My feedback on the SecondLife PBR-enabled viewer.

[Starry Skydancer]

When trying out the PBR viewer, there were some changes to the rendering that I did not like, and I would like to demonstrate this here.

I like to make skyboxes, this is what my skybox looks like in the current LL viewer, this is how it should look. 

There is a feature, (or perhaps a bug) in the viewer's rendering system that means the light shines through any objects that have their textures displayed with alpha masking of 0. Note my shadow. I use this to make my skyboxes behave the way I want them to; sunlight or moonlight will shine in, giving the enclosed space the impression of being an outdoor space.

The glow on this texture brightens the entirety of my texture, making the blue a brighter blue and brightening all my stars evenly.

 

This is the same skybox with the same sky setting, it blocks out all the light, the blue in the sky is not visible and the stars have been brightened disproportionately, thisi s not how my skybox is supposed to look.

 

Edited March 4, 2023 by Starry Skydancer

[NiranV Dean]

Intended. PBR is a whole new way of lighting things, you cannot expect anything to look even remotely the same. Everything that has ever been made before PBR was made for what we had, PBR does everything completely different, things will look different now and PBR requires a completely different workflow and new assets and textures to be created to look the same way as before.

[Flea Yatsenko]

What Starry is trying to say is that there was a quirk with the older renderer that allowed light to pass through when changing alpha masking and setting it to 0 and it doesn't work anymore. Basically, Starry is just requesting a feature for PBR that allows light to pass through objects and not cast shadows.

[Ardy Lay]

Once upon a time SL had an object property that could be cleared or set to indicate if that object should cast a shadow, by either including or excluding the object when making a shadow map.

[Candide LeMay]

I would welcome a flag to indicate if an object should receive EEP lighting or not. It's very hard to make caves and other enclosed dark places unless you make a custom EEP to hide the sun and the moon, which has its own drawbacks.

[Jackson Redstar]

Need to come up with a better name. Cannot say PBR without thinking of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer lol

[Qie Niangao]

11 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

I would welcome a flag to indicate if an object should receive EEP lighting or not. It's very hard to make caves and other enclosed dark places unless you make a custom EEP to hide the sun and the moon, which has its own drawbacks.

I'm curious what those drawbacks are. I use a custom pitch black EEP to put a basement scene completely underground with only internal light sources and haven't noticed any problems, but I may be overlooking something. (Well, there is the problem of getting the agent into that EEP setting, which one way or another likely involves them accepting scary Experience permissions. That's a drawback, for sure.)

[Candide LeMay]

Right. You don't know what EEP settings people are using so you can't rely on it. You also can't create scenes where you're in a dark place yet can see through a window/door/opening that it's sunny outside etc. I'm guessing it would be computationally expensive to automatically detect surfaces and objects that are occluded from the sun/moon, hence the flag.

[animats]

On 3/15/2023 at 1:57 PM, Candide LeMay said:

I would welcome a flag to indicate if an object should receive EEP lighting or not. It's very hard to make caves and other enclosed dark places unless you make a custom EEP to hide the sun and the moon, which has its own drawbacks.

If you take PBR seriously, every indoor location needs some lighting, or it's dark. Just like real life. Lights are supposed to have realistic intensities, with actual lumen values. After rendering the scene with a wide dynamic range, the brightness is adjusted to make things visible on 8-bit screens. This is called "tone mapping". Tone mapping is simulating the way human eyes adjust to light level. If done well, very dark scenes desaturate and become grey. The sun is usually far brighter than most other lights, and when you go from inside into sunlight, you're briefly blinded until your eyes adapt. I posted a clip from Cyberpunk 2077 showing such a transition.

Store owners should be aware of this. There are many stores in SL where, with shadows on, it's too dark inside because the store owner did not put in lights. A useful exercise is to set the environment to one of the darkest night settings and visit your own properties. If you can't see what you're doing, and your visitors should be able to see, add lights.

Are we getting any new kinds of lights with PBR? We have only two now - point lights which go through everything, and projectors, which cast shadows and require a texture to indicate the light pattern. Directional lights would be nice. At least point lights which illuminate a hemisphere, not a full sphere, and have a range. That handles most ceiling lights, without going up through the ceiling.

Edited March 17, 2023 by animats

[Love Zhaoying]

3 hours ago, animats said:

At least point lights which illuminate a hemisphere, not a full sphere, and have a range.

Do we have enough point lights? The limit used to be pretty low.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Do we have enough point lights? The limit used to be pretty low.

There's no maximum limit for active lights under Advanced Lighting Model.