PBR is coming...

[OptimoMaximo]

Hi everyone, 

i started this thread to share with you all, for free, some resources that i think might be useful to some of you.

I've prepared a zipped .7z file that contains:

• a substance designer node
• two substance painter presets (normal and UDIM)
• an exe file (Windows only)

These resources automatically pack AO, Roughness and Metallic maps exactly as the ongoing PBR project wants them to be encoded.

The executable file is a program i wrote for fun, and it's quite straightforward to use. It's meant for those of you gals/guys who do not use one of the Substance softwares, and want a mean to pack these textures automatically from the single images

(alternative softwares to Substance software listed here: https://all3dp.com/2/best-substance-painter-alternatives/)

here is the link to download it

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-ProK7mUJSxKXuhO9XkIGGDrsSWiaVcP/view?usp=share_link

Hope you enjoy!
 

[animats]

OK, those examples have these gLTF channels:

• Roughness
• Metallic
• Ambient occlusion

Blender's gLTF exporter supports:

• Base Color
• Metallic
• Roughness
• Baked Ambient Occlusion
• Normal Map (tangent space, +Y u
• Emissive

That's the core set. Are there more in SL? Clearcoat? Sheen? Transmission? Index of refraction? (Probably not the last two; those use a lot of compute.)

Is there a document from LL somewhere? (Yes, I looked in the wiki.)

[PekeNL]

To make it easier to understand. Here's a snapshot of the materials editor.

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

Does this new PBR support come with any changes to the rendering engine or is this simply an alternate arrangement of data channels?

i.e. Will you be able to use both emission and translucency on a single face? Will the metallic channel produce the same appearance as it does in PBR renderers or will it just be an alias to SL's environment channel?

[animats]

7 hours ago, PekeNL said:

To make it easier to understand. Here's a snapshot of the materials editor.

OK. Is there something that says what's in which channel of what? How are metallic and roughness packed? Is ambient occlusion in there, too?

[OptimoMaximo]

2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Does this new PBR support come with any changes to the rendering engine or is this simply an alternate arrangement of data channels?

i.e. Will you be able to use both emission and translucency on a single face? Will the metallic channel produce the same appearance as it does in PBR renderers or will it just be an alias to SL's environment channel?

I tried it, and it renders like in substance designer and painter.

1 hour ago, animats said:

OK. Is there something that says what's in which channel of what? How are metallic and roughness packed? Is ambient occlusion in there, too?

The gltf specs say it. The packing is ORM, occlusion roughness metallic. Since these maps are supposed to be 8bit single channel grayscale images, they can be packed into an 8 bit rgb image. Check out the project viewer release notes page (I'm on my phone right now, can't find the link on this device)

[Jenna Huntsman]

2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Does this new PBR support come with any changes to the rendering engine or is this simply an alternate arrangement of data channels?

Yes - PBR materials use a spec-compliant workflow which means that the transition between Substance (or other texturing program) should be WYSIWYG.

2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Will you be able to use both emission and translucency on a single face?

Yes.

2 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Will the metallic channel produce the same appearance as it does in PBR renderers or will it just be an alias to SL's environment channel?

Metallic should render in the same manner as other PBR renderers, including proper reflections of the scene around the object.

[Jenna Huntsman]

On 12/11/2022 at 11:25 PM, OptimoMaximo said:

 

(alternative softwares to Substance software listed here: https://all3dp.com/2/best-substance-painter-alternatives/)

One software which isn't listed there, that I've been using to make PBR content is Material Maker - https://www.materialmaker.org/

It's fairly simple to use, it looks intimidating at first but with about 20 mins of watching tutorials you can pretty much do whatever you want. Cool stuff.

[PekeNL]

5 hours ago, animats said:

OK. Is there something that says what's in which channel of what? How are metallic and roughness packed? Is ambient occlusion in there, too?

It works using the ORM workflow, meaning:

Red channel: Ambient Occlusion
Green channel: Roughness (Not glossiness!)
Blue channel: Metalness/Metalic

Note how it doesn't use an alpha channel. Hopefully with the PBR implementation we eradicate the excessive use of (useless) alpha blended channels (although I doubt half the creator scene currently knows how to properly use the current DNS texture format)

 

[Maxwell Graf]

“…They say materials are fair. ‘Tis a truth, I can bear them witness. And good to have—’tis so, I cannot reprove it. And useful, but for thy implementation. By my troth, it is no addition to their function—nor no great argument of the lack of it, for we will be horribly in love with them.”
                                                      -Shakespeare, kinda, Much Ado about Nothing

I am excited to see what the future holds for this, how it goes. If, for example, we can control the materials procedurally (accumulative snow for example, using parallax occlusion mapping) or terrain texturing capabilities. My castle stone walls could be flat and use smart materials to render each stone correctly instead of having to use geometry to do so, thereby improving the visual appearance, while reducing poly count and build complexity by a considerable amount. This has the potential to be the most significant development in SL since mesh, perhaps more. I recall the grey hairs I have from working with the implementation of materials in sansar and blue mars betas. It can go horribly wrong and amazingly right - it's all in how they go about it.

Looks promising so far, and they have the added benefit of the development experience in sansar. I imagine the biggest hurdle to it would be how to change over to this newer technology within our nigh two-decade-old platform without breaking legacy everything. I liken it to putting a ferrari engine in an old pickup (that's really reliable and even has factory air, that you really love because of the history you have with it and thus would never part it out to no city slicker, you're going to drive it till the wheels fall off they don't make em like this anymore...) Yeah, you can do it and it would be amazing and run like a scalded dog but it's going to take a lot of work to make it happen and there's a good chance you can screw up a lot of things that work fine right now with the V6 in it.

If they do it right, it could be amazing and really add some legs to the platform (no reference to Horizons). doh.

Edited January 2, 2023 by Maxwell Graf

[Judas Shuffle]

Just had a play with it. I like it. which  usually means its doomed to failure.

Its lovely not having to load in the textures on to the model one at a time. I like that its using gltf, Blender and substance both support that. It would be nice the viewer could import the gtfl mesh allready textured, maybe it can only had a quick play.

Im all in favor of anything that removes the tedious parts of building and so far this is doing that so yay.

But this is secondlife and as we know untill the firestorm people pretend to have invented it no one will like it

[Sari6t]

So far, the time I've spent playing with SL's implementation has not been wasted. The workflow will be much smoother coming out of Substance. When the FS people get their hands on this I'll be very excited. Mirrors are fun, sure they are far from perfect but MIRRORS lol. I made a test dance room with mirrored walls and lights, 3 hours later I left. I've read that LL water may not be as it was. Blake sea people - watch out lol. Alpha sorting is something I have yet to test. Metals look like they should finally. Any idea how long this might take before it gets rolled out? 

The adoption rate of PBR viewers will be interesting for creators. Base Color in a non PBR environment can look pre 2007.    : )  

 

Now if we could get an extra shoulder bone and erase sim crossings... one can dream.

[xDancingStarx]

Are there any before/after images that actually show the improvement we can get with PBR? I've seen some images in an older thread but tbh they left me shrugging shoulders.

Also is it known yet what the performance trade-off will be? How does it compare performance loss wise to enabling shadows on a let's say 3090?

Edited January 5, 2023 by xDancingStarx

[arisaie]

Is SL really getting PBR texturing?

[arton Rotaru]

16 hours ago, arisaie said:

Is SL really getting PBR texturing?

Yup! Can be tested on the Aditi grid already.
More information -> https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer/7.0.0.577157.html

[Psistorm Voxel]

As someone very much interested in switching to a PBR workflow, the big unknown is how will this affect mesh bodies? Has there been any talk at all about a standardized applier system (since from my JIRA attempts, a bake stack seems out of the question, which would have both solved SO many problems and enabled SO many cool things)? Or will it pretty much just be the same as before with omega, maitreya, legacy, ebody, etc all doing their own thing (and someone definitely wanting albedo maps as BOM because BOM good i guess)?

Also can material parameters be exposed to be tweaked manually/via LSL?

I'm genuinely excited either way, this will improve my work in many ways and make a lot of things easier for me, so learning about those implementations will help me prepare for either easy transition or applier hell, lol

[arton Rotaru]

18 hours ago, Psistorm Voxel said:

Also can material parameters be exposed to be tweaked manually/via LSL?

There is a screenshot of the PBR material editor a couple of postings above in this thread. Everything that can be edited there is also editable via LSL. (Plus texture transforms: Scale, Offsets, Rotation)

Regarding the mesh bodies. That would be a completely different project.

Edited January 10, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Psistorm Voxel]

Thanks for the info. And I was worried about that, but hopefully makers can agree on a universal implementation. Maitreya never supported omega materials, belleza jake STILL glitches out its top half when applying omega, and legacy... I don't even know what they are doing anymore, but it just won't ever look like the other bodies.

With everything in one material file, hopefully a standardized applier setup is coming. I'm just sad that PBR is not compatible with BOM, which means to have a PBR avatar, you MUST have drawcall heavy alpha sections again if you want any hope of mesh clothes

[Wulfie Reanimator]

10 minutes ago, Psistorm Voxel said:

I'm just sad that PBR is not compatible with BOM, which means to have a PBR avatar, you MUST have drawcall heavy alpha sections again if you want any hope of mesh clothes

I suppose you could still use the bake channels for Base Color in PBR. BOM skins would then just require a different technique in the future.

[Jenna Huntsman]

On 1/10/2023 at 4:30 PM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I suppose you could still use the bake channels for Base Color in PBR. BOM skins would then just require a different technique in the future.

Yup, this is (or should be) supported when PBR goes live. There was a discussion in the testers chat and it was stated that this approach should work when PBR goes live.

[Psistorm Voxel]

That's some consolation at least, though I do hope that in the future we can have a full PBR bake stack to finally get rid of applier hell, and to allow things like glowy/metal/etc tattoos, bionic overlays, scale/fur applications etc etc - the possibilities would be endless!

[arisaie]

So I tested it and the local texture preview allows 4k textures. 

Are they going to keep it that way? 

I'm not sure if it's just the viewer settings (I turned down shadows and TPed to sky without any other objects) but with just 1 4k pbr material my gpu utilisation was at 65% and 50C with rtx 3070. 

4k looks nicer, there's more details but what will happen if everyone upgrades their mesh with 4k textures? I feel like the body and head creators will try to upgrade to 4k for even more details.

Anyone can enlighten me? 

[Jenna Huntsman]

6 minutes ago, arisaie said:

local texture preview

Local != global

There's no planned changes around max texture sizes.

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, arisaie said:

but what will happen if everyone upgrades their mesh with 4k textures?

We'd end up with SL scenes containing tens of thousands of 4k textrues and surface maps, more than enough to make even the strongest game computer in the world to crash and burn.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

Or more like we'll get one really nice looking object, with the rest of the world textured in glorious 128px downscaled textures because the viewer refuses to keep more in memory.