Firestorm PBR Alpha viewer

[Beq Janus]

15 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

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).

This has been the single most common complaint in these first few days. The vast majority of users do not have an HDR monitor and everything looks contrasty/cartoonish, it is proving very unpopular for that reason alone at the moment. I am trying to find a way to summarise that feedback at the moment.

5 hours 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).

This is one of the issues I have had with the attitudes expressed in the creator forums on the LL discord server. There is a general view that inworld creators and those that do not wish to use the big tool-chains have no valid claim to be creators. This is both arrogant and ignorant of a whole swathe of hobbyist/non-commercial builders in SL. These fall into a number of important categories:

1) The DIY-er. 

Just like in RL, there is some pride to be had in making something of your own. It might not look as slick as a "professional/commercial" product, but you made it and it has sentimental and subjective values way beyond any linden dollar price tag. There are two (arguably three if we include "TPV export as DAE") main toolchains used by creators that work inworld. Mesh Studio and Mesh Generator. While these are (obviously) limited to working with prims (incl sculpts) and not as flexible as directly working in mesh there is still a good number of people that enjoy the experience and find that the output is more than adequate for their needs. The majority are building for their own needs, be those role play props, artworks, additions to their homes or any number of personal items, there are also a few that sell their items and have a decent customer base who enjoy their products.

2) The decorator.

We all like to customise things, from buying a house in the marketplace and then filling it with our choice of furnishings and lighting that fits our tastes, to building an entire region with mix and match assets from many creators, often tweaked and enhanced with "kitbashed" prims/sculpts/mesh. PBR can still support this, we can import PBR materials that can be tiled and apply them to our inworld objects. It worries me that we're seeing suggestions that homes sold by creators should have built-in probes and lighting. This goes against what many house-dressers want and I hope will backfire on those trying to force their design identity onto all of their customers. 

3) The re-seller

Mesh Creators have long had a sub-market for template mesh, meshes that come with a UV guide and other textures designed to allow their customers to apply custom materials and re-style and re-sell their product. 

I am sure there are many more, examples of people that don't want or need to leap into some external toolchain every time they need something.

 

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

17 hours 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.

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.)

I'm actually not so sure about that anymore. I logged into beta PBR grid and changed my settings to low, and metallic PBR and a lot of materials are just black instead of their proper colors. I think it's still using PBR because when you change settings it does the screen dim and undim thing only the PBR rendering engine uses. I thought they were going to leave ALM in for low end computers, but I guess it really doesn't make sense as PBR renderer runs far better on my machine.

Even if PBR isn't enabled on your region, you can use the PBR viewer to see how the new renderer handles legacy content.

 

Also I can't believe I didn't say this early but thank you so much firestorm team. Now I don't have to run the SL viewer on WINE anymore for PBR stuff. And yes with a little bit of testing the PBR renderer works great on Linux for me with AMDGPU .

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I'm actually not so sure about that anymore. I logged into beta PBR grid and changed my settings to low, and metallic PBR and a lot of materials are just black instead of their proper colors

You cannot disable PBR rendering in LL's PBR viewer or TPVs deriving directly from it such as FS (you can with one TPV I will not name here, because this is a FS thread).

The fact that turning graphics settings to low in a PBR viewer changes how PBR materials look, is simply because doing so, you turn off reflections...

Quote

I thought they were going to leave ALM in for low end computers, but I guess it really doesn't make sense as PBR renderer runs far better on my machine.

Yes, the PBR shaders and renderer run at least as fast as the ALM shaders and renderer, and often faster (especially on recent GPUs), however PBR causes an increase in VRAM usage, which might be problematic with GPUs not having much VRAM (2GB or less). Also, the old forward renderer, which was removed from LL's PBR viewer, runs 50 to 100% faster on old hardware, so the owners of such hardware might not adopt PBR for a while (i.e. until they can upgrade their PC).

Edited August 24, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Gavin Hird]

2 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

I am sure there are many more, examples of people that don't want or need to leap into some external toolchain every time they need something.

The core thing the owners of SecondLife; Linden Lab, must ask themselves are:

Do we want to turn SecondLife into a shopping center for virtual bling, or do we want to remain as a creative space – which was the original attraction.

If the answer is the first, they will be in for an increasingly hard value proposition as there are plenty of spaces that looks, or will look much more compelling.

[Jackson Redstar]

what is a 'HDR monitor'? I know what HDR is of course, But Im not sure I seen a HDR monitor I have a BenQ 10 bit monitor, though, never use the 10 bit part of it. Amd yeah, 'cartoonish' would be a good description of what the PBR viewer looks like right now. Or maybe over cooked. at least the avi does. Blacks too crushed as well. But playing around with a couple settings in the Lighting tab mostly corrected that. But its a work in progress

[Monty Linden]

The wikipedia article is not too bad:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynamic-range_television

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Gavin Hird said:

Do we want to turn SecondLife into a shopping center for virtual bling, or do we want to remain as a creative space – which was the original attraction.

Your world, your imagination... Our revenue ! 😛

[Candide LeMay]

2 hours ago, Gavin Hird said:

Do we want to turn SecondLife into a shopping center for virtual bling

Some people would argue this has already happened.

And to be at least somewhat on topic - as someone who makes stuff to amuse myself, I find PBR a welcome addition to SL. The 3D tools outside of SL are so nice these days that even an amateur like myself can use them easily. The less friction in getting stuff into SL the better.

[Gavin Hird]

47 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

Some people would argue this has already happened.

I can agree it is well in progress

[belindacarson]

4 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

I can agree it is well in progress

Gavin, with all due respect and no offense intended, people will take you seriously once your own viewer has a listing in the TPV directory.

[Gavin Hird]

12 minutes ago, belindacarson said:

Gavin, with all due respect and no offense intended, people will take you seriously once your own viewer has a listing in the TPV directory.

I am not going to put what is for all intents and purposes a beta development into the TPV directory (even if it is reasonably solid)

One important factor is I don't own any machines that runs Windows, and I won't get any either, so all development and testing of the Windows version is done in a virtual machine on macOS. I am not sure for how long that is sustainable.

When it comes to the macOS version, I am not convinced there is a future for it. So we'll see for how long I will hang on. 

Edited August 24, 2023 by Gavin Hird

[Rowan Amore]

16 minutes ago, Gavin Hird said:

I am not going to put what is for all intents and purposes a beta development into the TPV directory (even if it is reasonably solid)

One important factor is I don't own any machines that runs Windows, and I won't get any either, so all development and testing of the Windows version is done in a virtual machine on macOS. I am not sure for how long that is sustainable.

When it comes to the macOS version, I am not convinced there is a future for it. So we'll see for how long I will hang on. 

Don't worry about it.  The Cool VL which has been around for years along with it's creator, @Henri Beauchamp, has just recently been added to the TPV list.  People still took Henri seriously before that.

[arton Rotaru]

6 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

This has been the single most common complaint in these first few days. The vast majority of users do not have an HDR monitor and everything looks contrasty/cartoonish, it is proving very unpopular for that reason alone at the moment. I am trying to find a way to summarise that feedback at the moment.

It went like this.

PBR materials were implemented.
To fix some issues with PBR materials, ACES  Tonemapping was added.
People started to complain that now legacy content is too saturated.
Developer did his magic and split legacy content and PBR into 2 groups. Where only the pixels that had PBR Materials were rendered with ACES and the rest with Linear.
Worked quite well, but turned out to be too performance heavy.
So that got removed again and the tonemapping options menu got removed as well, because the Lab wants us to create PBR materials that are calibrated to the ACES tonemapping.

Inbetween the Auto-Exposure got implemented as well, which was/is another area of concern on it's own.

The problem that we are facing now is, any attempt to bring legacy content back to the current (old) looks (without introducing performance hogs), will render PBR materials that have been made with ACES in mind desaturated.

I don't know FS, but all I can say is, it took me roughly a week to get used to the ACES tonemapping look. When it got removed for legacy content it took me also roughly a week to get used to the old look again. And same procedure when it went fully ACES again. Same with the Auto-Exposure, took a while to get used to it.

It's not the end of the world, people just need some extended period of time to get used to it. If there is an easy way out, like disabling ACES, people will stick with that forever, because they don't need to get used to something new.

6 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

This is one of the issues I have had with the attitudes expressed in the creator forums on the LL discord server. There is a general view that inworld creators and those that do not wish to use the big tool-chains have no valid claim to be creators. This is both arrogant and ignorant of a whole swathe of hobbyist/non-commercial builders in SL. These fall into a number of important categories:

I can't confirm that this is a general view there. This are actually very few people who might be among the verbally loudest out there.

 

Edited August 24, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[JeromFranzic]

20 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Don't worry about it.  The Cool VL which has been around for years along with it's creator, @Henri Beauchamp, has just recently been added to the TPV list.  People still took Henri seriously before that.

IIRC, that addition happened a few months before Henri released the Cool VL Viewer PBR branch. I'm surprised his viewer wasn't added sooner. Henri has always had stable and beta releases of Cool VL Viewer available for residents to use, and is one of the few that's also maintained Open Sim compatibility throughout its lifespan.

Edited August 24, 2023 by JeromFranzic

[Rowan Amore]

8 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

IIRC, that addition happened a few months before Henri released the Cool VL Viewer PBR branch. I'm surprised his viewer wasn't added sooner. Henri has always had stable and beta releases of Cool VL Viewer available for residents to use, and is one of the few that's also maintained Open Sim compatibility throughout its lifespan.

It had more to do with LL requirements of RL info/privacy concerns that kept him from requesting to be added if I remember correctly.  He made mention of it here at the time.  

[Henri Beauchamp]

15 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

IIRC, that addition happened a few months before Henri released the Cool VL Viewer PBR branch. I'm surprised his viewer wasn't added sooner. Henri has always had stable and beta releases of Cool VL Viewer available for residents to use, and is one of the few that's also maintained Open Sim compatibility throughout its lifespan.

Err, I did try to avoid citing my viewer in a thread which is dedicated to another viewer... 🙈🙉🙊 Mission failed !  About the TVPD, the explanation is here (and had nothing to do with PBR, so please, let's get back to the topic 😜)

[Jackson Redstar]

@Beq Janus would a 10 bit SL ever be in the works you know?

[Crim Mip]

I installed this. Yes it is very much Alpha. Expect glitches. Then I went over to Rumpus 3. I walked up to this shiny looking rectangle and my jaw hit the floor when my reflection walked up from the opposite direction. Not only flat surfaces, there were spherical mirrors and lenses that worked. this is going to allow some incredibly cool things to be done. There is a downside. My system is relatively modern with a fast, high core count CPU and an Nvidia 3070. It was getting a bit of a workout. I wasn't getting bad frame rates, but definitely lower and the temps were higher in my system. This just isn't going to work on hardware as outdated as SL has been able to run on in the past. I know this will upset some. At the same time, it also means SL will finally be taking advantage of newer hardware to improve the experience just as most video games do. I welcome that.

[AmeliaJ08]

Well I installed it and had a short play with it last night in the Rumpus Room testing regions, Rumpus Room 3 on the main grid seems like the one to check out if you're looking to see what PBR can do.

I did immediately notice the HDR issue, my laptop screen obviously can't handle it. Contrast was far too high, will want a way of disabling or mitigating that in release... adjusting ambient lighting setting did help though.

Performance seemed good with settings enabled by default, hard to say what performance is really like in a sandbox with a handful of objects sitting around though. As for the shiny PBR stuff, really cool! I did immediately notice my avatar wasn't reflecting in real time though (delayed reflection update, some glitching where I'd appear and re-appear in reflections) so I went searching and found the real time reflection option... this halved the frame rate more or less but worked... mirrors in SL finally!

Would this feature be possible to enable selectively? certain objects need real time reflections of everything more than others or is it 'smart' already?

I'll also have to grab some PBR materials to play with in world creation, I had nothing immediately available to me.

 

 

Edited August 25, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Qie Niangao]

41 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I'll also have to grab some PBR materials to play with in world creation, I had nothing immediately available to me.

This I think is a problem. I ended up making a PBR material by script because opening any modeling tool is a day wasted for me. In case anybody else naturally starts from LSL it may save a step (easily done manually) to know that the "Blank" material has UUID 968cbad0-4dad-d64e-71b5-72bf13ad051a, so a script can get started with something like:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(LINK_SET,
            [ PRIM_RENDER_MATERIAL, ALL_SIDES, "968cbad0-4dad-d64e-71b5-72bf13ad051a"
            ]);
    }
}

and then play to your heart's content with PRIM_GLTF_BASE_COLOR, _NORMAL, _METALLIC_ROUGHNESS, and _EMISSIVE. Also, at one point I got some interesting sample materials on Aditi but of course there's no way to pull them over to Agni where I've never seen anything similar. I'm not sure why there's not a few in the Library at this point; is there any risk we'll just punt on using the glTF 2.0 standard for PBR materials and render the samples obsolete?

ETA: There are public domain / CC0  / sample-licensed content libraries. A couple I just stumbled on in stray Rumpus Room debris:

• https://polyhaven.com
• https://freepbr.com

not an endorsement, just a toe-hold.

Edited August 25, 2023 by Qie Niangao

[Gabriele Graves]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I did immediately notice the HDR issue, my laptop screen obviously can't handle it. Contrast was far too high, will want a way of disabling or mitigating that in release... adjusting ambient lighting setting did help though.

It seems that on the Firestorm Alpha you can disable HDR in the EEP Personal Lighting dialog if you set the "Reflection Probe Ambiance" setting to zero.  When you do this the setting underneath called "HDR Scale" changes to "Brightness" and things return to a more normal situation.

HDR On:

HDR Off:

[Jenna Huntsman]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I did immediately notice the HDR issue, my laptop screen obviously can't handle it

On empty regions, the auto exposure system doesn't quite work right (Still being tuned by LL) - Try going to a Belliseria region and testing there (Or, another non-empty region), as that should be much better.

Auto exposure ("HDR") is something that's still being worked on by LL, so these issues should get ironed out with further releases.

[Gabriele Graves]

1 minute ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

On empty regions, the auto exposure system doesn't quite work right (Still being tuned by LL)

Oh is that why when I rotate around my avatar it seems like the ambient lighting changes?  I did wonder.

[Jenna Huntsman]

Just now, Gabriele Graves said:

Oh is that why when I rotate around my avatar it seems like the ambient lighting changes?  I did wonder.

Yes - think of it like your phone's camera, which will automatically adjust exposure according to scene lighting.

[AmeliaJ08]

9 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

On empty regions, the auto exposure system doesn't quite work right (Still being tuned by LL) - Try going to a Belliseria region and testing there (Or, another non-empty region), as that should be much better.

Auto exposure ("HDR") is something that's still being worked on by LL, so these issues should get ironed out with further releases.

Well I landed in my home region and immediately noticed it, very high contrast. I'll mess around with it more tonight, thanks for the information

 

Edited August 25, 2023 by AmeliaJ08