PBR Materials @SL University

[EliseAnne85]

20 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

I don't know why these commercials aren't good looking to you (I don't watch such stuff), but I'd say it's still the artists who are to blame.

I explained why and put pictures.  The colors have no depth, no life.  The colors look like something from the inworld color picker palette.  Look at the coffee mugs below,  it just looks tinted brownblack to me, and the reflections aren't doing anything exciting for me either.  The spoon looks part rose gold and part silver, the plate under the coffee cup looks so flat too like an odd gray.  Many of these PBR artists on YouTube are just alpha-ing (probably thru Photoshop) the flowers I see in many PBR stuff.  I think, at this time, PS is a far superior program.  However, I'm not updating to the subscription payment version.  

Edited February 12, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, arton Rotaru said:

Actually I'm still selling sulpted prims, without materials on my MP store as well. And I won't take them out of my store even when PBR is released.

If you like playing with sculpted prims you should definitely take a look at 3D Coat.

It fully supports SL sculpt maps and allows you to import them as 3D models, modify and save them and also paint colour, depth, roughness/specularity, etc. directly onto them using either the old SL materials system or a workflow compatible with the new PBR system.

If anyone is looking for a way to spice up those old sculpties I'd recommend trying the 30 day free trial!

[arton Rotaru]

 

8 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I explained why and put pictures. 

While all of what you listed might be true, it's still a pretty picture. And I guess that is what was intended with this "mugshot" .

Edited February 12, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Ayashe Ninetails]

6 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I explained why and put pictures.  The colors have no depth, no life.  The colors look like something from the inworld color picker palette.  Look at the coffee mugs below,  it just looks tinted brownblack to me, and the reflections aren't doing anything exciting for me either.  The spoon looks part rose gold and part silver, the plate under the coffee cup looks so flat too like an odd gray.  Many of these PBR artists on YouTube are just alpha-ing (probably thru Photoshop) the flowers I see in many PBR stuff.  I think, at this time, PS is a far superior program.  However, I'm not updating to the subscription payment version.  

I'm not seeing anything wrong with that photo. Besides a bit too much depth of field for my liking. I had to really stare at the spoon to even notice the change in tones.

The reflections look similar to what I'm looking at on my computer desk right now. Looks good to me.

[arton Rotaru]

2 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

If you like playing with sculpted prims

Oh no! I hate sculpted prims. 😆 Since mesh I never touched a sculpty. But thank you for suggesting this. Appreciated!

[EliseAnne85]

6 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

I'm not seeing anything wrong with that photo. Besides a bit too much depth of field for my liking. I had to really stare at the spoon to even notice the change in tones.

The reflections look similar to what I'm looking at on my computer desk right now. Looks good to me.

Odd, that may seem but not really.  I noticed the rose on the main spoon and the silver handle right away.  Could be difference in monitors.  My monitor is a flat screen TV like monitor.  But, that's why they call computers personal as they vary.  I think the colors look like the inworld color picker palette was used.  Now looking at the rose colored part of the spoon again, it looks like someone made a rose colored inlay over that part of the spoon in PS as it doesn't quite fit the spoon.  Anyhow, I've showed other pics from PBR how to videos and it looked like the person tinted most parts from the color picker palette inworld.  Colors are not happening to look good on my monitor then.  Colors look flat.  

[Frionil Fang]

As an analogy and because I'm bored...

This is photo of a synthetic ruby from my gemstone collection. In a sense, it's a baked diffuse texture generated by a 3D application. Looks pretty neat, captures the light and colors and all nicely! But it's still just a flat photo and no matter how I turn my head, the lights are static and no matter how I pull back my curtains, the colors are the same.

This is a handdrawn approximation of the above. In a sense, it's a handdrawn diffuse texture. It's got its own charm and in some contexts it would look better (well not really, considering the quality of my artwork, but pretend with me for a bit here). Same limitations as above, but would look even more out of place in a dynamic, changing environment.

Neither of these pictures can compare to actually holding the ruby in my hand to appreciate its colors and how light plays on it with changing angles and lighting conditions. In the same analogy sense as the before two, that is materials in a dynamic 3D scene. Sure, you're allowed to prefer the photo or the handdrawn version, and no one is forcing you to buy a synthetic ruby (they're really cheap!), but I will much rather look at the actual ruby than the above two.

And similarly, PBR (or diffuse-specular-normal materials) existing does not force you to use them, you're still allowed to use your handdrawn things. Would I want to use those myself? Nope, I've had ALM enabled since it was implemented, prefer not to buy anything that doesn't use materials, and always add materials to things that don't have them if possible, just for that touch of extra dynamic flair - simple tiled detail textures to vary the intensity of specularity, or a little bit of roughness via normal map go a long way.

Also as a side note, you could draw even PBR channels* by hand in Paint, though you'd need a separate tool to combine them into appropriate textures for upload if you insisted using Paint and not, say, Photoshop which could do that natively. I have a pile of self-made seamlessly tiling diffuse-specular-normal materials made by hand, with software roughly on par of Photoshop 7 from 2002. Do not underestimate your tools, just because expensive, powerful industry standard applications exist doesn't mean you can't do pretty neat things with manual, free alternatives.

* = normal map is still probably better not drawn by hand but generated from a black and white heightmap instead, with one of the many Photoshop plugins or separate programs that exist.

Edited February 12, 2023 by Frionil Fang

[Ayashe Ninetails]

17 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I think the colors look like the inworld color picker palette was used.

I don't know what this means. SL uses a standard RGB/Hex color picker. I toss hex codes in there all the time.

 

17 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Anyhow, I've showed other pics from PBR how to videos and it looked like the person tinted most parts from the color picker palette inworld.  Colors are not happening to look good on my monitor then.  Colors look flat.  

I posted a video from a modern game that uses PBR. That's probably the best way to see what we're going to get (keeping in mind of course that high-budget games also utilize more complex techniques to simulate lighting, shadows, etc. etc. etc.). But since most of SL is in motion, since we're walking around and flying/driving/etc., static photos don't really show off how it's going to look in-world.

Edited February 12, 2023 by Ayashe Ninetails
Added stuffs

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

20 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Oh no! I hate sculpted prims. 😆 Since mesh I never touched a sculpty. But thank you for suggesting this. Appreciated!

I must admit I feel pretty much the same way.  The only things I'd consider using sculpted prims for now would be:

1. If I want a lot of temp on rez items since (last I checked) using mesh still counts against parcel LI limits whereas sculpted prims don't.
2. In conjunction with megaprims to make large off-sim terrain extensions & decorations.

Mesh is far superior in just about every sense except for the fact you can sometimes "cheat" with sculpted prims to save a few LI.

[Rowan Amore]

13 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

But since most of SL is in motion, since we're walking around and flying/driving/etc., static photos don't really show off how it's going to look in-world.

This is the point I think is being missed.  It's about the motion and how light reflections change as one's perspective changes.  

When you walk by a window, the reflection changes as you walk past.   If you stand still in RL or SL, the reflection won't change unless the source of light changes/moves.  

I was reading a little on PBR and this struck me as explaining it simply...

PBR is, as Joe Wilson puts it, "more of a concept than a strict set of rules"[3] – but the concept contains several distinctive points of note. One of these is that – unlike many previous models that sought to differentiate surfaces between non-reflective and reflective – PBR recognizes that, in the real world, as John Hable puts it, "everything is shiny".[4] Even "flat" or "matte" surfaces in the real world such as concrete will reflect a small degree of light, and many metals and liquids will reflect a great deal of it. Another thing that PBR models attempt to do is to integrate photogrammetry - measurements from photographs of real-world materials - to study and replicate real physical ranges of values to accurately simulate albedo, gloss, reflectivity, and other physical properties.

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

15 minutes ago, Frionil Fang said:

Neither of these pictures can compare to actually holding the ruby in my hand to appreciate its colors and how light plays on it with changing angles and lighting conditions.

That's the best part about all of this, IMO. I'm very used to seeing effects like PBR and ray tracing and all that fancy stuffs in dynamic environments where you can walk or run through and see how light and shadow play across all the different materials and surfaces in the scene. I would assume most gamers don't really notice it now that it's so common, but when you really pay attention, it's incredible. When you're in SL, though, you do tend to notice the lack of it. Walking around my kitchen with all the shiny and pseudo-reflective surfaces - it all never changes. Everything's just painted on. Meh. 

This will be a very welcome change - even just as a regular user.

 

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

This is the point I think is being missed.  It's about the motion and how light reflections change as one's perspective changes.  

When you walk by a window, the reflection changes as you walk past.   If you stand still in RL or SL, the reflection won't change unless the source of light changes/moves.  

I was reading a little on PBR and this struck me as explaining it simply...

PBR is, as Joe Wilson puts it, "more of a concept than a strict set of rules"[3] – but the concept contains several distinctive points of note. One of these is that – unlike many previous models that sought to differentiate surfaces between non-reflective and reflective – PBR recognizes that, in the real world, as John Hable puts it, "everything is shiny".[4] Even "flat" or "matte" surfaces in the real world such as concrete will reflect a small degree of light, and many metals and liquids will reflect a great deal of it. Another thing that PBR models attempt to do is to integrate photogrammetry - measurements from photographs of real-world materials - to study and replicate real physical ranges of values to accurately simulate albedo, gloss, reflectivity, and other physical properties.

Yes exactly! We're going to get muted sheens and bright shines and surfaces that look different in light vs. shadow vs. day vs. night vs. dawn vs. dusk. I mean, assuming it's done well. 👀

[EliseAnne85]

40 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

56 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I think the colors look like the inworld color picker palette was used.

I don't know what this means. SL uses a standard RGB/Hex color picker. I toss hex codes in there all the time.

What I mean by flat or colors like from the inworld color picker palette, the colors don't look gradient, they look flat.  Or, to put it another way, like looking at real world paint swatches one might see in a paint store.  I'd assume most of those PBR and Photoshopped enhanced photos are mostly being viewed on phones as that is what most people listen to YouTube on in today's world, not large screen TV computer monitors like I have.  

Anyhow, I agree with what others are saying in this thread and I also said as well in a prior post, I, me, we need to see what SL looks like with this.  As well, many of us want to know what our older content will look like.  I can't go on Aditi grid right now.  I'm readying to have rl surgery.  Today resting in rl.

[Rick Nightingale]

Am I right that one thing we won't be able to do with PBR is have specular highlights of a different colour to the albedo?

Like on my mer tails which are green, but flash with red patterns when at right angle to the light.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I must admit I feel pretty much the same way.  The only things I'd consider using sculpted prims for now would be:

1. If I want a lot of temp on rez items since (last I checked) using mesh still counts against parcel LI limits whereas sculpted prims don't.
2. In conjunction with megaprims to make large off-sim terrain extensions & decorations.

Mesh is far superior in just about every sense except for the fact you can sometimes "cheat" with sculpted prims to save a few LI.

Those are pretty good reasons, but to me the most significant reason for sculpties, by far, is the ability to update—even remotely—a rezzed object to completely new geometry (complete with textures and materials), as we can with every other SL object except the woefully crippled SL Mesh representation that intentionally confounds instance and class, all in service of some naïve notion of IP protection that some creators will still defend to the death.

So it's not that I like sculpties (they're painfully limited too), it's that I hate what they did to mesh.

[Jenna Huntsman]

9 minutes ago, Rick Daylight said:

Am I right that one thing we won't be able to do with PBR is have specular highlights of a different colour to the albedo?

Like on my mer tails which are green, but flash with red patterns when at right angle to the light.

You would be correct, the current implementation only allows for specular highlights that have the colour of the light source (non-metallic materials) or inherit the base colour of the material they're reflecting off (metallic materials), or somewhere in-between.

That being said, this is possible within the glTF spec with the use of KHR_materials_iridescence, which is potential future work after PBR goes live.

[Coffee Pancake]

6 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Maybe I'm missing the point, but since the simulator can't run faster than 45 fps, isn't anything greater than that wasted?

Oh it's worse than that ..

The region might run at 45 fps, but does that mean every agent or object update get passed to the viewer at 45 fps ? ...

High frame-rate SL can actually look worse as the jank inherent to a server side exclusive architecture becomes visible.

Edited February 12, 2023 by Coffee Pancake

[Love Zhaoying]

Does something "big" like PBR stay exclusive to the official viewer very long, aka until stabilized and TPV's can finally integrate the code changes?

[Gavin Hird]

35 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Does something "big" like PBR stay exclusive to the official viewer very long, aka until stabilized and TPV's can finally integrate the code changes?

The most important is backend for it to be in place on the main grid before anyone can use it.

Not sure if it is a MUST CHANGE for all users, as going to the demo regions with the regular viewer only produce black textures on surfaces with PBR materials.

Edited February 12, 2023 by Gavin Hird

[arton Rotaru]

25 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

Not sure if it is a MUST CHANGE for all users, as going to the demo regions with the regular viewer only produce black textures on surfaces with PBR materials

That sounds more like it's just legacy materials with high shine settings. All my meshes which have only PBR materials applied render in pure white with the regular viewer.

It's not a forced changed, though. Actually according to the PBR wiki page, LL is recommending that objects that use PBR materials should have a legacy diffuse map applied as well. So with a non PBR viewer it has some texture to render.

[Madelaine McMasters]

7 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Thanks.   But when an animator tells me his animations are 24 fps, he must mean something.   Maybe I should ask him, but certainly several experience animators I know are under the impression -- possibly mistaken -- that the animations they've uploaded to SL have a particular framerate, and whenever I've calculated the time at which a script should do something,  based on this and what happens a particular number of frames into the animation, the results have been what I'd expect.   For example, if the animation has the avatar start to move their right arm at frame 96, the movement starts about 4 seconds into the animation.

In this case, the 24fps refers to the capture rate of the animation. Imagine a dancer being motion captured for a dance animation. Capturing that motion at 24fps meshes well with the industry standard frame rate for motion pictures. If the SL viewer is running at 6fps, it'll pick every fourth frame from the animation for display. If the viewer is running at 48fps, it'll interpolate one frame between two successive frames in the BVH animation.

BVH files allow specification of a "frame time". I've seen SL sit animations with BVH frame times of two seconds. Rendered in-world, those animations can be quite smooth (due to interpolation), and very robotic.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Does something "big" like PBR stay exclusive to the official viewer very long, aka until stabilized and TPV's can finally integrate the code changes?

Just like with EEP, third party viewers may wait until bugs are worked out before releasing a full version.  Firestorm will undoubtedly do a beta test version or two.

[Gavin Hird]

20 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That sounds more like it's just legacy materials with high shine settings. All my meshes which have only PBR materials applied render in pure white with the regular viewer.

It's not a forced changed, though. Actually according to the PBR wiki page, LL is recommending that objects that use PBR materials should have a legacy diffuse map applied as well. So with a non PBR viewer it has some texture to render.

Could be. I suppose not everything is working as intended also on the beta grid with respect to the regular viewer. It will be sorted. 

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Finally stopped being lazy and tried out the materials part of the material viewer with one of my own objects.

On the left, is the PBR MetalRough, on the right is the SpecGloss version. I tried to keep their smart masks the same unless it made no sense for the MetalRough variant (since I do a lot of extra work on the SpecGloss to use the environment channel)

[Arielle Popstar]

I popped into the beta grid to take a look at some of the samples on the different PBR regions and yes, some interesting examples. It would be nice to see avatar apparel made with it though as that is my own preference as furniture and buildings and such quickly become just background noise after the initial ohhh and ahh's. I have to wonder if many of the items that I did see couldn't have been replicated pretty closely with existing materials and textures other than the reflections. 

When I look at the recent release notes, I see a long list of resolved issues and the list of things yet to do and think how far the viewer could have been had they focused on function rather than form. Aesthetics are all well and good but unfortunately the Lab's is too focused on the eye candy only, rather than making the viewer function better in general. This PBR and the EEP make me think they are attempting to bring Sansar to S/L and well, the lesson from that platform was that the looks were not enough to draw people in so why would it now?

[Innula Zenovka]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I popped into the beta grid to take a look at some of the samples on the different PBR regions and yes, some interesting examples. It would be nice to see avatar apparel made with it though as that is my own preference as furniture and buildings and such quickly become just background noise after the initial ohhh and ahh's. I have to wonder if many of the items that I did see couldn't have been replicated pretty closely with existing materials and textures other than the reflections. 

When I look at the recent release notes, I see a long list of resolved issues and the list of things yet to do and think how far the viewer could have been had they focused on function rather than form. Aesthetics are all well and good but unfortunately the Lab's is too focused on the eye candy only, rather than making the viewer function better in general. This PBR and the EEP make me think they are attempting to bring Sansar to S/L and well, the lesson from that platform was that the looks were not enough to draw people in so why would it now?

Every time LL introduce a new feature, someone invariably says, "This shiny new feature is all very well, but why haven't they done something about fixing such-and-such?"   

To my mind, though, this objection is based on the highly questionable assumption that there was a simple choice between, on the one hand, the shiny new feature and, on the other, the performance improvements/fixes that have supposedly been neglected.   

In particular, it assumes that

• the devs who were tasked with introducing the shiny new feature also have the skills and background necessary to fix the performance issues, too, and LL chose to deploy them on the new feature rather than the fix;
• that the performance issues are, indeed, fixable without some major revision of the viewer/server/whatever;
• the performance issues are not, in fact, being worked on at this moment by a different team.

 Quite possibly it was a simple choice between introducing the new feature and fixing some outstanding issue, but I have no way of determining this (partly because I don't know what particular performance issues you have in mind, of course), and I don't think it's safe to assume that the choice exists and LL made the wrong call.