PBR WOW!

[Istelathis]

3 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Pop quiz: can you tell which is the old materials (Blinn-Phong) and which is the new (PBR)?

 

I believe you can see the reflection of an avatar in the left video, watch the feet as it spins around, I can also make out the concrete slab in the antenna ears.  In the right one, on the antenna ear things,  the reflection looks as though it is coming from some street with buildings in it.

I would guess the left is PBR, because your perspective is not shifting.  The image remains relatively unchanged while the one on the right appears to be you are at the center of a spinning panoramic picture taken in a road.

Edited December 10, 2023 by Istelathis

[Love Zhaoying]

3 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Pop quiz: can you tell which is the old materials (Blinn-Phong) and which is the new (PBR)?

 

Ah, I see now. The "left-right" post I quoted was about your video! I tried to watch Luna's video. 😹

[Istelathis]

Lol, I just thought of the ramifications of PBR.  How many lover spats are there going to be, when people in relationships notice the reflection of their loved one with some other avatar in them from the pictures they share.  It will become a thing, we may need a new thread for those who were caught in the act 😜

 

 

 

Edited December 10, 2023 by Istelathis

[Flea Yatsenko]

I've got a 6800 in Linux and the PBR viewer runs a lot smoother than the ALM one. I am really confused what people are talking about with performance being poor. The frame rate numbers are similar but the frame time seems a lot smoother. If PBR is running badly you can just turn down reflections and it's way better. Disable them if you need to. I am pretty sure that's the most taxing part of PBR to run.

[Janet Voxel]

9 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I've got a 6800 in Linux and the PBR viewer runs a lot smoother than the ALM one. I am really confused what people are talking about with performance being poor. The frame rate numbers are similar but the frame time seems a lot smoother. If PBR is running badly you can just turn down reflections and it's way better. Disable them if you need to. I am pretty sure that's the most taxing part of PBR to run.

I think the issue is: you shouldn’t need to do any of that.

I get that it’s not optimized, that’s kind of to be expected. Hopefully it’ll be more optimized over time, but we shouldn’t be doing the ‘just turn all the new feature off and you’ll be fine’ thing.

[Quartz Mole]

2 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Has LL ever considered making this data public? anonymized of course, much like how Valve publish Steam hardware 'survey' data each month.

For a platform driven by user generated content this data would be valuable information for creators.

I don't know.  I'd suggest you attend one of the Content Creator User Group meetings and ask there.    

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I've got a 6800 in Linux and the PBR viewer runs a lot smoother than the ALM one. I am really confused what people are talking about with performance being poor. The frame rate numbers are similar but the frame time seems a lot smoother. If PBR is running badly you can just turn down reflections and it's way better. Disable them if you need to. I am pretty sure that's the most taxing part of PBR to run.

Yeah performance seems fine (average, no different to ALM renderer), I think some people are reporting a bug that results in very slow rezzing of avatars though.

I hope that maybe the preset slider (low-ultra) in future versions is a little more logical in how it applies settings, making ALM mandatory is a small way of ensuring this though since it removes a couple of checkboxes.

There's perhaps too many settings in that slider, I think you could maybe get away with 3-4 different quality presets that intelligently turn things on/off and people would spend less time digging through the checkboxes.

 

[Blush Bravin]

This thread made me want to check out performance and the overall appearance of the world between the FS alpha PBR viewer and the LL PBR viewer. I've run into lots of issues with the FS alpha but honestly, the LL PBR viewer runs much better for me and the textures look much more crisp. But FS is still in alpha to be fair. So I'm happy about the change. I was more than concerned in the beginning based of my past experiences with PBR in Sansar. I just wasn't sure the lab could pull off PBR for SL. I'm pretty impressed really and excited to see how things progress.

[Gabriele Graves]

I've been playing extensively with the Firestorm PBR alpha since it was made available and I like PBR very much.  I'm not using this as my daily driver version of FS due to the various issues such as the environment being too dark unless HDR is turned off but once these issues are sorted FS PBR will be great.  I'm not seeing any performances issues with it.

Originally, I did have concerns that existing content would look bad but that hasn't been the case thankfully.

I just hope that content creators will actually embrace this and use it well.

[arton Rotaru]

11 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Pop quiz: can you tell which is the old materials (Blinn-Phong) and which is the new (PBR)?

 

Sure there is everything alright with the normal map on the PBR version? The face piece looks kinda odd compared to the other one.

[Henri Beauchamp]

12 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Originally, I did have concerns that existing content would look bad but that hasn't been the case thankfully.

Really ?.... I beg to differ, and I just created a JIRA issue to illustrate the bad rendering discrepancies seen on non-PBR contents. See BUG-234816.

It's getting late here and now, but tomorrow I will try and open another JIRA (I will have to make a video for it) for the ugly waves-like artifacts seen at the surface of water bodies when moving close to them (or on them)...

EDIT: and here is the JIRA about the water surface artifacts: BUG-234820

Edited December 11, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp
Added new JIRA link

[Gabriele Graves]

1 hour ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Really ?.... I beg to differ, and I just created a JIRA issue to illustrate the bad rendering discrepancies seen on non-PBR contents. See BUG-234816.

Not sure what to say except I'm not doing a qualitative comparison like you might be doing to ensure your viewer is doing what you expect but everything I've seen while using the FS alpha was perfectly acceptable though I'm not claiming it was exactly as it was either but there wasn't a single thing that stood out as obviously bad to me.

YMMV and for differing values of "bad".

Edited December 11, 2023 by Gabriele Graves

[Scylla Rhiadra]

11 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

It's both. I used both baked specular maps and Blinn-Phong specular maps. This is not what everyone does, just me and only a few other creators that I know of. It's a matter of taste. I tend to think it just gives the object a little bit more depth and dynamic color range. I have even been experimenting with this while making PBR materials. There's a slight hint of baked speculars in the baseColor maps there too, but in the example in the video much less profoundly than in the Blinn-Phong version.

What is a "baked specular"??? You mean, shiny baked into the main texture?

I have a few of your things, Arduenn, and they are beautifully made and textured.

But, speaking as someone who does a lot of modding and retexturing of objects and backdrops in SL, I have been pretty shocked (and that actually is the correct word!) by how a great many creators don't bother with normal or specular maps at all in their builds. And I don't really understand why. They're not all that hard to make -- even I can make them. And they make such a difference, even in the old Blinn-Phong system.

I think a whole lot of older stuff is just going to look really, really "flat" in the PBR viewer, because it essentially has nothing to work with.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think a whole lot of older stuff is just going to look really, really "flat" in the PBR viewer, because it essentially has nothing to work with.

Ever since the announcement was made that "Pretentious Bloody Rubbish" was coming to SL, people have been simpering about how "cool" it would be and how it would make EVERYTHING look better.

The harsh reality is quite the opposite.

 

What decent PBR does best is metallic reflections, the whole metallic shader "tint the specular highlights with the colour of the metal" thing that help's make gold objects look like gold and not gold coloured plastic.

What LL has given us so far, is not what I'd call decent PBR. They took the specification for a minimal PBR implementation, ripped out a minor feature or two, and then did a fubar translation on the rest, that is, currently, UNFIT for release.

 

It's been 9 years since SL got ALM-Materials, with normal maps and specular colour maps, and 99.99999% of SL still doesn't use those. PBR isn't going to change that. Flat, matte 2003 style texturing will STILL be flat, matte 2003 style, the only difference is more load on the servers sending the blank PBR data, and increased load on the viewers, checking the blank data is blank before rendering the old 2003 version anyway, and, the difference in HOW that's rendered, with the new lighting.

 

I mean, the default midday preset, love it or loathe it, is bright sunlight from directly above, like standing on the equator on a sunny spring day. Except now with PBR, they fubared that into some darkened mess.

 

It's almost as if they decided to deliberately make non PBR content look worse than it should do.

 

LL's PBR won't make your skin look better unless your skin is made of glossy liquid metal, the only improvement to glossy rubber/latex is that you can now have a custom reflection map that resembles the room, rather than a default one that resembles nothing, but you pay for that with downgrades in the specular highlights.

 

Reality is that as Scylla said, most of SL is going to look really, really flat and matte, but with darker lighting, with a blue tint.

[diamond Marchant]

16 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

then did a fubar translation

I love the literal appropriateness of the word fubar in this context. Fubar is short for f’d up beyond all recognition.

[Janet Voxel]

10 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But, speaking as someone who does a lot of modding and retexturing of objects and backdrops in SL, I have been pretty shocked (and that actually is the correct word!) by how a great many creators don't bother with normal or specular maps at all in their builds. And I don't really understand why. They're not all that hard to make -- even I can make them. And they make such a difference, even in the old Blinn-Phong system.

Wait until you realize how many creators have no idea what PBR is, what it does and how close it is to release.

[Qie Niangao]

21 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

Wait until you realize how many creators have no idea what PBR is, what it does and how close it is to release.

This seems true. It also seems a sad commentary on the current caliber of "creators" in Second Life. It's not as if PBR has been a secret, and for a long, long time.

[Candide LeMay]

10 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I have been pretty shocked (and that actually is the correct word!) by how a great many creators don't bother with normal or specular maps at all in their builds. And I don't really understand why.

There was a thread a while ago here in the forums about how many people use ALM regularly/always on. Plenty of people said they never use ALM or only when taking pictures. I got the same response when asking this question inworld. The big change the PBR viewers will usher will not so much be PBR materials, but everyone* finally seeing materials - either classic ones or PBR.

 

*exception for Old Man Henri and his viewer 😉

[Janet Voxel]

9 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

This seems true. It also seems a sad commentary on the current caliber of "creators" in Second Life. It's not as if PBR has been a secret, and for a long, long time.

Yes. You could look at it like it will weed them out. But the fact that there are people using the PBR viewer, but turning it all the way down tells me it might not matter as much as I thought. The key is going to be making the features usable and fast on lower spec rigs.

We’ll see though…

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

This seems true. It also seems a sad commentary on the current caliber of "creators" in Second Life.

Breaking News : Most content creators in SL are NOT professional game content creators, or keen semi-pro game modders used to working in "Useless Engine 4 Build-a-First-Person-Shooter Kit".

 

Pictures at 11.

[Flea Yatsenko]

8 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

It's been 9 years since SL got ALM-Materials, with normal maps and specular colour maps, and 99.99999% of SL still doesn't use those. PBR isn't going to change that. Flat, matte 2003 style texturing will STILL be flat, matte 2003 style, the only difference is more load on the servers sending the blank PBR data, and increased load on the viewers, checking the blank data is blank before rendering the old 2003 version anyway, and, the difference in HOW that's rendered, with the new lighting.

Spec Norm is a total pain to use. It never looks like it does in SL with whatever tool you're using. Trying to make a metal pipe with a modern workflow like substance painter or BSDF in Blender is a nightmare. You have to jump through so many hoops. I have all sorts of weird presets for exporting various spec norm materials for SL because just simply exporting some things do NOT look right at all in SL. PBR lets you export the GLTF from substance painter, blender, etc, and it looks almost identical in SL (minus environmental lighting).

Spec norm never worked right, there was never any consistency between SL and blender for me. Ever. Import would always be different. Mainly because pretty much everything else uses a PBR workflow and if you want to export spec norm you have to convert the PBR to spec norm and it seems like there's absolutely no standard between software for handling spec norm. Even if I did manage to keep spec norm workflow looking alright the full baked versions always looked better anyways.

Yes there's a lot of amateur content creators in SL. Converting to spec norm is a lot more difficult. PBR makes it a lot easier. In fact it's easier to export GLTF from substance painter or blender than it is to bake it. PBR has some really nice features but I think the real goal is to make it easier to use something other than flat baked textures on everything for creators.

Just having a lightweight implementation of PBR and the related workflow is going to make things way easier for creators to figure out how to make good looking stuff in SL.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Just having a lightweight implementation of PBR and the related workflow is going to make things way easier for creators to figure out how to make good looking stuff in SL.

I wish that would be true, but I suspect reality will be different.

Biggest problems with spec/norm isn't the system, it's people not bothering to RTFM, and assuming the spec map is a "specular strength map" instead of a "specular colour" map, and forgetting that their software is probably exporting DirectX based normal maps, not OpenGL based normal maps.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Simply showing and hiding faces that have a PBR material set to them is kinda insane. You need to apply ten different parameters (eleven including the link number) to just show or hide a piece of mesh:

list uGetClawAlphaParams(integer Face,float Alpha){
    return [
        PRIM_GLTF_BASE_COLOR,Face,CLAWS,
        <1,1,0>,<0,0,0>,0,<1,1,1>,Alpha,
        PRIM_GLTF_ALPHA_MODE_MASK,.5,FALSE
    ];
}

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

36 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Simply showing and hiding faces that have a PBR material set to them is kinda insane. You need to apply ten different parameters (eleven including the link number) to just show or hide a piece of mesh:

Somebody asked that EXACT question in the OpenCollar R& D group the other night, demanding to know when OC would update to add a hide function compatible with PBR.

They were very unhappy when told it wasn't a simple "just change one line of code" to swap the simple alpha setting for a PBR LSL command, or the fact that most collar users won't be running PBR enabled viewers yet, or the fact that except for the collar they had just built, almost every collar in SL does not and wont use PBR any time soon.

[Janet Voxel]

1 hour ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Yes there's a lot of amateur content creators in SL. Converting to spec norm is a lot more difficult. PBR makes it a lot easier. In fact it's easier to export GLTF from substance painter or blender than it is to bake it. PBR has some really nice features but I think the real goal is to make it easier to use something other than flat baked textures on everything for creators.

I think this brings up an interesting point. While this might alter a creator that uses Blender/Substance as part of their workflow, how will this affect a creator that uses templates and say Photoshop to retexture workflow? 
 

Typically, it’s more of a fit the texture onto the uvmap, slap the AO map that came with it on top, wrap it up and sell it. I still see them doing that.