PBR WOW!

[aht1981]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Actually creating PBR Materials is… a project

One could argue making textures has never been easier.

Blender has its nodes - saw a great video the other day where somebody made a knitted texture and the image was knitted in as opposed to just overlayed. 

Substance painter is super - has so many generators.

Substance Designer/Sampler comes with Substance Painter on with Adobe subscription and both are superb - check out the video on the Embroidery maker.

And not forgetting there are 4 trillion videos on how to! None of this is easy at first of course, but I'd argue it is easier than the current texture system.

[Love Zhaoying]

28 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

All the old stuff will still work, same as prims. Textures still work same as always (they populate the "diffusemap" of the "Blinn-Phong" / "spec-norm" materials system), just don't use them as the "Base Color" map of a PBR / glTF Material. That's not what it's for, and (as I understand it) proper PBR surface lighting depends on AO shading that used to bake into the texture to instead be represented separately in the red "occlusion" channel of the ORM map.

Actually creating PBR Materials is… a project. Apparently it's not qualitatively different from the workflow to generate proper spec-norm material maps during mesh creation, so "pro" creators need only adapt their process a bit, but it's not as obvious for the rest of us.

Is it fair (if only partially accurate) if I state:

- "Textures" used as the actual "picture" for something (for example, a Primitive) pretty much work the same. A picture is a picture is a picture.

- "Materials" are what changes.

Izzatso?

[Love Zhaoying]

13 hours ago, Quartz Mole said:

Same here.   I've had my PCs made by a local computer store for about what I'd pay for an off-the-shelf model of a similar spec and whenever I want replace or upgrade a component I discuss my requirements with them and they end up supplying and fitting the new gpu or whatever for about, or less than, what I'd pay for the same component on Amazon. 

I had 2 "odd" requirements (3 if you count the specificity of "must run Second Life well"):

- Optical Audio (used for TV sound bar, and big ole honkin' Amp/Receiver)

- Must be capable of running some CPU-intensive Embroidery software I have (that stuff's $$$$).

As it turns out, finding motherboards with built-in Optical Audio isn't as easy as it once was, so my choices were limited.  These days, you'd get a separate sound card or even a USB-to-Optical converter.

Most people don't have these kind of requirements, so can just go get a PC, so long as it has a good enough CPU / Memory / Graphics profile.  The friendly man or woman at the local "We Build It" PC store throws it all together, and "WALLA"! (Voilà).

Me next time I get a desktop PC: "It's got to run fancy graphics software so I can make PBJ and GuiltF."

[Qie Niangao]

Just now, aht1981 said:

One could argue making textures has never been easier.

Blender […]

Yeah, see, when "easier" and "Blender" appear together like that, it's addressing a very special congregation.

6 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Is it fair (if only partially accurate) if I state:

- "Textures" used as the actual "picture" for something (for example, a Primitive) pretty much work the same. A picture is a picture is a picture.

- "Materials" are what changes.

Izzatso?

Maybe. The old materials system still works the same though (but it usually looks better in a PBR viewer). The big change in "Materials" (old or new) is that they're assured to be visible in a PBR viewer that disables forward rendering. And the PBR system really has no place for "textures" as we know them; they need to stay in that pre-PBR "texture" slot.

To use a photograph as the basis of a PBR Material… well, there are only 4 trillion videos to watch and then it'll be easy.

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 12/16/2023 at 10:14 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Fair enough: I can hardly expect a primer on this. But, speaking (as I noted) as a non-techie, this is mostly gobbledy***** to me.

What you seem to imply, among other things, though, is that I am not going to be able to create my own textures for things anymore. That the creation of "base colour" maps is a very different process than the creation of diffuse maps (which I can now produce with relative easy in Photoshop or even some other simpler graphics program)?

So, in practice, this is yet another instance of a technological leap in SL having the de facto effect of excluding non-specialists from creating a hitherto accessible form of content, much as the introduction of mesh made obsolete building with prims?

This is not a merely academic question: I texture stuff all the time in SL, and in particular import "digital art" for presentation and sale in-world. So, will the eventual obsolescence of "diffuse" maps mean that I will no longer be able to do that without more specialized knowledge and/or software?

Normally, when you make a cake you put in some eggs.

If you're making an absolutely white cake you'll need to do something different, though, because if you put the eggs in per usual the yellow yolks will tint the batter and resulting cake.

So, in order to make a white cake you'll need to know how to do something different than you're used to.

This does not mean that:

1) Only a professional chef can make a white cake.

OR

2) The recipes for the cakes you're used to making will change.

OR

3) Non-white cakes will mysteriously vanish from the world.

I'm not saying that you think any of this. But, depending on how you phrase things, other people might. And I'm not singling you out for any of this - I've long thought that people writing things for Linden Lab should be taught to assume that anything they say will be taken the worst possible way.

 

Edited January 3 by Theresa Tennyson

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Normally, when you make a cake you put in some eggs.

If you're making an absolutely white cake you'll need to do something different, though, because if you put the eggs in per usual the yellow yolks will tint the batter and resulting cake.

So, in order to make a white cake you'll need to know how to do something different than you're used to.

This does not mean that:

1) Only a professional chef can make a white cake.

OR

2) The recipes for the cakes you're used to making will change.

OR

3) Non-white cakes will mysteriously vanish from the world.

I'm not saying that you think any of this. But, depending on how you phrase things, other people might.

 

So continuing with the "Cake" analogy, it's not as if:

- You are now allowed to make only "Keto" cakes. In general, these don't use regular wheat flour.

- They tell you it's the same, but Almond (and other Keto) flours have different properties (rise and crumb)

- No matter how much you complain that "these Keto cakes aren't like regular cakes", the proponents of Keto cakes will never acknowledge there's a change: "You must not be following the recipe correctly".

- You can buy Keto cake mix, which is a little better, but then you aren't really making it yourself.

 

[Luna Bliss]

16 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I would encourage anyone shy to look inside their computer to give looking inside a second thought. Learning skills, being curious and stepping outside the daily routine is good for your brains neuroplasticity and sense of confidence if nothing else.

Ok Extrude, I will take your adivice, but I can't find the lid on this thing to remove it and look inside!  I have my dust cloth and a can of pledge to remove any dust bunnies ready and waiting (we have Pledge for dusting here in the US of A).

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Normally, when you make a cake you put in some eggs.

If you're making an absolutely white cake you'll need to do something different, though, because if you put the eggs in per usual the yellow yolks will tint the batter and resulting cake.

So, in order to make a white cake you'll need to know how to do something different than you're used to.

This does not mean that:

1) Only a professional chef can make a white cake.

OR

2) The recipes for the cakes you're used to making will change.

OR

3) Non-white cakes will mysteriously vanish from the world.

I'm not saying that you think any of this. But, depending on how you phrase things, other people might. And I'm not singling you out for any of this - I've long thought that people writing things for Linden Lab should be taught to assume that anything they say will be taken the worst possible way.

 

What has become clear from my own experiments with PBR and texturing using the PBR viewers is that none of this is likely to much impact very much on my own "workflow," if you like. I texture things largely for pics that I take, rather than for sale to others (although the pics themselves are sold), so what matters most is that it looks the way that I want it to look. I can imagine instances, certainly, where I am going to want the extra shiny that PBR can bring to a metallic object -- and for that there are free or commercial textures for me to use -- but mostly I'm going to be able to continue as I've done, producing perfectly good looking legacy textures with normal and spectral maps. And these might even look a bit better in a PBR viewer (although, so far, not: I need to grapple with what it's done to EEP settings).

I do wonder, though, how this will impact on the smaller to medium-sized creators who may not have access to things like Substance Painter, or face a steepish learning curve for employing PBR properly.

I also frankly wonder how prevalent "PBR-enabled" goods are going to become. We may well be looking at a future where PBR and legacy textures sort of co-exist, with both being employed for new goods. After all, many of the objects and garments for sale now don't take full advantage of normal and spectral maps, and they're not hard to produce, and have been around for some time. It may well simply be that PBR materials don't really take off at all, or at least don't dominate.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I texture things largely for pics that I take, rather than for sale to others (although the pics themselves are sold), so what matters most is that it looks the way that I want it to look.

Plus then, you are probably texturing for a specific lighting for the picture - instead of worrying about how it looks for in "all lighting" like if it were for someone else.

[Paul Hexem]

28 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

What has become clear from my own experiments with PBR and texturing using the PBR viewers is that none of this is likely to much impact very much on my own "workflow," if you like. I texture things largely for pics that I take, rather than for sale to others (although the pics themselves are sold), so what matters most is that it looks the way that I want it to look. I can imagine instances, certainly, where I am going to want the extra shiny that PBR can bring to a metallic object -- and for that there are free or commercial textures for me to use -- but mostly I'm going to be able to continue as I've done, producing perfectly good looking legacy textures with normal and spectral maps. And these might even look a bit better in a PBR viewer (although, so far, not: I need to grapple with what it's done to EEP settings).

I do wonder, though, how this will impact on the smaller to medium-sized creators who may not have access to things like Substance Painter, or face a steepish learning curve for employing PBR properly.

I also frankly wonder how prevalent "PBR-enabled" goods are going to become. We may well be looking at a future where PBR and legacy textures sort of co-exist, with both being employed for new goods. After all, many of the objects and garments for sale now don't take full advantage of normal and spectral maps, and they're not hard to produce, and have been around for some time. It may well simply be that PBR materials don't really take off at all, or at least don't dominate.

Something easy to forget- not everything needs materials/PBR, and for some stuff, regular materials will be plenty to look good. I think we'll continue to see a mix, just like currently we still see a mix of stuff with and without materials.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

33 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Plus then, you are probably texturing for a specific lighting for the picture - instead of worrying about how it looks for in "all lighting" like if it were for someone else.

I'm also texturing for a specific camera angle. The "dynamic" aspect of reflections isn't really of a great deal of use to me, other than in establishing where it should be appearing in a static shot.

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I'm also texturing for a specific camera angle. The "dynamic" aspect of reflections isn't really of a great deal of use to me, other than in establishing where it should be appearing in a static shot.

Similarly, I could have used just a Projector for part of the cave scene I am making for the "in the spotlight/shadow" effect, instead of using a Reflection Probe..

(Unless I decide to tweak the probe properties / add multiple probes / etc.)

 

[Gabriele Graves]

A mixture of B-P and PBR materials and a manual reflection probe.  Lighting was the hardest part to get how I wanted it.  Also demonstrates how unsuitable for planar mirrors reflection probes are.

Edited January 3 by Gabriele Graves

[Qie Niangao]

3 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I also frankly wonder how prevalent "PBR-enabled" goods are going to become. We may well be looking at a future where PBR and legacy textures sort of co-exist, with both being employed for new goods. After all, many of the objects and garments for sale now don't take full advantage of normal and spectral maps, and they're not hard to produce, and have been around for some time. It may well simply be that PBR materials don't really take off at all, or at least don't dominate.

For product creators,  though, the PBR viewer presents a big change: once all the forward rendering is dead, they can be sure that everybody will see those materials they've been unable to rely on all these years since they were introduced. I honestly can't blame creators for not using normal and specular maps (nor the alpha-channel emissivity hack) when a significant share of their customers couldn't see the effects.

For in-world photography, though, you're right: none of that matters. Whether everything is baked down to the diffusemap or in-viewer rendered in glorious PBR splendor, it can end up looking indistinguishable. And the product—the photograph—isn't intended to have any surface properties at all: it's not as though it should have visible brush strokes under close inspection, and there's no advantage to a glossy vs matte finish.

Until now, I didn't appreciate that a photograph, specifically, is where diffusemap and base color map really have the exact same meaning.

Edited January 3 by Qie Niangao
forward rendering, not "direct"

[Gabriele Graves]

For me having material assets is a big advantage over what we've had.  I have already acquired a large collection of different materials which are all superb.  This is one of the things that makes casual texturing under PBR much easier.

TBH I haven't been struggling at all (except for FS alpha bugs) with getting to grips with any of it.  I'm the kind of person that experiments and isn't afraid to turn things on/off and move sliders to see what effect it has.  I soon got a good feel for how things work and discovering the UI "quirks" wasn't difficult.

I was prepared for a much steeper learning curve on it's use.

Creating new materials from scratch is where the steep curve really is but I'm not sure how much of that most people would need to deal with.  A lot of people will be able to get by with just buying assets I expect.

[Love Zhaoying]

I see a business opportunity!

An updated "Second Life for Dummies" with a chapter on PBR!!

 

[Istelathis]

32 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I see a business opportunity!

An updated "Second Life for Dummies" with a chapter on PBR!!

 

I wonder if by the time the book comes out though, if LL will just pursue Unity for the desktop viewer so they will only have one engine to fiddle around with rather than two.  I'm wondering if eventually, it will happen to save on costs as well as time - once the mobile viewer takes off (if it takes off). 

Then I wonder if it did what would happen to all of the TPVs, what would happen to OpenSim, and so on.  

 

Edit:
Obligatory

 

Edited January 3 by Istelathis

[Love Zhaoying]

23 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

Then I wonder if it did what would happen to all of the TPVs, what would happen to OpenSim, and so on.  

I recently posted, "what will happen to OpenSim post-PBR?"..

[Ceka Cianci]

10 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Normally, when you make a cake you put in some eggs.

If you're making an absolutely white cake you'll need to do something different, though, because if you put the eggs in per usual the yellow yolks will tint the batter and resulting cake.

So, in order to make a white cake you'll need to know how to do something different than you're used to.

This does not mean that:

1) Only a professional chef can make a white cake.

OR

2) The recipes for the cakes you're used to making will change.

OR

3) Non-white cakes will mysteriously vanish from the world.

I'm not saying that you think any of this. But, depending on how you phrase things, other people might. And I'm not singling you out for any of this - I've long thought that people writing things for Linden Lab should be taught to assume that anything they say will be taken the worst possible way.

 

Separate the white from the yolk.. hehehe

ETA: I don't really know what you guys were on about.. I just thought we got to the point of food again in the forums.. Then realized after I posted that it was a metaphor..hehehe

Edited January 4 by Ceka Cianci

[Arielle Popstar]

14 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I recently posted, "what will happen to OpenSim post-PBR?"..

What about it? I already use the FS PBR viewer in my own grid even though the server release I am using doesn't include code for it but seeing very little difference. According to Opensim Office hours log they have put some PBR assets in Master and likely will add more when Firestorm goes beta.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 1/3/2024 at 10:42 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

I see a business opportunity!

An updated "Second Life for Dummies" with a chapter on PBR!!

 

Just what SL needs, another book on "how to do SL properly" that's basically about 5-10 years behind the reality, except for a short chapter on some new gimmick, written by somebody who barely has a clue about SL, some old fuddy duddy Official Fail Viewer using homebody, with a system avatar, who never leaves their G rated home in Bay City.

 

"Learn out of date nonsense that's useless to anyone with a rez date less than 15 years old trying to remember the glory days of 2006!"

 

New book?

Let's not and say we did.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

"Learn out of date nonsense that's useless to anyone with a rez date less than 15 years old trying to remember the glory days of 2006!"

Or 2017...

[Love Zhaoying]

3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Just what SL needs, another book on "how to do SL properly" that's basically about 5-10 years behind the reality, except for a short chapter on some new gimmick, written by somebody who barely has a clue about SL, some old fuddy duddy Official Fail Viewer using homebody, with a system avatar, who never leaves their G rated home in Bay City.

 

"Learn out of date nonsense that's useless to anyone with a rez date less than 15 years old trying to remember the glory days of 2006!"

 

New book?

Let's not and say we did.

I love it when you think my posts are serious! It means I have to put a "is joke!" disclaimer after all!

[Cinnamon Mistwood]

12 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I love it when you think my posts are serious! It means I have to put a "is joke!" disclaimer after all!

Your words will be remembered 5 or 10 years from now and presented back to the forum as true fact that EVERYONE said something about money making opportunities and books.  Your name will then be changed to replace some part of it with a childish name-calling insult designed to attempt to get you to respond negatively, but not so bad as the get the flamer in trouble. 

The lovely, insulting name will then be dipped in PBR materials that will sort of reflect some metallic, bumpy surface and beamed across all of SL for people who are still complaining about their computers performance and how hard everything is now that the world is too dark or too bright or how nothing has a texture at all and how SL oldbies are all to blame for anything anyone doesnt like.

⏫️ that was all said in one breath and one sentence.  Yup.  Do you feel famous now?  You know you've made it not by the number of likes or posts, but if you have been given a childish name and accused of being serious about jokes.

I am still just dabbling in PBR, but eventually I will have the basics.  (On topic)

[sirhc DeSantis]

56 minutes ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

Your words will be remembered 5 or 10 years from now and presented back to the forum as true fact that EVERYONE said something about money making opportunities and books.  Your name will then be changed to replace some part of it with a childish name-calling insult designed to attempt to get you to respond negatively, but not so bad as the get the flamer in trouble. 

The lovely, insulting name will then be dipped in PBR materials that will sort of reflect some metallic, bumpy surface and beamed across all of SL for people who are still complaining about their computers performance and how hard everything is now that the world is too dark or too bright or how nothing has a texture at all and how SL oldbies are all to blame for anything anyone doesnt like.

⏫️ that was all said in one breath and one sentence.  Yup.  Do you feel famous now?  You know you've made it not by the number of likes or posts, but if you have been given a childish name and accused of being serious about jokes.

I am still just dabbling in PBR, but eventually I will have the basics.  (On topic)

Just because  - most will be lost in terms of comments