ALM Proposal / Work

[EliseAnne85]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Take a look at this texture:

This is how the diffuse map looks:

Albedo map:

With proper use of PBR you can't simply omit the other maps because they are essential parts of the appearance. You can even argue that the albedo/diffuse map is the least important of them!

Yes, I know we are forced to use textures as diffuse map substitutes in SL But that is not a satisfactory solution because all the shadings and 3D details we have to bake onto the faux diffuse map will interfere both with the normal and specular maps and also with the advanced shaders for those who are able to use ultra graphics, severely reducing the usability of these advanced features.

The texture as diffuse map is nothing but a crude hack and if we have to continue using it, there's hardly any point in going full PBR.

However, as I've already said at least once in this thread there is an obvious and fairly simple solution: include both an albedo or diffuse map for those who have computers strong enough to handle PBR and a ready made composite texture for those who don't. The composite textures will have to be generated server side, not uploaded by the creator of course but that's a farily trivial task.

First thing I don't get @ChinRey is you show a texture in the first picture and then the albedo is just a color.  And, in some posts people have said the albedo is just a color which is confusing because in the blog it shows the Albedo is first so where is the texture like we make in Photoshop if just a color goes there?  And, also what I don't get is what about AO's as the main texture, what will happen to those?  Will Photoshop fun be dead?  I love Photoshop and don't like Blender or it doesn't like me.

I've Googled PBR and Albedo and such but I haven't really seen any finished merchandise and it all seems Blender related.

Do you have any photos of any finished products that use this PBR system and what games could I look at to just to see how my system runs and see what these products would look like?

I can honestly say this has taken the wind out of my sails of my wanting to build because it's confusing and I don't want to end up updating a lot of stuff.

Edited September 30, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Henri Beauchamp]

8 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Perhaps what is needed is a progressive ALM system that takes into account whether the details can be seen for the objects further away from you and degrades to the point where is not applied.

This won't have any significant impact for non-gaming PCs: the problem with them is the number of shaders involved in the render pipeline. Their GPU is just too weak to run that many (and that complex) shaders, whatever the number of objects involved in the scene.

That's why keeping the forward rendering mode is so crucial to avoid ruining the SL experience of non-gamers.

Edited September 30, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I can honestly say this has taken the wind out of my sails of my wanting to build because it's confusing and I don't want to end up updating a lot of stuff.

Maybe it's time to take it down to earth again then. The two most common game engines, Unity and UE4, have had PBR features like this for ages and it's hardly ever used there. If you want to sell game assets, you have to include normal and (RGB) specular maps similar to what we have in SL (but without the alpha channel mess hardly anybody use here anyway) but that's it. I think that's how it will be in SL too.

Come to think of it, does LL realize this or do they believe content creators will switch to PBR en masse?

 

8 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

First thing I don't get @ChinRey is you show a texture in the first picture and then the albedo is just a color.  And, in some posts people have said the albedo is just a color which is confusing because in the blog it shows the Albedo is first so where is the texture like we make in Photoshop if just a color goes there?

The texture is generated on the fly in the viewer by combining all those maps. Well, in this example it was all generated in FilterForge but you get the idea.

 

20 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

This won't have any significant impact for non-gaming PCs: the problem with them is the number of shaders involved in the render pipeline. Their GPU is just too weak to run that many (and that complex) shaders, whatever the number of objects involved in the scene.

Oh, I'm glad you mentioned shaders! All those surace effect maps, whether it's old fashioned normal+specular or PBR, work with the shaders. No system is stronger than its weakest link of course and in SL that is the shaders.

[EliseAnne85]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Maybe it's time to take it down to earth again then. The two most common game engines, Unity and UE4, have had PBR features like this for ages and it's hardly ever used there. If you want to sell game assets, you have to include normal and (RGB) specular maps similar to what we have in SL (but without the alpha channel mess hardly anybody use here anyway) but that's it. I think that's how it will be in SL too.

Come to think of it, does LL realize this or do they believe content creators will switch to PBR en masse?

I have a lot of questions, not that I want to take all your time or expect you to answer them.  But you mentioned alpha channel and that is one of my questions...where is the alpha channel for the PBR system?   

I went on YouTube last night and watched some videos on PBR.

Basically, it's about where the light falls on objects.  Yawn.  Sorry, but yawn.

And, the video I watched it looks like he works with a shape and a color and then tries to put a texture over a shape and color like such as velvet or corduroy or concrete could have what is called "a texture" to them.  But, in the video I watched he explains with PBR everything is basically metal or not metal.  And, the texture is very dark so I don't see how these dark PBR textured items could work at all without ALM on at all times.  Because, again, the textures are very dark.

I took a screenshot of the objects by the person I watched the video of and in the photo you can see he used no textures of fabrics for the furniture, the drapes, etc.  All that looks like a texture is a weird zig-zag pattern on an ugly rug and some lighting effects.   Even the walls don't look textured.  It's bland.

So, from what I've watched so far you need a shape and a color and then it's trying to throw some types of overlays over these to give the effect of a texture such as concrete or whatever, which in the photo I show below, I think fails as there is not hardly anything I'd call a texture to the items.  Even the window frames are blah.

[ChinRey]

54 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I have a lot of questions, not that I want to take all your time or expect you to answer them.  But you mentioned alpha channel and that is one of my questions...where is the alpha channel for the PBR system?

There aren't any. The alpha channels in our current normal and specular maps are used to encode additional specular data, specular exponent and environment intensity (and yes, the normal map alpha controls a specular map parameter, that's why I call it a mess). There are no direct parallels to these paramters in the PBR implementation LL is planning to introduce but the roughness map does much of the same job.

 

1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:

So, from what I've watched so far you need a shape and a color and then it's trying to throw some types of overlays over these to give the effect of a texture such as concrete or whatever, which in the photo I show below, I think fails as there is not hardly anything I'd call a texture to the items.  Even the window frames are blah.

Yes, that's pretty much it. I'm not sure if it's blah though. It's a lot about style, fashion and taste and if realism is the goal (mind you, I said "if"), PBR do tend to give a look closer to RL than traditional texturing.

[ChinRey]

I was going to include this in my reply to EliseAnne85 but it's really a completely different subtopic so:

Look at this texture:

It's a photo of a brick wall. The editing I did was mostly to straighten it up and make it seamless. A lot of textures are made this way, how do we convert them into sets of PBR maps? There is software than can simulate normal and specular maps from a photo and sometimes they can come up with half decent results, sometimes they can't (this is one of the hopeless cases btw). But I've yet to see any of them come up with a decent albedo map based on a photo. The problem is of course that a phot is effectively a "baked texture" to begin with so the software or the content creator will have to "reverse engineer" nature with a lot of crucial data missing.

(On a totally irrelevant tangent: does anybody who knows masonry have a name for this bond? I call it Scandinavian bond since I've only seen it thee, once in Norway and once in Denmark, but I don't think that's an appropriate name.)

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

(On a totally irrelevant tangent: does anybody who knows masonry have a name for this bond? I call it Scandinavian bond since I've only seen it thee, once in Norway and once in Denmark, but I don't think that's an appropriate name.)

Flemish

[EliseAnne85]

59 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Yes, that's pretty much it. I'm not sure if it's blah though. It's a lot about style, fashion and taste and if realism is the goal (mind you, I said "if"), PBR do tend to give a look closer to RL than traditional texturing.

I thought it was blah as the furniture, the drapes, even the window frames looked as though they had no texture, and the walls just a color.  However, the lighting is not totally blah but just a color for the texture if not metal sounds 20 years behind what SL is right now.  Take DRD for instance, the artist or artists that work for DRD must be 20 to 50 years ahead of the game they are so good.  And, there are many more great artists here in SL I could name also who are way ahead of the game but it seems too difficult to run for the FPS people who want gaming fast.

Watching another video on YouTube this morning about PBR is that it is basically "easy".  You don't need a lot of texture artists as it's only a color with some overlays for metals or something but it's easy.  This is all I've studied so far.

If you look at my photo below with no bump and shiny on and the barest of all the graphics settings you could ever think of, the windowsill and the artistry here is just amazing, and it didn't even need bump and shiny on to look bumpy, imo.  

What PBR will do is make it easy.  Do most SLifers want easy or artistry?  I'd think artistry.  I didn't need to run much graphics to capture some of the artistry that exists now in SL.  I'd say don't kill that!

[Jenna Huntsman]

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

where is the alpha channel for the PBR system? 

The alpha channel is contained within the Base Color map (Aka. Albedo), or essentially the PBR version of a traditional Diffuse map (there are differences, but not relevant to this question)

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I took a screenshot of the objects by the person I watched the video of

Looking at that screenshot, the reason why it looks bland is that there's only an ambient light source, alongside it seems like a lot of the materials are designed to look the same. Bit of a poor example if you ask me.

10 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

What PBR will do is make it easy

Not so much easy as consistent.

The problem with creating content for SL right now is that outside of the diffuse map, it's hard to get any consistency with an external creation tool, meaning material maps go largely unused as it is often too hard to create them (and have them look good across a variety of users / viewers with widely varying graphics settings), so most creators create for the lowest common denominator (Those who disable pretty much every graphical enhancement from the past 10 years), so a lot of the content in SL looks bad. PBR goes a long way to fixing this.

[ChinRey]

55 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Flemish

No, it's not flemish bond. If you look closer, you'll see it's a bit like monk bond but it's not exactly that either.

[EliseAnne85]

47 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Bit of a poor example if you ask me.

I asked for some samples of what PBR content looks like and got no replies so I went to YouTube to see what I could find.  So, hopefully it is a bit of a poor example but I haven't found any others yet.

I'm still looking but the photo I show above with just local lights on still looks bumpy and great.

Oh my gah, FPS is the one that is over-rated.  SL runs a lot of textures, scripts, and other things other games (I'd assume as I've never been on a game on the internet) don't have so FPS are going to be a lot lower but it means not much to enjoying the artistry here.  In the photo above, basically all I have on are local lights and I can see so much detail.

And, I lowered all the graphics on purpose for that photo.  Some people should try it.  Turn to ultra, high, mid, turn lights off/on, etc and see if it still looks good or not.   That's what I did.  On the lowest graphics settings one could think of, SL artists have done an amazing job.

Edited September 30, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Jenna Huntsman]

28 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I asked for some samples of what PBR content looks like and got no replies so I went to YouTube to see what I could find.  So, hopefully it is a bit of a poor example but I haven't found any others yet.

I'm not going to post anything from within the SL PBR test, as things are still rolling pretty fast and so things aren't consistent there. But what you want to be looking at is stuff like this:

Both of these aren't really possible with the current workflow. Sure, you can make a rusty-looking metal texture, but it'll never interact with light correctly. You can make the metal shine, but then the rust will shine along with it (which is wrong), or you can make the metal matte, which makes the rust look correct, but the metal surface will be wrong. The water / mud example is another good one as it demonstrates scene reflections, which the current SL release version does not have, instead having an extremely bad "environment" map, which contains none of objects or lighting from the scene.

A couple of examples from the scene you screenshotted can be:

• Brick texture is painted on (No normal map), and has baked AO (Will look incorrect at any sky setting other than a midday scene with no nearby light sources)
• Windowsill texture has no depth or sense of material change (As the paint has flaked off in areas, the base wood underneath will interact with light differently from the paint above it)
• The window glass has no specular from the scene light sources, and has no reflections. (Glass produces very sharp reflections!)

[EliseAnne85]

23 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

A couple of examples from the scene you screenshotted can be:

• Brick texture is painted on (No normal map), and has baked AO (Will look incorrect at any sky setting other than a midday scene with no nearby light sources)
• Windowsill texture has no depth or sense of material change (As the paint has flaked off in areas, the base wood underneath will interact with light differently from the paint above it)
• The window glass has no specular from the scene light sources, and has no reflections. (Glass produces very sharp reflections!)

The bricks are blah, but that's not what I was showing.  The window is supposed to be  paper not glass as it's a summer shaded room and it's a skybox but I thought the paper was a cleaver idea, so I wasn't showing the glass either anyhow.  I was just trying to show a close up of the windowsill details which looked great with bump on, so I wondered what they looked like with it off.  I wanted to see the difference in the windowsill.  I think it still looks rather "bumpy" with practically no good graphics settings at all.

As far as your pic you are sharing, is that a real photograph then transformed into "maps"?

[Jenna Huntsman]

13 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

As far as your pic you are sharing, is that a real photograph then transformed into "maps"?

The background in the mud image is likely an HDRi (A HDR image used in-leiu of an actual scene to get accurate reflections), but the actual surfaces are maps.

[EliseAnne85]

4 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

The background in the mud image is likely an HDRi (A HDR image used in-leiu of an actual scene to get accurate reflections), but the actual surfaces are maps.

So, HDRi's are done with a camera?  

Here's the def as I've never heard of it...

An HDRI, which stands for High Dynamic Range Image, is a 360° image that is wrapped around an image or even a 3D model for lighting and background purposes. It is created by mixing several images of the same scene with different exposures (from the darkest shadow to the brightest highlight).

[Wulfie Reanimator]

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

If you look at my photo below with no bump and shiny on and the barest of all the graphics settings you could ever think of, the windowsill and the artistry here is just amazing, and it didn't even need bump and shiny on to look bumpy, imo.  

What PBR will do is make it easy.

PBR (and the existing specular-based rendering) will do nothing to make creating texture like that windowstill easier or better. Both systems are irrelevant in that context.

22 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

As far as your pic you are sharing, is that a real photograph then transformed into "maps"?

It's not a photograph turned into maps. The mud in that image was created by hand.

Edited September 30, 2022 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Janet Voxel]

Here's a good question: Does PBR open up any possibilities in SL, besides the obvious "Things will look nicer?"

[Wulfie Reanimator]

13 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

Here's a good question: Does PBR open up any possibilities in SL, besides the obvious "Things will look nicer?"

Assuming the PBR asset is given to customers as modifiable, it'll be a lot easier to retexture an object while keeping details like shading intact. (Or to only change shading, like if you wanted to adjust the muscle/clevage definition on your avatar without changing the actual skin at all.)

Edited September 30, 2022 by Wulfie Reanimator

[EliseAnne85]

11 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

PBR (and the existing specular-based rendering) will do nothing to make creating texture like that windowstill easier or better. Both systems are irrelevant in that context.

No, what the person in the video was saying is that PBR, just PBR, is easier to create I'd gather is what he meant.  The easier comment had nothing to do with the detailed windowsill photo where it looks bumpy to me even at lowest graphics settings I could think of.  

This is what the person in the video said:  "PBR is easy" (period)

Edited September 30, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Speaking as someone who does fairly often make her own textures, I'm beginning to get the sense that the workflow for this is going to be a bit intimidating, and will require a degree of artistry (i.e., painting by hand) and technical know-how that is beyond me, at least at the moment.

I think this is all a good thing. But I do wonder if this is yet another nail in the DIY SL creation coffin.

[EliseAnne85]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

painting by hand

I'm just learning painting by hand myself and it is not easy and some creator's in SL just seem to have a gift for it they are so good at it now.  But, you could have fun with it as it's fun, I think.  So, I'd say try it!

What I'm confused about is that I have a lot of fun layering textures in Photoshop to make a texture and where PS would stand with the PBR system, as well as AO's let's say just for clothing.  I don't understand where a clothing AO would fit in the map areas. 

I wanted to do some clothing but feel maybe I should wait until I understand all this better.   Maybe an inworld demonstration or lecture on PBR would be helpful.  

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I don't understand where a clothing AO would fit in the map areas. 

I am ready to be corrected on this, but a clothing AO is an entirely different beast than what is being discussed here, because it is baked straight into the texture before it's applied to the garment. It doesn't get loaded and applied separately.

I suppose in theory, if having shadows and ambient occlusion permanently on ever becomes the norm here, you'd no longer need it. But until that time, it's still going to be something people use.

[EliseAnne85]

6 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I am ready to be corrected on this, but a clothing AO is an entirely different beast than what is being discussed here, because it is baked straight into the texture before it's applied to the garment. It doesn't get loaded and applied separately.

I suppose in theory, if having shadows and ambient occlusion permanently on ever becomes the norm here, you'd no longer need it. But until that time, it's still going to be something people use.

I might be using the wrong term as I know many clothing textures are a mixture of baked stuff and paint but I call them an AO which is not the right term so may be I mean UV map?  Well, to further explain, the map for some clothing is in pieces is what I mean, like a pattern laid out with bits and pieces and the Albedo is just a color, and this is where I am lost.  

Edited September 30, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I might be using the wrong term as I know many clothing textures are a mixture of baked stuff and paint but I call them an AO which is not the right term so may be I mean UV map?  Well, to further explain, the map for some clothing is in pieces is what I mean, like a pattern laid out with bits and pieces and the Albedo is just a color, and this is where I am lost.  

Well, I don't know why I'm answering this, because I'm pretty clueless . . . but my sense is that the variant colours will still be on the Albedo. So, for instance, the brick and mortar colours. The AO or shadow map is, or should be, separate from that, but gets baked on before you load it into the viewer.

[Jenna Huntsman]

21 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Well, to further explain, the map for some clothing is in pieces is what I mean, like a pattern laid out with bits and pieces and the Albedo is just a color, and this is where I am lost.  

PBR doesn't affect this. The examples you see online are flat textures for simplicity, as the idea is you'd get that texture and paint it onto a model in (Insert your favorite 3D program here).

Here's an example of the UV islands at work in the base colour map (Not a particularly exciting map, but it's the cleanest example I've got)

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The AO or shadow map is, or should be, separate from that,

The AO map is, indeed, separate. It is applied at the viewer's discresion, so if the scene lighting makes sense to have a shadow in a given area, the map will be applied. This means that you don't get persistent shadows where they don't make sense.