ALM Proposal / Work

[EliseAnne85]

6 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

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)

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.

Okies.  I see.  Yes, that's the bits and pieces thing I'm trying to find the words for.  So, that's still a go.  Oh, thankies!  That's great.  

In the photo I shared from that video it kind of threw me because his stuff doesn't look textured so I thought it meant it is just colored.  

Why he didn't texture much I'm not sure but I don't think I'm going to learn much randomly trying to hit videos on YouTube.  I've searched Google images too and they all do mostly look like a bunch of marbles but I couldn't find any finished product.  

[Janet Voxel]

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

3 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Why he didn't texture much I'm not sure

It's possible that the reason the example used in the video you saw doesn't use more complex textures is because the video is trying to highlight the effects of physically based rendering and how it simulates surface properties, in which case using textures with excessive details would only serve to make the example more confusing.

[Candide LeMay]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

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.

Modern PBR workflow is the opposite of painting by hand. If you use a program like Substance Painter/ 3D Coat / etc you have vast libraries of materials and presets ready to be used. You don't go "oh wood looks like this and its specular highlights are like this, let me paint them by hand" no, you select a wood type material from your library, tweak it a little and apply it to a 3d model using brushes/fills/other tools (all nicely realtime). Same for stone, concrete, metals etc. Use layers to add damage/rust/irregularities. This allows even an anti-artist like myself to texture objects rather efficiently.

[Janet Voxel]

7 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

Modern PBR workflow is the opposite of painting by hand. If you use a program like Substance Painter/ 3D Coat / etc you have vast libraries of materials and presets ready to be used. You don't go "oh wood looks like this and its specular highlights are like this, let me paint them by hand" no, you select a wood type material from your library, tweak it a little and apply it to a 3d model using brushes/fills/other tools (all nicely realtime). Same for stone, concrete, metals etc. Use layers to add damage/rust/irregularities. This allows even an anti-artist like myself to texture objects rather efficiently.

The bonus is: when you work with those programs or even blender. What you end up with in SL will look pretty much like what was rendered in Blender/Substance/etc.

[EliseAnne85]

9 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

You don't go "oh wood looks like this and its specular highlights are like this, let me paint them by hand" no,

LOL.  But, painting by hand on certain areas is still useful.  I mostly layer but every once in a while it needs just a splash here or there for just a bit of something extra and layering is not needed.   

[EliseAnne85]

32 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

Wow, it's a thingamajig.  It's good.  

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

13 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

Modern PBR workflow is the opposite of painting by hand. If you use a program like Substance Painter/ 3D Coat / etc you have vast libraries of materials and presets ready to be used. You don't go "oh wood looks like this and its specular highlights are like this, let me paint them by hand" no, you select a wood type material from your library, tweak it a little and apply it to a 3d model using brushes/fills/other tools (all nicely realtime). Same for stone, concrete, metals etc. Use layers to add damage/rust/irregularities. This allows even an anti-artist like myself to texture objects rather efficiently.

At the risk of meandering off-topic for a moment, while you're 100% right that hand painting PBR isn't typical behaviour, in the case of 3D Coat there's actually quite a few professional 3D artists/designers that specifically use 3D Coat for hand painting textures as it's arguably one of the best pieces of software for that particular purpose due to it's similarity to photoshop in regard to texturing tools and features.

It's certainly a lot easier and more efficient to just use the fill tool to slap on a few PBR materials and the results of doing so can be quite effective, but you do still have the option to paint additional details on PBR materials by hand and there are some texture artists who use those capabilities to great effect.

[Qie Niangao]

It's been my naive impression that PBR is practically a pre-requisite to introducing a SubSurface Scattering channel, which seems future tablestakes for an immersive world with realistic avatars (especially but not exclusively human avatars). But I'm no expert, maybe there are non-PBR-channel implementations of SSS. It's not part of this initial flush of PBR maps—perhaps a bridge too far for creators? Or maybe not yet stable standards?

But the ones who really know skin rendering in professional game creation must be champing at the bit, right?

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

Modern PBR workflow is the opposite of painting by hand. If you use a program like Substance Painter/ 3D Coat / etc

That is a problem in itself. Substance Painter and 3D Coat are not free. The cheapest version of 3D Coat costs 379 dollars. That's not too bad but still probably more than many casual cotnent creators are willing to shell out. Substance Painter is even worse. It has been bought up by Adobe so you can't buy a license at all, you have to rent it for 50 dollars a month.

That being said, there are at least two free open soruce programs, Material Maker and ArmorLab that are suppsoed to do the job. Does anybody have any experience with those?

[Jenna Huntsman]

12 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Material Maker

I do!

I'd recommend anyone interested in PBR to give Material Maker a try. It's free, open source and there's plenty of tutorials available on YouTube that can give you some training to get you started.

[Candide LeMay]

13 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

That is a problem in itself. Substance Painter and 3D Coat are not free. The cheapest version of 3D Coat costs 379 dollars. That's not too bad but still probably more than many casual cotnent creators are willing to shell out. Substance Painter is even worse. It has been bought up by Adobe so you can't buy a license at all, you have to rent it for 50 dollars a month.

That being said, there are at least two free open soruce programs, Material Maker and ArmorLab that are suppsoed to do the job. Does anybody have any experience with those?

Substance Painter (and Designer etc) can be purchased on Steam for around 130 bucks (there's typically a sale around December/January). This is a permanent license that doesn't require monthly subscription. 3D Coat has a painting-only version without all the voxel stuff for about 100 bucks. Again, a permanent license with no subscription. Not free, but reasonably affordable.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

30 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

The cheapest version of 3D Coat costs 379 dollars.

Pilgway (the creators of 3D Coat) recently released a couple of new products, 3D Coat Textura & 3D Coat Print, as well as some new pricing models.

3D Coat Print is entirely free but is aimed primarily at 3D Printing (hence the name) and while it does have all the features of 3D Coat its options for export are limited

Quote

3DCoatPrint is a special FREE version of 3DCoat with voxel modeling designed for the fast creation of print-ready 3D models. All 3DCoat Voxel Modeling and Render inside. The only limitations are applied at the time of Export: the models are reduced to the maximum of 40K triangles and the mesh is smoothed specifically for 3D-printing.

while 3D Coat Textura is aimed specifically at texture artists

Quote

3DCoatTextura is a tailored version of 3DCoat 2021 which has all its professional tools for 3D Texturing and Rendering at a more affordable price. Paint your 3D models faster using Brushes, Smart Materials, and layers, Create hand-painted and PBR textures.

As far as pricing goes Pilgway now offers the traditional single payment perpetual license option ($95 for Textura) as well as rent-to-own and monthly subscription licensing options (6x $20 and $10 per month respectively).

It's still not as cheap as a free copy of Blender of course, but it's definitely a more affordable option if you're happy to do your modelling in Blender and only want to use 3D Coat for PBR texturing.

ETA: What Candide said!  

Edited September 30, 2022 by Fluffy Sharkfin

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

It's been my naive impression that PBR is practically a pre-requisite to introducing a SubSurface Scattering channel

Yes and no and yes. PBR means Physical Based Rendering and a subsurface scattering simulation is by definition physical based.

However, there is no such thing as a standard PBR implementation. You can argue that the old diffuse/normal/specular map system is PBR since it does simulate some physical effects. Many do. If you do a Google search for PBR resource sites, you'll probably find that most of them don't take the concept further than diffuse/normal/specular.

But you can also argue that the glTF/Unity/UE4 implementation isn't PBR since it doesn't simulate anywhere near all physical effects. As Jenna Huntsman pointed out earlier in this thread, a complete implementation of the PBR concept would probably be way to render heavy for a real time rendering of a complex scene so that's simply not an option neither for SL nor for computer games.

Maybe I digress but what I'm trying to say is that subsurface scattering can be added to any PBR implementation. It would be rather pointless to graft an advanced function like that onto a fairly simple diffuse/normal/specular system of course but that's another matter.

 

[ChinRey]

8 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

Substance Painter (and Designer etc) can be purchased on Steam for around 130 bucks (there's typically a sale around December/January).

Oh, I didn't know that, I only checked Adobe's website for prices.

However, the page on Steam says "This license does not include access to the Substance 3D Assets platform (previously Substance Source)". I assume that means there are no vast libraries of materials and presets ready to be used if you buy it there.

 

10 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

while 3D Coat Textura is aimed specifically at texture artists

As far as pricing goes Pilgway now offers the traditional single payment perpetual license option ($79 for Textura) as well as rent-to-own and monthly subscription licensing options (6x $20 and $10 per month respectively).

That's more like it!

But 500+ ready made materials, that's not actually much. But maybe they'll expand it in the future?

[ChinRey]

21 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

I do!

I'd recommend anyone interested in PBR to give Material Maker a try. It's free, open source and there's plenty of tutorials available on YouTube that can give you some training to get you started.

Thank you! I guess I'll have to give it a try.

...

First impression: It's a simplified mixture between MapZone and FilterForge, that's not bad.

The pattern library is very limited though. Is there a way to add your own?

I'll look at the rest later - it's late night where I live now - but right now it looks like something that can be really useful for generating some synthetic textures but not nearly powerful enough to be my main tool for them.

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

19 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

That's more like it!

But 500+ ready made materials, that's not actually much. But maybe they'll expand it in the future?

True it's not a huge amount (and some of them aren't exactly the best quality) but those are just the premade materials available in their free library, you can also build your own materials using custom textures.  I've grabbed a few of the better materials on offer but mostly just create my own using Filter Forge or textures/materials available from free sites like freepbr.com.

[Candide LeMay]

9 hours ago, ChinRey said:

However, the page on Steam says "This license does not include access to the Substance 3D Assets platform (previously Substance Source)". I assume that means there are no vast libraries of materials and presets ready to be used if you buy it there.

You get dozens of materials with the steam version, enough to get you started. And there are many many substance material packs available online either for free or for few bucks. It's not different to buying texture packs in SL in ye olden days.

[EliseAnne85]

19 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

It's been my naive impression that PBR is practically a pre-requisite to introducing a SubSurface Scattering channel, which seems future tablestakes for an immersive world with realistic avatars (especially but not exclusively human avatars). But I'm no expert, maybe there are non-PBR-channel implementations of SSS. It's not part of this initial flush of PBR maps—perhaps a bridge too far for creators? Or maybe not yet stable standards?

But the ones who really know skin rendering in professional game creation must be champing at the bit, right?

 

They should have two viewers.  

This is all sounding very expensive.  The tinies of the Shire just had an 18th year anniversary Medieval Ball.  Raglan Shire sim hasn't changed in 18 years and I doubt they would ever change even in 180 years.  

The thing with PBR, I've read is it is a standard for commercials.  Commercials on YouTube, I'd gather.  And, that sounds like it will make things very, very expensive.  

Many people are here for fun and friendship, not commercialization.

PBR is probably something along the lines you'd see on a Jazz YouTube video, like the one below and which are springing up all over the place on YouTube.

If people, love, friendship really do matter, they'd spin this new commercialized viewer off like they did when Sansar was created.

 

[Candide LeMay]

Folks who follow the PBR project - are there plans to support decals in the new renderer? That would be a big win.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

On 9/30/2022 at 4:04 PM, Jenna Huntsman said:

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.

Just wanted to address this comment and mention that it is possible to create different levels of specularity/reflectivity within a single material, you just have to utilize the specular exponent and environment intensity maps (which, as @ChinRey pointed out earlier, isn't something that most creators bother with).

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

11 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

Folks who follow the PBR project - are there plans to support decals in the new renderer? That would be a big win.

I'd absolutely love to see SL support decals/texture layers however, given how extravagant some folks can be with 1024x1024 textures, giving creators the ability to apply even more textures per face would probably be disastrous for performance.

[Ernst Osterham]

On 10/2/2022 at 1:52 AM, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I'd absolutely love to see SL support decals/texture layers however, given how extravagant some folks can be with 1024x1024 textures, giving creators the ability to apply even more textures per face would probably be disastrous for performance.

This.  There's no drawback to builders using excessive textures and texture memory as-is.  Other than more 10L upload costs, and even those are gone with premium plus it seems.  Excessive textures is even more than excessive geometry, a pure tragedy of the commons situation.  Collectively we have an interest in using minimal textures, individually we have an interest in maxxing everything to get superdetail.

[EliseAnne85]

1 hour ago, Ernst Osterham said:

This.  There's no drawback to builders using excessive textures and texture memory as-is.  Other than more 10L upload costs, and even those are gone with premium plus it seems.  Excessive textures is even more than excessive geometry, a pure tragedy of the commons situation.  Collectively we have an interest in using minimal textures, individually we have an interest in maxxing everything to get superdetail.

While I appreciate what Fluffy and what you Ernst are saying about 1024's but some items just do not look good lower than a 1024.  It's a some do, some don't kind of thing.  

What I was wondering and hopefully some geeks know more (I am not a geek) are you sure all the scripts in all these huds aren't causing lag?  I mean creators are scripting every part an avatar wears, even for like the grommets on shoes.  Are you sure all these scripted huds aren't causing the lag because having the LOD down to 2 is ridiculously low.  I just went to a human party with the LOD at 2 and items were dead, even some of what people were wearing.  It was a terrible way to enjoy a party at LOD 2.  I'm usually a Dinkie and we don't script (hud) items very often.  We sell color by color or a fatpack with many colors but no hud and it's NOT laggy.  Tinies and Dinkies tend to build optimized for everything though too.

What is the problem with SL?  It never was this laggy before EEP, not for me, and I've been here on and off over 17 years. And, I mention EEP because this is when my lag really started with the human avatar.

I miss the original Lindens.

And, forced ALM is going to kill people's laptops.  Forcing this is a bad idea.  You build another viewer, if people migrate there, fine.  If they don't, they don't.  

Meanwhile, this LOD is absurd.

Edited October 8, 2022 by EliseAnne85

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

While I appreciate what Fluffy and what you Ernst are saying about 1024's but some items just do not look good lower than a 1024.  It's a some do, some don't kind of thing.

I'd argue that almost every object looks "better" with 1024x1024 textures, but it's nothing compared to how amazing objects look when you use PBR materials with 4k textures.  However since we don't live in a world where hardware resources are unlimited and some residents are struggling with the requirements of SL already it makes sense to limit the available texture size to something less excessive.  Unfortunately when you limit image resolution it seems a lot of people interpret that limit as the "recommended size" and subsequently upload every texture at the maximum possible resolution, which is unfortunate because better texture optimization would do wonders for those on low-end hardware who are struggling with poor performance.

Nobody is saying creators shouldn't be using 1024x1024 textures, just that they should be using them responsibly where appropriate.

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

What I was wondering and hopefully some geeks know more (I am not a geek) are you sure all the scripts in all these huds aren't causing lag?  I mean creators are scripting every part an avatar wears, even for like the grommets on shoes.  Are you sure all these scripted huds aren't causing the lag because having the LOD down to 2 is ridiculously low.  I just went to a human party with the LOD at 2 and items were dead, even some of what people were wearing.  It was a terrible way to enjoy a party at LOD 2.  I'm usually a Dinkie and we don't script (hud) items very often.  We sell color by color or a fatpack with many colors but no hud and it's NOT laggy.  Tinies and Dinkies tend to build optimized for everything though too.

What is the problem with SL?  It never was this laggy before EEP, not for me, and I've been here on and off over 17 years. And, I mention EEP because this is when my lag really started with the human avatar.

The term "lag" is so loosely defined that it's almost meaningless in regards to SL.  There are so many factors that can cause poor performance and so many different types of performance related issues that using the term lag to try and describe all of them is an extreme over-simplification and serves only to confuse people.  For example, scripts run on the server-side and each script will take a certain amount of resources and if enough of them are running at once it can cause the region to "lag" so that everything slows down however even when a regions performance slows down so much that it's about to crash you can potentially still be getting a solid 120 frames per second from your graphics card.

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I miss the original Lindens.

Random, but okay... I'm sure they miss you too!  

2 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

And, forced ALM is going to kill people's laptops.  Forcing this is a bad idea.  You build another viewer, if people migrate there, fine.  If they don't, they don't.  

Meanwhile, this LOD is absurd.

Since LL have already stated that they're only going to remove forward rendering if it doesn't adversely impact the majority of residents it seems like your concern is unwarranted.

As for absurd LOD, that's entirely out of LLs control and something you should be taking up with the people that created the mesh in question.