PBR is coming...

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Sort of. It won't be as nice and accurate looking as the actual duplicates.

But then again, "real life" mirrors always add distortion, lack of depth, etc. So I think that will be OK with a lot of people! Hope so, at least.

[arton Rotaru]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

But then again, "real life" mirrors always add distortion, lack of depth, etc. So I think that will be OK with a lot of people! Hope so, at least.

It's a 1000 times cooler than what we have now for reflections at least.

[Yseult UwU]

sorry for my late reply but does lack of support for colored speculars mean existing colored speculars will break once the new lighting engine is put in?

[Frionil Fang]

13 minutes ago, Yseult UwU said:

sorry for my late reply but does lack of support for colored speculars mean existing colored speculars will break once the new lighting engine is put in?

There is no change to existing diffuse-specular-normal materials, and you can keep making them as always. To my understanding what will change is that specularity (and legacy shiny) will use the reflection probed reflections, instead of the old lame sky gradient.

[Yseult UwU]

ah so if you want to mimic iridescence, the legacy system will always be there. gotcha.

[benchthis]

I just installed the Feb 13th forced update Second Life Project GLTF PBR Materials 7.0.0.578161 (64bit)

I'm not changing any of the recommended graphic setting yet. Right away I noticed:

Depth of Field 1st First person does not appear to have depth of field? It looks like when moving around in 1st person some blur is noticable randomly while moving. Just observation, not sure if that's common with depth of field. 

 

[benchthis]

Also noticed my frames with the reflections checked is about 8fps, that's for my 2 gig nvidia 16 gigs of ram i5. I won't be having the reflections enabled until I get a newer machine or something with reflections improves. 

The cool thing is I usually, with the previous versions, always turn off advanced lighting to get better performance. Since there's not of that anymore, I uncheck reflections and my fps went up to 41. if that's with the advance lighting, that's awesome. 

I don't know what screen space reflections are? apparently my computer is not good enough to handle that, and it was suggested that my computers not good enought to run real time reflection detail, even thought when I change to it it works. I can't move with reflections enabled with any of the reflection options. 

Newer users with simple older computers like me might be more happy with the reflections box unchecked as recommended. Until things get optimized.  

[benchthis]

Noticed something strange with the transparent hud situation. In preferences/graphics/quality & speed slider. 

I was messing with the quality and speed slider and noticed my huds popped up when moving the silder to different quality position.

[benchthis]

Looks like it's the transparent water option, if unchecked makes huds transparent. 

[arton Rotaru]

The HUD issue will be fixed in an upcoming viewer.

Screen space reflections are basically for reflections on water. If your performance tanks, keep them off.

DoF is working correctly for me. Have to focus the cam on something and zoom close onto it.

Edited February 14, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[arton Rotaru]

Turns out the disapearing HUDs with transparent water unticked is a new one. Will be addressed soon.

[Nika Talaj]

I have read some of this thread, watched the recent video, read a little in the wiki.  I'm not a creator, so here are a few stupid user questions:

1. It looks to me like I could add PBR materials to things I now own, e.g. to make metals nicely reflective.  It also looks like that would not replace the diffuse texture they now have, just whatever specular and normal textures they may have.  Correct?
2. Judging by the frequency of bug discovery I'm seeing, general release of PBR is still pretty far (say, over 6 months) in the future?  Does that align with what you creators are thinking?
3. I'm assuming that once PBR is released, creators will be immediately making reflective objects like ... say ... cars or .. mesh waterfalls ... that look FANTASTIC compared to today's products.  They prolly will also far exceed what I could do by adding a packet of PBR water materials to my current Skye Studio waterfall.  Is that true?

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

It looks to me like I could add PBR materials to things I now own, e.g. to make metals nicely reflective.  It also looks like that would not replace the diffuse texture they now have, just whatever specular and normal textures they may have.  Correct?

If it's modifiable, yes.

 

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

Judging by the frequency of bug discovery I'm seeing, general release of PBR is still pretty far (say, over 6 months) in the future?  Does that align with what you creators are thinking?

It's hard to say but I wouldn't be surprised if it took much longer than six months. We'll see.

 

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

I'm assuming that once PBR is released, creators will be immediately making reflective objects like ... say ... cars or .. mesh waterfalls ... that look FANTASTIC compared to today's products.  They prolly will also far exceed what I could do by adding a packet of PBR water materials to my current Skye Studio waterfall.  Is that true?

In principle yes. It may depends on how old the waterfall is. I'm not familiar with Alex Bader's waterfalls but I know some of his other water features and he has made an amazing progress in water textures over the years. His early attempts were perfectly ok but nothing special by SL standards. His later ones are at a completely different level and it can take a while before somebody figures out how to do it better with PBR.

Edited February 18, 2023 by ChinRey

[arton Rotaru]

2 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

I have read some of this thread, watched the recent video, read a little in the wiki.  I'm not a creator, so here are a few stupid user questions:

1. It looks to me like I could add PBR materials to things I now own, e.g. to make metals nicely reflective.  It also looks like that would not replace the diffuse texture they now have, just whatever specular and normal textures they may have.  Correct?
2. Judging by the frequency of bug discovery I'm seeing, general release of PBR is still pretty far (say, over 6 months) in the future?  Does that align with what you creators are thinking?
3. I'm assuming that once PBR is released, creators will be immediately making reflective objects like ... say ... cars or .. mesh waterfalls ... that look FANTASTIC compared to today's products.  They prolly will also far exceed what I could do by adding a packet of PBR water materials to my current Skye Studio waterfall.  Is that true?

I'll add some to Rey's reply.

To 1) The PBR material is an asset that will live in your inventory. If you apply an material asset to a face of an object, it will replace the legacy material, including the diffuse map, completely. The legacy material isn't removed, though. It will stay "underneath" the PBR material. So once you remove a PBR material from the face, the legacy material will still be there.

To 2) It's indeed hard to tell when this project will be shipped. Considering that the initial goal was it to release before Christmas 2022, I would suspect that the new target could be Easter 2023.
It has been stated at the CCUG yesterday, that they want to go to Release Candidate state on Agni real soon.

To 3) I suspect there will be plenty of just material assets available real soon after release, which will be perfectly fine to be added to older content. How good these will be looking is written in the stars, though. As Rey says, some things might be hard to do better than what some have done with the legacy materials. PBR is not a magic stick that makes everything look awesome just because it's labeled PBR. What does look awesome today, will be looking awesome tommorow as well.

Another BIG aspect of this project are the Reflection Probes, though. Placing probes manually will be something we have to get familiar with, to get the most out of PBR materials.

[ChinRey]

I missed a few nuances in Nika's questions so here is a second reply.

10 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

It looks to me like I could add PBR materials to things I now own, e.g. to make metals nicely reflective.  It also looks like that would not replace the diffuse texture they now have, just whatever specular and normal textures they may have.  Correct?

If you want to keep the original diffuse and/or normal maps you will have to have them in your inventory and add them to the PBR material you want to use.

11 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

I'm assuming that once PBR is released, creators will be immediately making reflective objects like ... say ... cars or .. mesh waterfalls ... that look FANTASTIC compared to today's products.

What you can expect at first are objects with glaringly overdone shininess that stand out like sore thumbs among the older content. Hopefully people will come to their senses after a while.

The maps for glTF style PBR aren't actually that more advanced than what we already have in SL. The main weakness of SL's current specularity function is that it is so awkward to figure out it's hardly ever used to its full potential. You have those Glossiness and Environment parameters you never get right and then you have to fiddle with the alpha channel of the normal map to set specular intensity.

8 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Another BIG aspect of this project are the Reflection Probes, though. Placing probes manually will be something we have to get familiar with, to get the most out of PBR materials.

Yes, I think those are a much more significant change than the surface maps. But at the moment the automatic reflection probes pick up way too much blue tint from the water that is everywhere in SL. As it is now you have to use manual reflection proves just about everywhere. Not only is this a waste of prims, it's also not very user friendly for people who aren't experienced content creators.

[Jenna Huntsman]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

If you want to keep the original diffuse and/or normal maps you will have to have them in your inventory and add them to the PBR material you want to use.

Not quite correct, as the PBR base color map and the traditional diffuse map aren't quite the same - PBR base color maps do not contain baked lighting, as is commonly seen in SL diffuse maps.

 

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

But at the moment the automatic reflection probes pick up way too much blue tint from the water that is everywhere in SL.

Not from the water, it's from the sky. Has since been fixed, but you'll need to wait a little while until the public builds catch up.

[ChinRey]

21 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Not quite correct, as the PBR base color map and the traditional diffuse map aren't quite the same - PBR base color maps do not contain baked lighting, as is commonly seen in SL diffuse maps.

Yes but ideally SL diffuse maps shouldn't contain baked lighting either but they do and knowing my fellow content creators here I think it's a safe bet they still often will. I think I explained the difference between textures, diffuse maps and albedo maps earleir in this thread. Or possibly in earlier PBR discussion, I can't remember.

 

24 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

Not from the water, it's from the sky. Has since been fixed, but you'll need to wait a little while until the public builds catch up.

Ok. The PBR documentation in the SL wiki says it's from water but I did wonder a bit about that myself, the sky did seem like a more plausible explanation. Anyway, it's good to hear it's been fixed.

[Nika Talaj]

23 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

1. It looks to me like I could add PBR materials to things I now own, e.g. to make metals nicely reflective.  It also looks like that would not replace the diffuse texture they now have, just whatever specular and normal textures they may have.  Correct?

Thank you, folks, for this discussion.  My takeaway, please correct me if wrong, is: It would only make sense to try this VERY rarely unless I am the creator of the object.  

My assumption here is: For LI reasons, most current mesh objects combine different visual surfaces into a single diffuse texture on a single face with a fairly complex AO map.  So, a simple coffee table might have a metal top and wooden legs all in one diffuse texture, which I don't own.  SImply dumping a random shiny PBR material on that would presumably not preserve the difference between those surfaces. Correct?

In the PBR video, there is a moment where a door handle magically changes from non-PBR to MAGIC! gorgeous PBR.  Now I'm wondering how that happened - did the object have both its original texture and a custom PBR material made to fit that mesh?  So that when PBR was turned on in the viewer, voila?

Edited February 18, 2023 by Nika Talaj

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

My assumption here is: For LI reasons, most current mesh objects combine different visual surfaces into a single diffuse texture on a single face with a fairly complex AO map.  So, a simple coffee table might have a metal top and wooden legs all in one diffuse texture, which I don't own.  SImply dumping a random shiny PBR material on that would presumably not preserve the difference between those surfaces. Correct?

That is correct. The PBR material would have to be specifically tailored for the set of UVs of that particular object.

1 hour ago, Nika Talaj said:

n the PBR video, there is a moment where a door handle magically changes from non-PBR to MAGIC! gorgeous PBR.  Now I'm wondering how that happened - did the object have both its original texture and a custom PBR material made to fit that mesh?  So that when PBR was turned on in the viewer, voila?

I quickly skipped through the video. Earlier you see her dragging a brass PBR material to a sphere. It's a plain brass material that will show as plain brass as well when you drag it on a planar face. Rather boring actually.

The same plain brass material is dragged onto the door handle. A creator of such a door handle would bake an Ambient Occlusion map for that objects UVs, and would spice it up a lot with the base color/roughness map. Where it is less shiny in the cavities, where dirt and grime might accumulate. Beaten up the edges some etc.. Just the same as one would do with legacy textures, just to make it look less artificial.

So dragging such plain PBR materials onto something like that can be done, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to do so.

Edited February 18, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Eowyn Southmoor]

I'm thoroughly lost on this new PBR thing so I thought I'd revive this thread to ask a few questions, specifically as it relates to vehicles in SL, so hoping @arton Rotaru especially might be able to shed some light on things for me.

I paint vehicles in SL. I don't make the vehicles themselves - I download the texture template PSD files from the creators and come up with new designs for the diffuse textures.  Sometimes i also make the normal and specular layers too, though this isn't always required.  Indeed, many vehicles in SL still don't use materials or cheat and use a basic white texture as a specular layer.  So with this in mind, here goes:

1  Is pbr a new system completely, or is it an additional texture that works with the current diffuse/spec/norm textures?

2 If pbr is a totally new system, is there new LSL code that allows you to write paint applier scripts to texture specific prims/faces with the new system (assuming pbr uses different names from diffuse/spec/norm)?

3  Will vehicles using the current materials system still look decent?  I ask this because I don't think many vehicle creators will bother to update their older products, and unlike many other things in SL, newer doesn't equal better when it comes to vehicles.

4  Will vehicles that currently use NO materials at all (ie: the use the default SL 'shine') still look decent or will these start to look bad?

5  If pbr is a new system, will it be possible to still use the diffuse/spec/norm textures then add some kind of "pbr" texture?

6  Will i need to create custom pbr textures for every single diffuse texture I make?  For example, if I am painting a boat, and I use 4 diffuse textures to paint different areas - one for the hull, one for the deck, one for the seats, one for the engine - will i need corresponding pbr textures for each diffuse texture to ensure the right "look", taking into consideration that the 4 parts painted would all be very different surfaces, like plain wood, wood planking, leather or fabric, and metal.  This is probably the most important factor for me as currently I have vehicles that require up 30 diffuse textures to paint fully. Now, if i add full materials layers to this, then that can jump up to 90 textures in total. Will it be even higher with pbr?

7.  Relating to question 6, is it possible to create multiple different surface types on the one texture with the pbr system?  Currently, I might paint a vehicle where one texture contains areas that cover several parts, and these will be different types of surfaces.  With specular and normal textures I can tailor them to match the diffuse so i can have metal, wood, plastic, fabric surfaces all on the one texture.

I hope my questions arent too difficult to understand.

 

[Frionil Fang]

I'm not who you tagged but I think/hope I know the answers to some of these.

17 minutes ago, Eowyn Southmoor said:

1  Is pbr a new system completely, or is it an additional texture that works with the current diffuse/spec/norm textures?

It's an alternative system. A PBR material overrides the diffuse/normal/specular, but they can still be used otherwise.

17 minutes ago, Eowyn Southmoor said:

2 If pbr is a totally new system, is there new LSL code that allows you to write paint applier scripts to texture specific prims/faces with the new system (assuming pbr uses different names from diffuse/spec/norm)?

Yes, the parameters are already listed on the wiki, see the RENDER_MATERIAL and *_GLTF_* ones https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetPrimitiveParams

17 minutes ago, Eowyn Southmoor said:

3  Will vehicles using the current materials system still look decent? 

I'd hope things will look only better, because the environment shine is now done with reflection probes and screen-space reflections instead of the old sky gradient + bright blob in sun direction -style. However, since it's very different, adjustments might be necessary.

Question #4, probably same as above.

Question #5, see #1. To my understanding the diffuse slot will always be preserved as a fallback texture even if a PBR material is used, dunno if the old-style normal/specular slots get emptied when a PBR material is applied.

17 minutes ago, Eowyn Southmoor said:

6  Will i need to create custom pbr textures for every single diffuse texture I make?

The same rules apply as with existing materials - sometimes you can get away with generic tiled textures in a given slot, sometimes you need something more custom, so it depends on the situation. The texture count for PBR will be the same as old materials since they're channel-packed (grayscale values 0-255 packed into individual R G B channels instead of getting an entire texture slot), the only exception being that emissive is an extra optional RGB texture slot, but it's rarely needed.

Question #7, same as above. You can still pack multiple differently behaving areas into the same texture, as long as you make sure any global values (tints, multipliers) are chosen so that everything shows up right, just like you can do with specular glossiness/environment/tint settings now.

If I got any of these wrong, someone with more thorough experience please correct me!

Edited April 7, 2023 by Frionil Fang

[Lelani Carver]

On 12/11/2022 at 5:25 PM, OptimoMaximo said:

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!
 

Bumping to ask about this ORM packing tool. I fumbled around trying to get it downloaded, I installed 7zip to open it, not sure of next step. I’m on Windows 10.

Is there an installer? 

[Aquila Kytori]

3 hours ago, Lelani Carver said:

I fumbled around trying to get it downloaded, I installed 7zip to open it, not sure of next step. I’m on Windows 10.

1. Create a new folder somewhere (on desktop) and name it something like Optimo's ORM packer.
2. Drag the downloaded file into this folder.
3. Open the folder then right click on the file SL_ORM_Packer.7z  to open the Open with pop-up menu and from the options choose 7-zip  >  Extract Here . This will unzip the files into this same folder.
4. After extraction there will be 4 new files in the folder. The one we want is the file with the .exe extension, (the executable file). Double click on this file and it will open Otimo's  ORM Texture Packer. (or right click on the file and choose the Open option.)

 

 

Edited October 5, 2023 by Aquila Kytori

[Lelani Carver]

Thank you! There's more than one way to skin this cat, and I needed to test. 

[OptimoMaximo]

On 10/5/2023 at 9:32 PM, Aquila Kytori said:

1. Create a new folder somewhere (on desktop) and name it something like Optimo's ORM packer.
2. Drag the downloaded file into this folder.
3. Open the folder then right click on the file SL_ORM_Packer.7z  to open the Open with pop-up menu and from the options choose 7-zip  >  Extract Here . This will unzip the files into this same folder.
4. After extraction there will be 4 new files in the folder. The one we want is the file with the .exe extension, (the executable file). Double click on this file and it will open Otimo's  ORM Texture Packer. (or right click on the file and choose the Open option.)

 

 

Thanks Aquila 😁