Latest PBR changes: shadows gone with the wind !

[Henri Beauchamp]

Citation from the blog:

Quote

Today we are happy to announce a significant update for both the Second Life RC (release candidate) PBR Viewer and GLTF project server. For PBR materials to render correctly in Second Life, residents must use the latest versions listed below. 

• Second Life RC viewer version (7.0.0.581886) or newer.

And be on supporting GLTF server regions named ”Rumpus Room 1-4” 

• Second Life server version (2023-09-28.6340659568) or newer.

GLTF PBR Materials efforts were slowed recently by a potentially costly issue. PBR Materials contain a great deal of new information which is stored in the objects that use these materials. When such objects are updated, and updates happen surprisingly often, the entire set of information about the object is transmitted.  The amount of data transmitted multiplied by the frequency of transmission adds up quickly. Reducing the amount of data transmitted required a change to the protocol used for sending this information.

Many thanks to one of our resident beta testers, animats (Joe Magarac), for spotting this issue and reporting it swiftly.

These changes will allow creators to make richer, more realistic objects in world, so we believe that the efforts involved will pay off, and that all residents will enjoy the results of these changes.

More GLTF PBR updates are on the way, please stay tuned!

Well, it would be all nice and dandy (with indeed a tone mapping that is at last ”viewable” on non-HDR monitors), if there was not a ”slight” issue with the new shaders: they ate up the shadows !

Demonstration (taken on Aditi in Morris, with Midday settings):

First the current release viewer v6.6.15.581961:

 

Second, the newest PBR RC viewer v7.0.0.581886, Midday with HDR adjustments:

 

And even worst for the shadows (but better for the glass roof transparency), with the same RC viewer and legacy Midday (no HDR adjustment):

 

Notice all the missing (or almost wiped out) shadows (trees, avatar, in particular), as well as how bad the rest of the few shadows look now, when compared to the ”standard”...

I raised this concern as soon as I backported the commit responsible for this fiasco to the Cool VL Viewer (and immediately reverted it), but I was met with chirping crickets... Let's see if crickets do chirp here too, and if residents at all care about shadows.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp
Fighting the stoopid auto-smiley-translator: no, a closing parenthesis followed by a colon is not always a smiley...

[Ardy Lay]

The residual ambient light is back too.  There is now a light on inside the refrigerator all the time, even when it is unplugged.

[Chic Aeon]

Probably important to remember ALL THE ISSUES with EEP (and some still remaining of course) while they were working on it.  I am not even looking at PBR until it gets to the main grid and in Firestorm.  Much easier on stress level.  But kudos for the folks willing to deal and report. I hope your reports help with "fine tuning".    I thought that I read that there may (will - could) be a way to turn off PBR even after it comes out.  In theory MY stuff -- according to the dev comments -- should still look OK but if it doesn't I am not redoing twelve years of work. 

[Henri Beauchamp]

38 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I am not even looking at PBR until it gets to the main grid and in Firestorm

Well, PBR is already ”live” on the main grid (in a few test regions), and Firestorm already got an alpha viewer with PBR support... So it's time for you to look at it ! 😛

 

38 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I thought that I read that there may (will - could) be a way to turn off PBR even after it comes out. 

I'm afraid no... LL opted to do away entirely with the old renderer (EE ALM and forward modes alike), and there will be no way to ”turn it off”. The only settings you will be able to play with are the ones for the reflections (reflection probes are extremely costly in term of FPS rates, and won't allow ”weak” PCs to run PBR decently when turned on).

Of course, you will be able to use the Cool VL Viewer, which already got (for its experimental branch) a dual renderer (legacy ALM+forward, and PBR, switchable on the fly with just a check box), but it will not stay forever like this (at some point in the future, everyone will have to bite the bullet and go 100% PBR, especially if LL finally implements a Vulkan renderer, which is very desirable on its own)...

Edited October 16, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Chic Aeon]

Well I guess that "official info" has changed :D. 

 

We had PBR in Sansar and while the VIEWER was PBR the items that I made there didn't  USE PBR but baked textures and they looked better there than they did here in SL.  So I will still wait and see. Not a big builder any longer and not changing how I do things.  IF they make it so that older baked textures don't work well (this going against that official  info that may be outdated now) I can't imagine folks being  happy with that. "I" Don't want to start over after sixteen years of saving my favorite things (OK well 12 years of "good stuff" maybe LOL).   That would be a huge investment down the drain. 

Who really knows what it will be when "finished"?  Even after EEP was released on the grid and there was a huge outcry (and same with the new avatars) LL went back to the drawing board.  

 

 

[arton Rotaru]

2 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Well I guess that "official info" has changed :D. 

 

We had PBR in Sansar and while the VIEWER was PBR the items that I made there didn't  USE PBR but baked textures and they looked better there than they did here in SL.  So I will still wait and see. Not a big builder any longer and not changing how I do things.  IF they make it so that older baked textures don't work well (this going against that official  info that may be outdated now) I can't imagine folks being  happy with that. "I" Don't want to start over after sixteen years of saving my favorite things (OK well 12 years of "good stuff" maybe LOL).   That would be a huge investment down the drain. 

Who really knows what it will be when "finished"?  Even after EEP was released on the grid and there was a huge outcry (and same with the new avatars) LL went back to the drawing board.  

 

 

Existing content will remain the same (well, almost) as it always has been.
It's only that everybody will see blinn-phong material maps aka legacy Spec-Gloss and PBR materials. There is no option to disable material maps anymore.

If your content is diffuse map only, it will only show the diffuse map as it always did. (well, almost)

[Ardy Lay]

Ensure shadows are enabled.  Make a box.  Get inside.  Close the box.  WHERE IS THE DARKNESS?

[animats]

3 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

Ensure shadows are enabled.  Make a box.  Get inside.  Close the box.  WHERE IS THE DARKNESS?

Right. SL world isn't ready for grid-wide strict enforcement of realistic lighting by default.

What happens if you set Ambient to black in your environment?

[Ardy Lay]

5 hours ago, animats said:

Right. SL world isn't ready for grid-wide strict enforcement of realistic lighting by default.

What happens if you set Ambient to black in your environment?

That gets me darkness if I also kill haze and clouds, but it looks wrong because each object illuminated is illuminated as if there are no other objects in the universe.  No reflected light effects lighting of other objects.  Without that we are stuck in "looks stupid" land.

Maybe I just need to learn how to use this.  Surely I don't have to manually set up fake ambient fill lighting for every camera angle in every scene.

Edited October 17, 2023 by Ardy Lay

[arton Rotaru]

Darkness inside a room is now achieved by setting the Ambiance option of a manual reflection probe >= 1.0. This will 100% override the ambient color of the Windlight.
From 0 to 1 it's a mix of the ambient color and the refelction probe.

So, darkness is an opt-in feature now.

Edited October 17, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Ardy Lay]

2 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Darkness inside a room is now achieved by setting the Ambiance option of a manual reflection probe >= 1.0. This will 100% override the ambient color of the Windlight.
From 0 to 1 it's a mix of the ambient color and the refelction probe.

So, darkness is a opt-in feature now.

I'll have to wait for it and hope it works when it is available on my land.  In the meantime I will stop trying to test and provide feedback.

[Extrude Ragu]

My understanding is PBR viewer has a 'legacy mode' where it emulates legacy behaviour, this occurs on old sky settings that were made before the new reflection probe ambience slider in sky settings:-

When this is set to 0.00 (default on old skies) then the viewer attempts to emulate appearance of old behaviour best it can (But will never be quite the same, because PBR is in the end of the day a different method of shading). Full PBR (Probe Ambience > 1.0) brings the ability to have true darkness (like, actual pitch black) where there's no lighting which is obviously not compatible in legacy content where there is ambient lighting even at midnight, my guess is the 'legacy mode' being seen in the screenshots is probably preventing things getting shaded too dark to avoid breaking legacy content - some sort of compromise.

Whether it can be improved? Maybe, hopefully even. At the same time I hope that people don't lose their mind and make sure that any changes they ask of LL for the sake of legacy content aren't ones that ultimately break PBR going forward. We should avoid compromising the future of SecondLife content for content that is long past its prime.

 

 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

My understanding is PBR viewer has a 'legacy mode' where it emulates legacy behaviour, this occurs on old sky settings that were made before the new reflection probe ambience slider in sky settings:-

When this is set to 0.00 (default on old skies) then the viewer attempts to emulate appearance of old behaviour best it can (But will never be quite the same, because PBR is in the end of the day a different method of shading). Full PBR (Probe Ambience > 1.0) brings the ability to have true darkness (like, actual pitch black) where there's no lighting which is obviously not compatible in legacy content where there is ambient lighting even at midnight, my guess is the 'legacy mode' being seen in the screenshots is probably preventing things getting shaded too dark to avoid breaking legacy content - some sort of compromise.

Whether it can be improved? Maybe, hopefully even. At the same time I hope that people don't lose their mind and make sure that any changes they ask of LL for the sake of legacy content aren't ones that ultimately break PBR going forward. We should avoid compromising the future of SecondLife content for content that is long past its prime.

 

 

 

Sounds great! Does this also address the "shadows mostly gone" issue? (Perhaps as in, "shadows" = "darkness"..)

Or possibly the "shadows issue" is just part of the Work In Progress (Chic advised patience in general).

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

35 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Does this also address the ”shadows mostly gone” issue?

No, it's an entirely different issue, and I'd wish we could get back to my original post, which is all about shadows (or lack thereof)...

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

48 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Does this also address the ”shadows mostly gone” issue?

No, it's an entirely different issue, and I'd wish we could get back to my original post, which is all about shadows (or lack thereof)...

..that's why I brought it up. 😉

 

[Ardy Lay]

3 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

No, it's an entirely different issue, and I'd wish we could get back to my original post, which is all about shadows (or lack thereof)...

If we had the proper shadows that you are lamenting the possibly temporary loss of then I would have the darkness I so desperately want as they are very much the same thing.  I simply offer a use case for proper shadowing.

[Chic Aeon]

18 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Existing content will remain the same (well, almost) as it always has been.
It's only that everybody will see blinn-phong material maps aka legacy Spec-Gloss and PBR materials. There is no option to disable material maps anymore.

If your content is diffuse map only, it will only show the diffuse map as it always did. (well, almost)

And if an item is MOD then folks can presumably turn off any  that don't work.  That is what I read. Thanks. Of course they need to KNOW they can do that :D.  

[Henri Beauchamp]

Today, I made an immense effort (no, I'm not even kidding here), and filed up a JIRA, which took me a lot of precious time (that I could have much better spent developing my viewer instead) and made my old-fart-self grumble and pester against this poorly designed piece (to stay polite) of web site, with my password forgotten by the JIRA (again, and as pretty much every time I use it), small text boxes to fill up the form when I need a wall of text, no ”draft” saving for that form, so that you can gather any missing data from another OS (with reboot needed) and come back to the form editing when you got that data, etc, etc... 😞

So, here you go Linden Lab: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234564

It will not be said that I do not do every effort to help improving SL...

[Love Zhaoying]

On 10/16/2023 at 2:02 PM, Ardy Lay said:

The residual ambient light is back too.  There is now a light on inside the refrigerator all the time, even when it is unplugged.

I apologize, but every time I read this I wonder - do you know if the light stays on when the refrigerator door is shut?  That is the age-old question.

[Ardy Lay]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I apologize, but every time I read this I wonder - do you know if the light stays on when the refrigerator door is shut?  That is the age-old question.

I do.  In SL, I fit inside the refrigerator, and, although the "light bulb" is switched off, there is still a heck of a lot of light in there when the door is closed.  The light changes as the day cycle progresses.  What I am seeing is "ambient" and "fog" and something else, which are applied to everything.  I assume this is because SL can't have nice things like objects being lit directly and indirectly by light reflected off of other objects, so they fake it with that pervasive "ambient" that illuminates everything, including surfaces that should not be illuminated via reflections.  It's a performance compromise that I wish could go away.  It triggered Henry, presumably because the release candidate has greatly increased ambient light levels to the point that shadows are filled with ambient light.  And yes, I can edit environment to reduce ambient but then we still don't have the indirect lighting that ambient is faking.  I will have to wait for PBR to work on my land to learn how it works.  Maybe then I can get some sleep.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Ardy Lay said:

I do.  In SL, I fit inside the refrigerator, and, although the "light bulb" is switched off, there is still a heck of a lot of light in there when the door is closed.  The light changes as the day cycle progresses.  What I am seeing is "ambient" and "fog" and something else, which are applied to everything.  I assume this is because SL can't have nice things like objects being lit directly and indirectly by light reflected off of other objects, so they fake it with that pervasive "ambient" that illuminates everything, including surfaces that should not be illuminated via reflections.  It's a performance compromise that I wish could go away.  It triggered Henry, presumably because the release candidate has greatly increased ambient light levels to the point that shadows are filled with ambient light.  And yes, I can edit environment to reduce ambient but then we still don't have the indirect lighting that ambient is faking.  I will have to wait for PBR to work on my land to learn how it works.  Maybe then I can get some sleep.

Since both a refrigerator and a "house" are like a "box", am I correct that you'd see the same undesired ambient light if you want into a house and "closed all the blinds"?

I hate to see you sleep in a refrigerator just to try and get some darkness. Being that time of year, perhaps try a nice coffin. <= Is joke!

[Ardy Lay]

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

am I correct that you'd see the same undesired ambient light if you want into a house and "closed all the blinds"?

Yes.

[colleen Criss]

What scares me most is people will over do it with PBR and we will all/everything look metallic .

[arton Rotaru]

9 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

I do.  In SL, I fit inside the refrigerator, and, although the "light bulb" is switched off, there is still a heck of a lot of light in there when the door is closed.  The light changes as the day cycle progresses.  What I am seeing is "ambient" and "fog" and something else, which are applied to everything.  I assume this is because SL can't have nice things like objects being lit directly and indirectly by light reflected off of other objects, so they fake it with that pervasive "ambient" that illuminates everything, including surfaces that should not be illuminated via reflections.  It's a performance compromise that I wish could go away.  It triggered Henry, presumably because the release candidate has greatly increased ambient light levels to the point that shadows are filled with ambient light.  And yes, I can edit environment to reduce ambient but then we still don't have the indirect lighting that ambient is faking.  I will have to wait for PBR to work on my land to learn how it works.  Maybe then I can get some sleep.

Here is a GIF that demonstrates how darkness is done with the recent PBR builds. Note the Ambiance setting I change from 0.0 to 0.5 to 1.0.
(And sorry Henry for derailing your topic. But now that you took it to the Jira it is in good hands. My count on the Jira for the GLTF viewer is 29 by now.)

 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

13 hours ago, colleen Criss said:

What scares me most is people will over do it with PBR and we will all/everything look metallic .

Like people don't already put overly shiny materials on most things?