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Reflection probes


Bree Giffen
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@EliseAnne85

Perhaps an example will help to clear things up?

First I generated a set of PBR maps in Filter Forge using this filter Barrel Generator PBR (I tweaked the roughness & metalness a little to better illustrate the effect)

image.thumb.jpeg.b575345db8b759ae3ce755234dd02e4e.jpeg

This is how the sphere looks with just the Albedo map

image.gif.29f7661600cc0744f20a9c60d9908c47.gif

If you add the other Surface Property maps (Roughness & Metalness) you can start to see the "shiny" effect on the metal as the light moves around the object

image.gif.8ae2d05ad4b702d61375fb7cf76c1ae7.gif

if you then add the normal map you can also see the light reflecting off the added Surface Detail as the normal map alters the angle at which it's reflected

image.gif.3bfdbcf4e1822dd9bb005392d175b2e0.gif

So, an albedo map will contain all the colours present on a surface, whether those colours represent wood or metal or rust or freckles or strawberry pudding doesn't matter, the other properties such as how polished or rough it is or how much it reflects whats around it are all handled by the roughness and metalness maps.

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25 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

@EliseAnne85

Perhaps an example will help to clear things up?

First I generated a set of PBR maps in Filter Forge using this filter Barrel Generator PBR (I tweaked the roughness & metalness a little to better illustrate the effect)

image.thumb.jpeg.b575345db8b759ae3ce755234dd02e4e.jpeg

This is how the sphere looks with just the Albedo map

image.gif.29f7661600cc0744f20a9c60d9908c47.gif

If you add the other Surface Property maps (Roughness & Metalness) you can start to see the "shiny" effect on the metal as the light moves around the object

image.gif.8ae2d05ad4b702d61375fb7cf76c1ae7.gif

if you then add the normal map you can also see the light reflecting off the added Surface Detail as the normal map alters the angle at which it's reflected

image.gif.3bfdbcf4e1822dd9bb005392d175b2e0.gif

So, an albedo map will contain all the colours present on a surface, whether those colours represent wood or metal or rust or freckles or strawberry pudding doesn't matter, the other properties such as how polished or rough it is or how much it reflects whats around it are all handled by the roughness and metalness maps.

Wow, fantastic!  Thanks for sharing it!   Calling it the main texture map might have been easier LOL because it just kept escaping me when others say the albedo is pure color or base color.  I thought it was the main diffuse map goes there as you show.  oi  Thanks again.

 

Edited by EliseAnne85
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2 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

Yes.

Imagine how nice mainland would look after just one pass?

What about all the cool stuff on MP which could still sell for quite some time...I do wonder if it will still look good or not. 

Granted, PBR may be one of the most magical things to happen to virtual worlds but it may take awhile like mesh did before it's in it's fully glory.  What Fluffy showed looks amazing; however, there are things I am still sooooooo attached too - more home items and my jewelry collection and rings have sentimental value.  It's not a cheap upgrade either, this one could involve computer hardware or whole new computers for many plus new avatars, hairs, or might as well say it - everything.  I remember when mesh came out there were mixed feelings but it didn't involve a computer upgrade.  I have never been involved with a computer upgrade for SL that I remember although I have had several computers over these many years.

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2 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:
On 1/6/2023 at 3:57 PM, EliseAnne85 said:

Do you think all the content that exists now for potatoes, as you call them, should be retired?

Yes.

Imagine how nice mainland would look after just one pass?

This is making me hungry for some reason. Could you please pass the potatoes?

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11 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

It's not a cheap upgrade either, this one could involve computer hardware or whole new computers for many plus new avatars, hairs, or might as well say it - everything.  I remember when mesh came out there were mixed feelings but it didn't involve a computer upgrade.  I have never been involved with a computer upgrade for SL that I remember although I have had several computers over these many years.

Are you sure you didn't end up wanting to upgrade machines after Mesh got popular? Switching to deferred rendering ("ALM", from the old forward rendering) should be a smaller increment to client hardware and network than was the introduction of Mesh, which eventually compelled me to upgrade graphics cards to see all those complex mesh avatars and clothes, each with multiple uniquely-textured sides.

I suppose the difference this time will be more abrupt: suddenly a favorite viewer will update to the Linden deferred-only rendering pipeline to support PBR (and conform with the glTF 2.0 spec), and then those viewer configurations that have already "spent" the viewer performance improvements so they're at just-acceptable performance will find everything running unacceptably slower. It's kinda too bad folks will have had a full year to "use up" those improvements before this important change was ready for wide deployment.

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1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

after Mesh got popular?

Ah, you could be right as I have been off and on SL for nearly two decades now, so I took a break after playing with mesh very early on and when I came back to SL I had a new computer by coincidence and mesh was/is popular.  I do remember so many being hesitant about mesh.  I jumped right in and bought my first item within weeks of it's release.  The main thing I remember is I didn't like mesh maxi skirts when they first came out - our legs would stick through.   Oh yeah and we had no feet once we alphaed out our legs but the feet had to go too so long mesh skirts looked weird.  I bought mostly mesh tops in the very beginning of mesh.

Edited by EliseAnne85
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  • 9 months later...
On 1/6/2023 at 11:30 PM, EliseAnne85 said:

I'm trying to understand where the pattern of objects goes or will come from.  Patterns/textures of our world like the grain of wood, tree bark, corduroy fabric for some examples as Fluffy said the albedo is just color.  So, I'm assuming albedo is like a tinter or our inworld color palette because she said it's just color.  I'm just lost as to where texture/pattern of items would come from. So, I asked in my post above does the pattern come from the roughness map then?  

See photo I will place below because what I was asking for clarity on is the albedo actually color AND pattern.  See how the shirts of the PBR picture below have a pattern.  Fabrics have patterns, so to speak, and I was wondering how one does that in PBR.  Where does one create texture/pattern with PBR - which map area?  I was assuming with PBR we would create pattern/texture and color in the albedo.  So, I'm lost here.  

Screenshot (1597).png

The patterns as you call them are not 'patterns' at all.

Bark - The darkness 'pattern' you see is the crevaces between the individual flakes of bark. This would be where your normal map and ambient occlusion would come in.

Same for linen and nylon, you're looking at individual threads of fabric interwoven which have tiny creases and crevaces, this would all be shaded with your normal map and ambient occlusion. Most PBR materials you can download from websites already come with such maps, it's not work you'd have to do yourself typically unless you were designing a material from scratch.

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On 1/6/2023 at 5:16 AM, Bree Giffen said:

So I'm reading the blog posts and I see that one of the improvements will be reflection probes. Does this mean we will have working mirrors in SL? The vanity here is amazing and I think this will be a big hit. How does reflection probing work exactly? 

Ok, reflection probes...

A reflection probe is an image designed to squeeze a 360 degree panoramic view into a flat 2d image, this image can then be "wrapped" around an invisible sphere or cube, and projected onto surfaces set as "shiny" to provide FAKE reflections.

 

SL has had a reflection map for 20 years or more, just the one, it's the fake world reflection that got slapped on things when you set the old pre ALM surfaces to "shiny low/medium/high" and that gets applied to objects when you use ALM/Materials and set the ENV parameter to a non zero number.

 

Probes do NOT enable "real mirrors", with "Real reflections", by definition, a probe is a "FAKE reflection".

 

The 360 degree snapshot feature, has the ability to take probe images of say the inside of your SL living room. All the new PBR thing does is provide auto-generated images.

 

The 360 snapshots used in the LL viewer use one of the common formats for HDR Light Probes ( https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/HDRShop/ ), speciifically that 2:1 aspect ratio image with the  spherical distortions, known as "LatLong" format.

138922_header_small.jpg

 

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Is there any way to force the viewer to load (and keep loaded) everything in radius even if the camera isn't pointing at it? Because that's an issue I had trying to take 360 screenshots before. Sometimes I could get around it by pointing the camera at a problem item or spinning before hitting the button, but in some areas there was no way to get it to work. What would be really nice would be for this to happen automatically when the 360 screenshot window is opened, because nobody actually wants the disappearing behaviour when they're trying to take a picture of what's behind them.

Reflections are going to be a bit sad if you can't get a shot of your living room that doesn't have a wall randomly missing.

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