PBR WOW!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If I understand correctly, you can use both B-P and PBR if you just apply the B-P first. 

Is that correct?

If true, can you go back and change the B-P later, or only the PBR?

* currently enjoying suffering from microcephaly *

 

As I understand it, to modify the Blinn-Phong textures after applying PBR materials, you'd need first to remove the PBR. And then, presumably, re-apply it after you'd edited the legacy textures.

But I haven't tried doing this myself yet. It's an important question, actually, because currently the most common, or at least the easiest way to tile legacy textures is to stretch the object with "Stretch Textures" unchecked. But that won't change the scaling of PBR textures in parallel: you need to adjust one to match the other manually, using the Scaling inputs.

[arton Rotaru]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If I understand correctly, you can use both B-P and PBR if you just apply the B-P first. 

Is that correct?

That is correct!

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If true, can you go back and change the B-P later, or only the PBR?

To change the B-P you will have to remove the PBR first, and apply it back afterwards. Which is annoiny as we all aggreed upon earlier. But it's just an inconvenience and nothing "evil" to nudge anybody into a certain direction.

I haven't heard of any creator who is eager to apply both materials anyway. So this whole topic is rather tiring than anything else.

Next year this time, nobody is remembering any of this, because everybody is enjoing PBR materials and don't want to go back.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, arton Rotaru said:

I haven't heard of any creator who is eager to apply both materials anyway.

If you were a creator, would you be creating goods with only PBR materials right now? At the most optimistic, about 35% of residents would be able to see them.

If you're correct, though, that's going to seriously delay the implementation of PBR to new goods. Why would you choose to use a system that is invisible to a majority of residents, as opposed to one that everyone can see, regardless of viewer?

3 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

everybody is enjoing PBR materials and don't want to go back

I'm sure not there . . . yet.

[LipstickAndDreams]

7 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Next year this time, nobody is remembering any of this, because everybody is enjoing PBR materials and don't want to go back.

All I know is that I am not going to enjoy having 5 FPS when I used to at least have 15-30. No, I'm not going to buy a new computer to compensate for *****ty development practices.

[arton Rotaru]

31 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If you were a creator, would you be creating goods with only PBR materials right now? At the most optimistic, about 35% of residents would be able to see them.

If you're correct, though, that's going to seriously delay the implementation of PBR to new goods. Why would you choose to use a system that is invisible to a majority of residents, as opposed to one that everyone can see, regardless of viewer?

I am a creator and I'm going to make PBR only in the future. I have currently just one object listed on the MP that has PBR materials. But since it's just an updated object, it still has the full Blinn-Phong material sets "underneath" as well.

I have updated it only because of a change to the formula of the specular reflections of the sun, with Blinn-Phong materials, which kinda broke the look of the boat, because it was calibrated to look good under the sun specular reflections.

(To me it's quite astounding that nobody seems to have noticed that change of the suns specularity on Blinn-Phong yet)

For anything else I'm waiting on TPVs to release a non Beta version of their viewer with PBR. After that there is no good reason to apply both materials.

Edited December 29, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Qie Niangao]

6 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

I haven't heard of any creator who is eager to apply both materials anyway. So this whole topic is rather tiring than anything else.

Nobody should be eager to, but many commercial creators will be forced by the market to do so, for some unknown transition interval. Even venue designers are going to face pressure to include pre-PBR fallback materials (at least a diffusemap) on surfaces visitors will experience, probably for however long it takes for Firestorm to age-out support for their last non-PBR viewer (sometime in 2025, realistically).

But I think the UI "bug"/"misfeature" is much less a big deal than folks are perceiving it to be. Removing a PBR Material isn't deleting it, it's not even a burdensome step because every creator will have that Material handy in their inventory to re-apply after futzing with the Blinn-Phong material maps.

Simply, it's not as if once PBR is applied there's no way to manipulate the Blinn-Phong maps and restore the PBR Material on top of them. It's not really all that different from flipping a single button on the UI—albeit not as discoverable, granted.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

To me it's quite astounding that nobody seems to have noticed that change of the suns specularity on Blinn-Phong yet

Is this just visible on objects using Blinn-Phong?

Because, in the three PBR viewers I've been using, my EEPs look pretty radically different in all ways.

[arton Rotaru]

23 minutes ago, LipstickAndDreams said:

All I know is that I am not going to enjoy having 5 FPS when I used to at least have 15-30. No, I'm not going to buy a new computer to compensate for *****ty development practices.

I have to ask, have you tried the official PBR viewer yet? It might be performing better than what you have now.

There will be a few people who might get behind for what ever reason. I wish that wouldn't be the case, but the world won't stop turning because of that.

Edited December 29, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

albeit not as discoverable, granted

And that's the main issue I've had -- coordinating scaling and shine in an object across PBR and non-PBR viewers, precisely because you can't see or inspect them both easily by switching back and forth.

[LipstickAndDreams]

2 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

I have to ask, have you tried the official PBR viewer yet? It might be performaning better than what you have now.

There will be a few people who might get behind for what ever reason. I wish taht wouldn't be the case, but the world won't stop turning because of that.

Yes, I have tried it. All implementations run significantly worse than forward rendering on systems with integrated graphics. Me and others have elaborated on this issue before. You can find it in previous replies to this thread.

[arton Rotaru]

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Is this just visible on objects using Blinn-Phong?

Because, in the three PBR viewers I've been using, my EEPs look pretty radically different in all ways.

In the old viewers there was this distinct difference in specular reflection of local lights vs the sun. This was always annoying  because you couldn't calibrate your specular/gloss maps to have them look as intended under both light sources. So you had to make some compromises to get both looking "good". Since the object I mentioned is a boat, I did calibrate the spec/gloss maps of it to be more geared to the suns specular because there aren't that much local lights out on the sea usually.

This has nothing to do with EEPs specifically, it was the forlmua that has been used for the sun specular reflections on blinn-phong that was wrong. Well, wrong for 10 years now.

Now, everything is using the same method for specularity be it local lights or the sun. But it broke my boat, so I had to take care of that.

Edited December 29, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[arton Rotaru]

3 minutes ago, LipstickAndDreams said:

Yes, I have tried it. All implementations run significantly worse than forward rendering on systems with integrated graphics. Me and others have elaborated on this issue before. You can find it in previous replies to this thread.

That's not good, and I feel with you. But this ship has sailed, I'm afraid.

[Qie Niangao]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And that's the main issue I've had -- coordinating scaling and shine in an object across PBR and non-PBR viewers, precisely because you can't see or inspect them both easily by switching back and forth.

Yeah. And it's deeper than flipping a button on the build tool for the very reason you and arton are discussing: the PBR viewer sees Blinn-Phong materials somewhat differently (especially in certain lighting conditions). So far, knock on wood, I haven't found a condition where I didn't prefer how the PBR-viewer showed Blinn-Phong materials (except when Linden water and alpha textures are involved, which is a horror show).

[LipstickAndDreams]

2 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's not good, and I feel with you. But this ship has sailed, I'm afraid.

Well it is a lesson that if you don't like how something is being done, do it yourself. My solution will be to compile the last non-PBR version of Firestorm from source, but with the version blocking code removed. I will do this once they start blocking their last non-PBR viewer from logging in.

Then later I want to figure out how to get the viewer to apply the base color from PBR as a diffuse texture to make things look slightly less broken, but that will take some time to learn how to do.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Janet Voxel said:

Does it look better, can my computer run it and is it easy to work with?

With the current PBR implementation.

Very questionable, questionable, and no, respectively to the three questions.

 

Take the default day cycle, for an example, it apparently uses the "Midday - Legacy" as it's midday setting, not the new "Midday" setting.

Why? Because if they had used the new "Midday" setting, for about 2 hours out of every 4, the inside of EVERY BUILDING, ON EVERY PARCEL, ON MORE THAN 27,000 REGIONS WOULD RENDER BY DEFAULT AS BLACK AS THE INSIDE OF AN ABANDONED COAL MINE AT MIDNIGHT TO A BLIND PERSON, until the owners of said buildings got their University Diploma in SL Pretentious Bloody Rubbish Render Theory 101, and learned how to manually fix the problem with an IBL Probe object.

Which was NEVER going to happen.

 

No body should have to read a tech breakdown of a new rendering protocol, just to log in and walk around and be able to see where they are going.

 

This is why some PBR fan's wish that the "Midday  - Legacy" setting didn't exist, was ignored by the LL devs.

 

[arton Rotaru]

23 minutes ago, LipstickAndDreams said:

Well it is a lesson that if you don't like how something is being done, do it yourself. My solution will be to compile the last non-PBR version of Firestorm from source, but with the version blocking code removed. I will do this once they start blocking their last non-PBR viewer from logging in.

Then later I want to figure out how to get the viewer to apply the base color from PBR as a diffuse texture to make things look slightly less broken, but that will take some time to learn how to do.

That's perfectly fine as I'm concerned. People just have to except that they will see broken content then.

Edited December 29, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Just now, arton Rotaru said:

People just have to except that they will see broken content then.

People got used to seeing "broken content" when the half finished mess that is EEP was initially rolled out, and continued doing so for over a year and a half, until the last of the "hot fixes".

 

Welcome to SecondLife, were used to Futureness fans demanding that LL break most content.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

No body should have to read a tech breakdown of a new rendering protocol, just to log in and walk around and be able to see where they are going.

Yeah. This.

And unfortunately, at the moment, that at least potentially is sort of the state of affairs.

[arton Rotaru]

19 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Why? Because if they had used the new "Midday" setting, for about 2 hours out of every 4, the inside of EVERY BUILDING, ON EVERY PARCEL, ON MORE THAN 27,000 REGIONS WOULD RENDER BY DEFAULT AS BLACK AS THE INSIDE OF AN ABANDONED COAL MINE AT MIDNIGHT TO A BLIND PERSON, until the owners of said buildings got their University Diploma in SL Pretentious Bloody Rubbish Render Theory 101, and learned how to manually fix the problem with an IBL Probe object.

Actually it would only be dark in those buildings which would have set up manual reflection probes in their buildings. Otherwise nothing will be dark. But that has been explained in another thread at length already, but it seems some people don't like to stick to facts.

Edited December 29, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Luna Bliss]

Children, we must struggle to reach the mountaintop.........

[Love Zhaoying]

This thread has the best drama lately! All that's missing is a flounce!

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Children, we must struggle to reach the mountaintop

Historically, people prefer living in the plains and valleys, it's less trouble than climbing a big pointy rock just to look down on where you actually live.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

This thread has the best drama lately! All that's missing is a flounce!

 

Not at all. It's been a really useful thread! I've learned a ton here.

[arton Rotaru]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

This thread has the best drama lately! All that's missing is a flounce!

 

As long as there is drama going on, Second Life is alive and kicking!

[Luna Bliss]

5 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

11 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Children, we must struggle to reach the mountaintop

Historically, people prefer living in the plains and valleys, it's less trouble than climbing a big pointy rock just to look down on where you actually live.

Oh but it is the struggle that makes us human......