PBR WOW!

[elleevelyn]

17 hours ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

They recently changed the code to not rez avatars with partly rezzed meshes attachments. This got nothing to do with PBR, and I personally find it annoying (you risk bumping into people just because one of their meshes did not yet rez and you can't see them at all, or they can stay unrezed forever if that mesh fails to download)...

with Linden viewer 7.1.1 the debug setting is RenderUnloadedAvatar. The default is False

when True the viewer does what it used too, attachment bits all over til the avatar resolves, and if it never fully resolves then frankenstein

when False the viewer shows avatars as clouds, til they are resolved fully-formed. If they never resolve then they stay a cloud

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

There might be uncertainty about a PBR viewer's texture loading speed, on the theory that it could be delayed ”looking for PBR textures” or something. In fact, I'd appreciate a detailed, step-by-step description of the whole materials loading process with and without PBR.

PBR materials presence and reference (material UUID, face index) is transmitted via a new Extra Parameter (like for flexible, lights, sculpts, meshes,  etc), in UDP Object Updates messages; this also includes reflection probes data for reflection probe objects.

The PBR materials data itself (texture maps UUIDs, PBR factors, scales, offsets, rotations) is transmitted separately (and sometimes before the UDP object update message) by the sim via a new UDP message. This data is also cached on disk by PBR viewers, as an extra object cache file (one per sim, like for the object data above).

PBR maps (textures) are fetched on demand, when the object is rendered, via HTTP fetches (like for other textures), via the CDN assets server.

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Like, a PBR viewer needn't download all the non-PBR maps for surfaces with a PBR Material, so it doesn't, right?

The textures themselves are only fetched when in use: if your viewer is a PBR one, it will not fetch the legacy material textures for faces also bearing a PBR material. But the data associated with the object itself will still contain a few fields (UUIDs, texture entry index = prim face, diffuse texture scale and offsets, etc) dealing with legacy materials.

Edited January 2 by Henri Beauchamp

[arton Rotaru]

17 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

The textures themselves are only fetched when in use: if your viewer is a PBR one, it will not fetch the legacy material textures for faces also bearing a PBR material. But the data associated with the object itself will still contain a few fields (UUIDs, texture entry index = prim face, diffuse texture scale and offsets, etc) dealing with legacy materials.

That's what I thought would be the case as well. But I just tried it again. Fully empty cache, logging in, waiting until everything is loaded, removing all the PBR materials at once from an object, all the underlaying blinn-phong material maps are right there without any grey, or blurriness. So this looks pretty much as the legacy texture maps have been downloaded and cached already to me.

If they are really being fetched that moment I did remove the PBR, texture loading seems to be blazingly fast.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's what I thought would be the case as well. But I just tried it again. Fully empty cache, logging in, waiting until everything is loaded, removing all the PBR materials at once from an object, all the underlaying blinn-phong material maps are right there without any grey, or blurriness. So this looks pretty much as the legacy texture maps have been downloaded and cached already to me.

If they are really being fetched that moment I did remove the PBR, texture loading seems to be blazingly fast.

That's interesting, it implies that if lots of objects are created with both B-P and PBR textures, and if they are all downloaded, then it would increase the downloads for PBR viewers. (Since except for Henri's viewer, there is no "switch" and the viewer will only need one set of textures or the others.)  Hopefully that potential issue won't happen (due to a non-infinite transition time to PBR, or some other change).

[arton Rotaru]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

That's interesting, it implies that if lots of objects are created with both B-P and PBR textures, and if they are all downloaded, then it would increase the downloads for PBR viewers. (Since except for Henri's viewer, there is no "switch" and the viewer will only need one set of textures or the others.)  Hopefully that potential issue won't happen (due to a non-infinite transition time to PBR, or some other change).

Yeah, I can't say what is going on for certain, though. As Henri has a much better inside view of how the viewer works than I do. And before I did that testing with removing the PBR materials, I always have said that the legacy textures aren't be downloaded as well.

So don't quote me on that.

Edited January 2 by arton Rotaru

[Henri Beauchamp]

15 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's what I thought would be the case as well. But I just tried it again. Fully empty cache, logging in, waiting until everything is loaded, removing all the PBR materials at once from an object, all the underlaying blinn-phong material maps are right there without any grey, or blurriness. So this looks pretty much as the legacy texture maps have been downloaded and cached already to me.

If they exist on another object without a PBR material; this is normal...

There might also be a possible race condition happening on login (when PBR materials data has not yet been received), or because of the object cache data for that object (did you wipe out the object cache as well ?).

Anyway, when not in use for rendering, a texture will end up being evicted from memory (and VRAM).

Edited January 2 by Henri Beauchamp

[arton Rotaru]

Just now, Henri Beauchamp said:

If they exist on another object without a PBR material; this is normal...

Well Henri, trust me that I'm pretty aware of that.

[arton Rotaru]

5 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

However, when not in use for rendering, a texture will end up being evicted from memory (and VRAM).

That's clear also!

The race condition at login time could be a factor, though. I did indeed wipe the whole cache folder clean before doing that test.

[Istelathis]

I was curious if they are downloaded, so I went to a sandbox, shot myself up 2000m and rezzed a  blinn-phong object, that also had PBR materials added to it.  Clearing the cache, I logged out, manually deleted my cache, and logged back in.  Using an SL Cache Viewer it only detected the PBR textures.  I don't think they are downloaded, unless I am doing something wrong.

This was all done through LL's viewer, I'm not sure if it is the same for TPVs.

Edited January 2 by Istelathis

[Flea Yatsenko]

19 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:

I'm still finding that LL's latest PBR viewer is much slower than the previous v.6 one. Going anywhere that is even slightly busy means that avatars and surroundings take ages to rez and some textures never rez. I think there has been one update of the PBR viewer but that didn't show any improvement in performance. 

Turning down the graphics to minimum appears to make no difference to performance, it's still really slow. 

Re the old EEP settings - I found they were messed up with PBR but I made some new settings which look fine. 

I don't think the slow rezzing has to do with PBR. I think it's an unrelated problem that SL broke something that happened to be included in the PBR release.

19 hours ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

We did a poll of our customers to get an idea where people are at and will be repeating this each few months to track adoption.

This is a subset of SL users and those who are actively engaged with our products.

1. 61% are waiting for Firestorm to use PBR (so not using the LL viewer).

2. 15% are using the LL PBR viewer.

3. 9% will use PBR when Firestorm is in Beta (versus Alpha).

4. 9% Haven't used the LL PBR viewer yet but are intending to use it soon.

5. 4% are waiting for Alchemy or Catznip to use PBR.

6. 2% will never use a PBR viewer (reasons unknown).

 

This data is super important, thank you so much. Will be interesting to see how many people stick with PBR and how many go back to a non-PBR viewer. Seems like people are excited about PBR but some of them try it and are disappointed. Especially because the lighting can be very different from what they are used to with the old browser.

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I don't think the slow rezzing has to do with PBR. I think it's an unrelated problem that SL broke something that happened to be included in the PBR release.

This appears to have changed (slow rezzing) in a release prior to the PBR release. It was hard for me to track down at first as I also got a new computer during that time period, but talking to others they noted a change 1 or 2 releases before the PBR one.

[Henri Beauchamp]

52 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I don't think the slow rezzing has to do with PBR. I think it's an unrelated problem that SL broke something that happened to be included in the PBR release.

I explained it in this previous post.

[Marianne Little]

Forgive me for not reading all the pages. 😪

I want to know how avatars will look in PBR. At this moment, I do not care for showy regions and pretty snow and will not read +30 pages about it.

• Must bodies, hair, clothes and all the other things we wear, be optimized for PBR?
• If they are not, how will we look with our pre- PBR avatars?
• Will our enviroment settings look bad in PBR? Must we have PBR settings?

 

 

[Janet Voxel]

9 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I explained it in this previous post.

That’s a pretty good explanation and it explains why suddenly the PBR viewers I had been using started “running like crap”. This last build seems to have improved things somewhat, not really sure why, but I hope LL keeps making adjustments.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

Forgive me for not reading all the pages. 😪

I want to know how avatars will look in PBR. At this moment, I do not care for showy regions and pretty snow and will not read +30 pages about it.

• Must bodies, hair, clothes and all the other things we wear, be optimized for PBR?
• If they are not, how will we look with our pre- PBR avatars?
• Will our enviroment settings look bad in PBR? Must we have PBR settings?

 

 

My favorite clothing was shiny with PBR, which was annoying because I always assumed it was a type of "cloth" material that was not intended to be shiny. Other than that, I did not notice any difference with my "actual avatar" (not counting clothes, etc.).

Edited January 2 by Love Zhaoying

[arton Rotaru]

15 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

Forgive me for not reading all the pages. 😪

I want to know how avatars will look in PBR. At this moment, I do not care for showy regions and pretty snow and will not read +30 pages about it.

• Must bodies, hair, clothes and all the other things we wear, be optimized for PBR?
• If they are not, how will we look with our pre- PBR avatars?
• Will our enviroment settings look bad in PBR? Must we have PBR settings?

 

 

I'm afraid there isn't a straight answer to these questions. It will be more like, it depends, maybe, maybe not, could be, could be not. etc. pp...

[Janet Voxel]

44 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

Forgive me for not reading all the pages. 😪

I want to know how avatars will look in PBR. At this moment, I do not care for showy regions and pretty snow and will not read +30 pages about it.

• Must bodies, hair, clothes and all the other things we wear, be optimized for PBR?
• If they are not, how will we look with our pre- PBR avatars?
• Will our enviroment settings look bad in PBR? Must we have PBR settings?

 

 

Here’s the thing: you’re really not going to notice much of a difference. You might notice a slight improvement, that’s about it.

There’s a couple of reasons for this the way I see it. 1) it’s still a work in progress 2) there aren't that many PBR objects out there at the moment. So you’re looking at legacy objects, in a slightly different light. You’re going to be underwhelmed by that for the most part.

I’m glad you brought this up in this way, because I said this a many pages back. All the majority of people are going to care about is “Does it look better?” And “Does it run better/Can my computer run it?” This isn’t a poke at you or the people having a technical discussion about PBR. The average SL user doesn’t care whether it’s Blinn-Phong or PBR or will investigate further than buying something labeled “PBR” and seeing how it looks.

It’s definitely not going to look worse. However, your favorite windlights might not look the same. It’s very similar to buying a new monitor and things looking off for a while. You’ll adjust eventually. I can’t say any of the legacy content looks bad.

How will this affect how your avatar looks? Not very much. Your avatar, body, head, etc is legacy content. It’ll look pretty much the same.  
 

The biggest disappointment about this whole thing for me has been how few creators have taken the time to play around with this or even know what this is. The creators that have messed around with it, clothing wise, looks amazing. You will notice the difference between a sequin dress that uses PBR vs legacy. However….you’re going to have to wait for the content and it’ll probably be a couple years before the majority of creators really figure it out.

Even then, honestly, there doesn’t seem to be that much incentive or reason to change a workflow from legacy as far as texturing an object right now.

[arton Rotaru]

3 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

Even then, honestly, there doesn’t seem to be that much incentive or reason to change a workflow from legacy as far as texturing an object right now.

Right, this comes down to the personal preferences of each creator. As the adoption rate is depending on that TPVs are catching up usually, there isn't much incentive to release PBR content right now. This will change once the majority of the userbase is running a PBR build.

Many creators were waiting for PBR support in SL actually, as their texturing tools are pretty much PBR orientated in this day and age.

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Marianne Little said:

Forgive me for not reading all the pages. 😪

I want to know how avatars will look in PBR. At this moment, I do not care for showy regions and pretty snow and will not read +30 pages about it.

• Must bodies, hair, clothes and all the other things we wear, be optimized for PBR?
• If they are not, how will we look with our pre- PBR avatars?
• Will our enviroment settings look bad in PBR? Must we have PBR settings?

 

 

Your avatar should look pretty much the same.

Environment settings may have to change depending on how they were set up because the possible contrast range is wider. I generally use default settings and things look pretty much the same. Blacks do look darker though. 

If, however, you're using an environment that pushed the overall lighting to one end or the other of the contrast spectrum before it may well look "too bright" or "too dark" now.

[Flea Yatsenko]

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

I explained it in this previous post.

That post should be stickied. Very good. But I have a 3950x with a 7800XT and I have my SL cache on tmpfs in Gentoo with a speed test of 560/23 and rezzing is still super slow. I think their new algo just isn't very good and releasing it when PBR is released means the logical conclusion for a lot of people is that PBR is slow rezzing. Maybe it has to do with my frames feeling smoother in PBR though.

[Janet Voxel]

7 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

That post should be stickied. Very good. But I have a 3950x with a 7800XT and I have my SL cache on tmpfs in Gentoo with a speed test of 560/23 and rezzing is still super slow. I think their new algo just isn't very good and releasing it when PBR is released means the logical conclusion for a lot of people is that PBR is slow rezzing. Maybe it has to do with my frames feeling smoother in PBR though.

Yes, this! I’m really hoping they did it all at once to sort of rip the band-aid off all at once so to speak.

It really did have me thinking along the lines of “Maybe this PBR thing isn’t going to work out.” About a month ago.

[Rowan Amore]

17 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Rowan's not the only one.  I'm also getting really good performance with the latest FS alpha as can be seen here (I'm running at 4K resolution as well which isn't apparent from the UI):

Almost the same thing I'm seeing.  Ground level on Horizons...

[Qie Niangao]

58 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

I want to know how avatars will look in PBR. At this moment, I do not care for showy regions and pretty snow and will not read +30 pages about it.

• Must bodies, hair, clothes and all the other things we wear, be optimized for PBR? […]

Already well answered by others. Some other notes: BOM textures (notably skin) can't use PBR materials because the baking service has no idea about them. A PBR viewer might make them appear slightly different from before, but usually not that much compared to clothing that made substantial use of pre-PBR specular- and normalmaps.

An exception might be special applier-based skin shining/scaling/appliqué tattoos (Nefekalum, etc.) that use those pre-PBR materials and which may look extra shiny in a PBR viewer under common lighting conditions. That also illustrates a way creators could use PBR materials for skins: by replacing BOM altogether and reverting to a (new) applier system. Or, if you have a modifiable avatar mesh and all the PBR materials it would need to completely replace BOM, you could be the first on your block with a PBR-skinned avatar! With the current PBR capabilities there's not really any* incentive to do that but ironically in some possible future, skin may be the biggest reason to welcome PBR, if subsurface scattering becomes part of skin rendering in SL. But that will be years from now, if ever.

_______________
*There's no incentive unless you want something very exotic that can be represented only by PBR materials. Personally, I know of only one effect that has no possible Blinn-Phong analog: a surface with both transparency and variable emissivity; that is, the visible portions have differing levels of "full-brightness" showing at the same time. Not sure what kind of cyborg avatar would make use of that, but it would need PBR to do it.

[Janet Voxel]

52 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

An exception might be special applier-based skin shining/scaling/appliqué tattoos (Nefekalum, etc.) that use those pre-PBR materials and which may look extra shiny in a PBR viewer under common lighting conditions. That also illustrates a way creators could use PBR materials for skins: by replacing BOM altogether and reverting to a (new) applier system. Or, if you have a modifiable avatar mesh and all the PBR materials it would need to completely replace BOM, you could be the first on your block with a PBR-skinned avatar! With the current PBR capabilities there's not really any* incentive to do that 

_______________
*There's no incentive unless you want something very exotic that can be represented only by PBR materials. Personally, I know of only one effect that has no possible Blinn-Phong analog: a surface with both transparency and variable emissivity; that is, the visible portions have differing levels of "full-brightness" showing at the same time. Not sure what kind of cyborg avatar would make use of that, but it would need PBR to do it.

It’s funny to think after ditching skin appliers we would somehow end up using them again. The biggest element to making a more realistic skin is subsurface scattering and that is missing currently. But I could see the pbr applier thing happening once some creators figure out how to make a gltf applier. Since quite a few bodies are mod now, all it might take is an unholy union of a scripter and a skin maker, it could be something we end up seeing at some point.

[Paul Hexem]

On 12/31/2023 at 5:09 PM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I do get a bit tired of the "Well, I put this rig together on a budget, and it works just fine! Why can't you do the same???" posts.

Why?

Putting together a computer isn't particularly labor intensive. Nothing is very heavy or complex. In some cases it's as easy as putting something in a keyed slot so you can't mess it up and then tightening a single screw. And if you're upgrading instead of building from scratch, it's often even easier by magnitudes.

For anyone with a desktop struggling with PBR: I looked it up yesterday, and I can get a good GTX 1050 card for less than 200 USD, brand new, without sales or discounts, shipped overnight tonight. If you're patient and willing to hunt for bargains, you could find it significantly lower priced than that.

And I guarantee you if you came to these forums and said "I got this card, now what?" you'd get all the help in the world to install it.

Let's face it. SL is an expensive hobby. Knowing how to do things like this is hugely instrumental in making it cost way less. There's almost no good reason not to.