Firestorm PBR Alpha viewer

[Beq Janus]

We've just released an Alpha build of Firestorm that integrates the Linden Lab PBR project viewer. I have to emphasise that this is Alpha, in the same sense that the LL version is too. This is not release quality but the hope is that many of our users will be keen to test this new technology out and at the same time provide ourselves and, more importantly at this stage, Linden Lab, with valuable bug reports and user experience feedback.

PBR server-side support is not yet ready for mainstream and is only available in a limited number of regions on the main grid (Agni), it is also present on the beta grid (Aditi). 

This is a shiny, fun, bug-hunting spree. The more we find now, the less painful things are later on. 

For bugs, please use JIRA (if this is clearly a core graphical bug, I would suggest going straight to the LL JIRA  https://jira.secondlife.com )for others then do use https://jira.firestormviewer.org

For more general comments on the PBR experience then these forums have a number of PBR discussions; you can also comment here of course. Please do remember that this is not intended to be release quality; constructive feedback is appreciated. 

https://www.firestormviewer.org/see-the-future-of-second-life-graphics-firestorm-pbr-alpha/

The download links are available in our preview group (Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group secondlife:///app/group/7ba4569c-9dd9-fed2-aaa7-36065d18a13c/about) this is also where inworld support is given, we cannot support this viewer in our main support channels as it is not a release build. 

Enjoy.

 

[Qie Niangao]

There was a new release (7.0.0.581368) of the Linden project viewer today, after a bit of a hiatus. I wonder if this Firestorm alpha is based from that same code, or is the timing just coincidental?

[Beq Janus]

9 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

There was a new release (7.0.0.581368) of the Linden project viewer today, after a bit of a hiatus. I wonder if this Firestorm alpha is based from that same code, or is the timing just coincidental?

Coincidental, though probably not massively different,  we merged PBR after our main release (6.14) last week, so the PBR codebase that was merged was up to date at that point. 

[PekeNL]

Man at this rate we'll be officially getting PBR somewhere summer 2024?

[Jaylinbridges]

1 hour ago, PekeNL said:

Man at this rate we'll be officially getting PBR somewhere summer 2024?

How long before a non-PBR viewer, third party or SL, will no longer function in SL?  That's the real question.

I hope my smart phone doesn't need PBR for SL.  As if I want to be in SL w/ a smartphone, squint...

[Flea Yatsenko]

28 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

How long before a non-PBR viewer, third party or SL, will no longer function in SL?  That's the real question.

I hope my smart phone doesn't need PBR for SL.  As if I want to be in SL w/ a smartphone, squint...

the new mobile viewer is non-PBR. Basically, the existing diffuse textures will be the fallback if you don't have PBR enabled. It should look very similar and won't break existing builds, but it will have different lighting.

[JeromFranzic]

I like what I'm seeing so far. I'm getting usable frame rates with your PBR viewer and can use medium PBR settings. Not too bad for a laptop that's on a GTX 1050. No crashes yet.

I can use max settings for PBR, but crank down the DD to 96 or 64. Otherwise it's too slow for me, great for indoor settings that aren't too crowded or closeup photos.

Also tested it while on Open Sim, thanks for doing that. 

[Henri Beauchamp]

59 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

How long before a non-PBR viewer, third party or SL, will no longer function in SL?

As long as PBR objects without a proper fallback diffuse texture will not cripple how SL looks when rendered in non-PBR viewers...

Provided future PBR-enabled creations will keep providing a diffuse texture, objects will look OK in ”future legacy” viewers; of course, since there is no obligation for people to add a diffuse texture to their PBR-enabled builds, there is a risk that such builds will end up spreading all over the grid. 🫣

[Beq Janus]

59 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

How long before a non-PBR viewer, third party or SL, will no longer function in SL?  That's the real question.

There is a difference between functioning and giving a reasonable experience, and also to being supported. Once PBR is officially launched by LL, and once we release our first PBR viewer, then based on our normal practice there will be support provided for prior versions for 3 releases. After that support is dropped and we typically block those builds. 

That suggests that probably 12 months after the initial PBR release we would expect to be moving away from the non-PBR viewers. 

Older viewers should continue to function without issues, they would only cease to function if the underlying protocol that communicate with the SL servers change. At the moment, no such changes are expected. 

The question then is will you get a reasonable experience, and that is going to depend a lot on the attitude of consumers and creators. As @Flea Yatsenko notes, the PBR spec allows for a legacy texture to be applied to a PBR asset such that non-PBR viewers will see a fallback texture. However, this does require the creator to provide such a texture, if not then you will see a plain white, untextured mesh

 

[Beq Janus]

6 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Provided future PBR-enabled creations will keep providing a diffuse texture, objects will look OK in ”future legacy” viewers; of course, since there is no obligation for people to add a diffuse texture to their PBR-enabled builds, there is a risk that such builds will end up spreading all over the grid. 🫣

When I asked recently about "best practices" in the Creator Discord I was generally dismissed and shouted down for even suggesting that there was a transition period. One creator cheerfully declaring that they had no intention of providing a fallback, or considering a bright pink "upgrade to PBR" texture instead. This does not bode well for the mobile users or those users for whom it will take time to save for an upgraded machine and wish to remain in SL as long as possible.

In reality, we won't know the facts about the adoption rate and thus the expected transition period until release. 

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 minute ago, Beq Janus said:

if not then you will see a plain white, untextured mesh

Or the default plywood texture, for non-mesh prims with PBR material but without any change done to the diffuse texture.

 

To see how the world would look like, should creators fail to set a diffuse texture for their builds, you can log in with a non-PBR viewer in the Rumpus Room sims (there are 6 of them) on the Aditi (beta) grid: the objects there are all using PBR materials, but of course since they are only for testing, no one bothered adding a diffuse texture to them.

[Henri Beauchamp]

17 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

When I asked recently about ”best practices” in the Creator Discord I was generally dismissed and shouted down for even suggesting that there was a transition period. One creator cheerfully declaring that they had no intention of providing a fallback, or considering a bright pink ”upgrade to PBR” texture instead.

Not wanting to ”pollute” this viewer thread about creators related considerations, but such a stupid reaction makes me hope that LL will add an ”Incompatible with non-PBR viewers” check box for PBR-materials-enabled items sold on the Marketplace...

I, for one, would certainly not buy an item marked as such, and won't want to discover, after buying an item without such information provided, that it bears an ugly bright pink ”upgrade to PBR” diffuse texture ! 😵

[Qie Niangao]

22 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

This does not bode well for the mobile users…

That's an interesting point. Assuming the mobile userbase is as big as one might expect, the PBR-only creators won't be important for long if they stick to that practice—which means they won't stick to that practice.

On the other hand, there will be a lot of content (builds, more than mere objects) that will only be worth seeing with PBR. That's a weird sort of tension, where the newest (mobile) viewers won't be able to see the best content.

In the long run, though, the workflow for non-PBR creation is a dead end, there's just no telling how long that run will be.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Assuming the mobile userbase is as big as one might expect,

Those poor Lumiya users!

IJS!

 

[Candide LeMay]

Does the upcoming mobile viewer from LL based on unity really not support PBR materials? That would be very weird if they released it like that.

[Flea Yatsenko]

2 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

Does the upcoming mobile viewer from LL based on unity really not support PBR materials? That would be very weird if they released it like that.

It doesn't. And you will be able to use the standard viewer with ALM instead of PBR. The old deferred rendering engine is getting removed and ALM will be the low end version.

The content creators who think PBR is a replacement for textures are going to be very disappointed. LL can at least block older versions of viewers to get people on PBR quicker. But with ALM still being around I'm sure given the SL userbase there will be a lot of people who hate change and hate PBR and refuse to give up ALM. Anyone who was around for the change from prim to sculpty or sculpty to mesh knows that it takes a long time for things to change.

Now if you are building a sim or even a little parcel or skybox, some of the stuff won't have PBR and some will. More growing pains. Standards take time to change. Yes legacy content will still look good. Yes a lot of people won't care that some stuff has working reflections and some are baked reflections (or something in between). But it's not going to be a clean break.

I do not mean to hijack the thread about PBR. It's great it's landed in Firestorm since that's the only viewer I really use. But people who think we're just magically going to have PBR everything and everyone will use PBR are out of touch. Baking is never going away, it's a feat LL got the mobile viewer to look that good on what is basically a GPU/CPU around a low end celeron in performance, to think they will have PBR and all this other stuff on that sort of hardware is not reasonable.

PBR is more about the lighting engine than the materials. Lighting, reflections, etc all look way better

[Qie Niangao]

47 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

And you will be able to use the standard viewer with ALM instead of PBR. The old deferred rendering engine is getting removed and ALM will be the low end version.

I'm a little confused what this means. PBR-capable viewers will have the old non-ALM "forward rendering" engine removed, which to me is the most exciting part of the whole development because finally creators will be able to use materials, whether glTF or the existing "Blinn-Phong", without having some folks unable to see them. But perhaps the "old deferred rendering engine" is also being "removed" in a sense, in that Advanced Lighting will look dramatically different in a PBR-capable viewer, regardless of materials.

But I'm not aware that the user will be able to disable PBR in a PBR-capable viewer: if the glTF materials are present, they'll be rendered, correct? (Or maybe this was referring to the transition interval while both current and PBR-capable viewers will be extant on the grid? I may be just misreading this.)

[Henri Beauchamp]

30 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'm a little confused what this means. PBR-capable viewers will have the old non-ALM ”forward rendering” engine removed, which to me is the most exciting part of the whole development because finally creators will be able to use materials, whether glTF or the existing ”Blinn-Phong”, without having some folks unable to see them. But perhaps the ”old deferred rendering engine” is also being ”removed” in a sense, in that Advanced Lighting will look dramatically different in a PBR-capable viewer, regardless of materials.

In the current release viewers, you got two rendering modes: forward (legacy, pre-materials) rendering and ”ALM” which is a deferred rendering with shaders able to render the (non-PBR) materials.

The new PBR renderer is always in deferred rendering mode, but this is not ”ALM”: the shaders have been fully rewritten to allow PBR rendering, so the ”now legacy” materials render slightly differently, and non-material faces features that were commonly used with the forward renderer may, sadly, render very differently (e.g. full bright faces)...

Also, the tone mapping (HDR vs linear) poses an issue: HDR is best for PBR materials (on the condition you got an HDR monitor, else you'll find the image way too contrasted), but sucks rocks with legacy contents, while linear (legacy) tone mapping is not that great for PBR materials rendering, but renders legacy contents more or less like we are used to with current release viewers (with the exceptions of full bright faces, for example).

30 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

But I'm not aware that the user will be able to disable PBR in a PBR-capable viewer

Yes, you can: see the last chapter in this post of mine.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Aishagain]

If this were a motorway opening, say around 1960, I can just imagine the incident insurance lawyers rubbing their hands with glee and waiting for the bangs and screams.

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Candide LeMay said:

Does the upcoming mobile viewer from LL based on unity really not support PBR materials? That would be very weird if they released it like that.

FWIW, I asked that at the Concierge & Land User Group this afternoon:

Quote

[2023/08/23 12:43]  Qie Niangao: Oh, this question came up: the mobile viewer won't render PBR materials??
[…]
[2023/08/23 12:44]  Wendi Linden: Qie - the mobile is intended to be fully compatible with Second Life, so I would expect you'd see that on mobile as well/

This may be projecting into an indefinite future, so personally I wouldn't conclude that the initial mobile viewer will be PBR capable.

Again, I'm pretty sure that in the long run, all SL content will be created with glTF-based workflow (including geometry), and that this will help us leverage more AI-automated creation tools as they become industry standard. But I'm not holding my breath.

[PekeNL]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

and that this will help us leverage more AI-automated creation tools as they become industry standard.

Please no. I don't need the forums being flooded with content creators screaming their lungs out about how AI 'took ur juuubs' here too.

[Gavin Hird]

My biggest problem with PBR is not from a technical perspective, but it basically cancels the original idea and attraction of SecondLife that you could go in there and build anything you imagined; alone or together with others using the tools provided in world.

PBR adds another layer of professionalism to the creation process where most of it happens by an increasingly smaller group, both because the skillset to create becomes increasingly higher, but also because you need a tool chest that must be paid for by a combination of subscription and high end hardware.

Sure you can still create inside of SecondLife, but mostly by using components others have imagined and created for you; and at a cost, just like in real life. – Making the whole thing increasingly pointless.

[Henri Beauchamp]

57 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

My biggest problem with PBR is not from a technical perspective, but it basically cancels the original idea and attraction of SecondLife that you could go in there and build anything you imagined; alone or together with others using the tools provided in world.

This is not a new problem, sadly: this problem has existed ever since the sculpties have been introduced, then worsened with the introduction of meshes and, yet again, with (non-PBR) materials...

This is indeed a big issue, and I keep advocating for getting modernized build tools in SL (e.g. with mesh modification/manipulation/creation tools, like basic mesh ”prims” you could mold like clay, cut/join/intesect, a mesh ”hull” from classic prims generation tool, etc).

As for PBR materials, a possible way to mitigate the building skills ”entry level”, would be for LL to provide a large library of default materials (in the inventory Library)...

Edited August 24, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Gavin Hird]

5 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

This is not a new problem, sadly: this problem has existed ever since the sculpties have been introduced, then worsened with the introduction of meshes and, yet again, with (non-PBR) materials...

This is indeed a big issue, and I keep advocating for getting modernized build tools in SL (e.g. with mesh modification/manipulation/creation tools, like basic mesh ”prims” you could mold like clay, cut/join/intesect, a mesh ”hull” from classic prims generation tool, etc).

As for PBR materials, a possible way to mitigate the building skills ”entry level”, would be for LL to provide a large library of default materials (in the inventory Library)...

I agree it is not a new problem, but PBR accelerates it.

[Fionalein]

I doubt it will be used much, just look at how many creators use ALM ... with everybody having it on it will get a bit more widespread though.