PBR WOW!

[Ardy Lay]

15 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!

They will ATTEMPT to shoot you down using derisive language and fail whether you are joking or not.

I'm not tinkering with making "materials" until stuff settles down.  I'll look at what other people make and not stress over it.

Edited January 6 by Ardy Lay

[Ardy Lay]

On 12/19/2023 at 9:18 AM, Quartz Mole said:

I'd like to remind people that the Linden Lab Official:Forum Participation Guidelines start with 

It would, I think, be generally appreciated, not least by me, if people could express their disagreements about PBR without resorting to sarcasm or otherwise belittling people with whom they disagree.    It doesn't add anything to the discussion, and I fear it can only be off-putting to people who want to ask questions about this new (at least for SL) technology but are worried about being dismissed as idiots for not understanding things.

Looks like they forgot again.

I streamed some crowded events using Second Life Release 7.1.2.7215179142 (64bit) and viewers were expressing incredulity over the smoothness of my video stream.  I hadn't the heart to tell them that my 60 FPS video stream was being captured from a viewer that was rendering at 120 FPS at the outset of the adventure, limited by the "sync rate" of my 5120 x 1440 display.  SL window was 1920 x 1440.

Unfortunately, as time passed, the rendering slowed down, but not because the crowd was getting larger, nor because of a change of scenery.  What I saw changing was avatars were changing outfits as the 3 hours long party progressed.  Not sure if this changing of rendered outfits caused an accumulation of sludge or what.  At the end of the 3-hour event, rendering was down to 48 FPS in a crowd of 38.  Some attendees had said goodby and logged out.  The crowd peaked at 44 attendees if I include myself.

Edited January 6 by Ardy Lay

[Chic Aeon]

I am moving my store this month (well I paid my rent for a month so I have a month -- bet plans and all that).  I am paying particular attention to how things look in FS current and LL current and finding what will work for both (possible for sure but not terribly easy. 

 

Meanwhile I made some new post lights and textured them simply with baked textures but nothing very fancy. Then after the diffuse was on there I added some of the metallic textures that were included with the free kit.  

 

I have to say that for me the PBR really looks better.  In my mind and in part this is because the lamp is METAL and PBR does its best in metal.  Anyway here are my side by side lamps photo taken in Linden viewer. 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

38 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

I am moving my store this month (well I paid my rent for a month so I have a month -- bet plans and all that).  I am paying particular attention to how things look in FS current and LL current and finding what will work for both (possible for sure but not terribly easy. 

 

Meanwhile I made some new post lights and textured them simply with baked textures but nothing very fancy. Then after the diffuse was on there I added some of the metallic textures that were included with the free kit.  

 

I have to say that for me the PBR really looks better.  In my mind and in part this is because the lamp is METAL and PBR does its best in metal.  Anyway here are my side by side lamps photo taken in Linden viewer. 

 

Is PBR on the left?

[Chic Aeon]

25 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Is PBR on the left?

No sorry. "Legacy" on the left. PBR material (jut ones I got in that free kit) on the right.  But I think they are both acceptable :D.

[elleevelyn]

On 12/20/2023 at 3:33 PM, arton Rotaru said:

The striping artifacts on the Ocean are coming from the Screen Space Reflections. I keep those turned off.
And yes, it's a known issue since February actually. Unfortunately it hasn't been fixed yet.

seems this has been fixed in latest release 7.1.2.72151791427.1.2

so Iam pretty happy now

[arton Rotaru]

55 minutes ago, elleevelyn said:

seems this has been fixed in latest release 7.1.2.72151791427.1.2

so Iam pretty happy now

Unfortunately there hasn't been done anything to fix this yet. Enable SSR, and stand near the water, and then press left/right arrow keys. Striping is still there.

 

[elleevelyn]

3 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Unfortunately there hasn't been done anything to fix this yet. Enable SSR, and stand near the water, and then press left/right arrow keys. Striping is still there.

 

grrr! you right. I toggled it on and was not doing the moire thing. So I relog and is doing it. so bummer

[arton Rotaru]

59 minutes ago, elleevelyn said:

grrr! you right. I toggled it on and was not doing the moire thing. So I relog and is doing it. so bummer

Sometimes it takes a moment before the toggle kicks in. 

[Love Zhaoying]

On 1/5/2024 at 11:31 PM, Chic Aeon said:

On 1/5/2024 at 11:04 PM, Love Zhaoying said:

Is PBR on the left?

No sorry. "Legacy" on the left. PBR material (jut ones I got in that free kit) on the right.  But I think they are both acceptable :D.

It's a shame, but after many pictures in many threads, it often appears (to me) the "legacy" often looks better than PBR!  Sometimes it's more subjective, and sometimes it's more obvious. I'm sure this will improve after PBR "settles in".

[SandorWren]

I just learned from The Firestorm Preview group, that there IS a way to revert back from PBR. It's easy. We click on the material window where our textures usually display, and then choose "none" from the popup window.  Setting it to "default" worked for me too.

[Qie Niangao]

23 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

I just learned from The Firestorm Preview group, that there IS a way to revert back from PBR. It's easy. We click on the material window where our textures usually display, and then choose "none" from the popup window.  Setting it to "default" worked for me too.

Not sure where in the several threads, but this was discussed some weeks ago, so it's unfortunate that users aren't finding it easily in the UI.

But besides the UI difficulty, I think there's another problem: There doesn't seem to be a way in most viewers to adjust the old Blinn-Phong material maps except with this method of (temporarily) removing the PBR material from the surface, meaning there's a separate step of re-applying them afterwards to get them back.

(It appears that the Cool VL Viewer can choose which materials system is being applied, but I haven't found a way to actually see the Blinn-Phong materials on the surface while working with them if there's a PBR material already applied. To be honest, I can't really use that viewer's UI effectively, so untold magic may lie within and I'd never find it.)

This is probably no big deal for creators of individual items to paint on the Blinn-Phong maps and then apply the PBR Materials, no problem. But for builders… well, I got all excited about these PBR Materials I collected and tweaked and applied to a reasonably complex build and now I'm thinking I should accommodate folks with non-PBR viewers who are otherwise surrounded by blank textures. It's gonna be a project to sneak all those base color albedo maps onto all those diffusemaps, shuffle some repeats and offsets (oh how I wish the editor could transform PBR's texture coordinate system onto the old one and vice versa!).

I think I'll just let those non-PBR-viewer users see grey until either they update or there's some semblance of Build Tool support for this.

(Or… Hey! Does anybody already have a script that pushes the albedo onto the diffusemap with the coordinates transformed? It should be possible because I made all the PBR material maps myself, but I really can't be the first scripter to need this thing.)

[Scylla Rhiadra]

50 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Not sure where in the several threads, but this was discussed some weeks ago, so it's unfortunate that users aren't finding it easily in the UI.

But besides the UI difficulty, I think there's another problem: There doesn't seem to be a way in most viewers to adjust the old Blinn-Phong material maps except with this method of (temporarily) removing the PBR material from the surface, meaning there's a separate step of re-applying them afterwards to get them back.

(It appears that the Cool VL Viewer can choose which materials system is being applied, but I haven't found a way to actually see the Blinn-Phong materials on the surface while working with them if there's a PBR material already applied. To be honest, I can't really use that viewer's UI effectively, so untold magic may lie within and I'd never find it.)

This is probably no big deal for creators of individual items to paint on the Blinn-Phong maps and then apply the PBR Materials, no problem. But for builders… well, I got all excited about these PBR Materials I collected and tweaked and applied to a reasonably complex build and now I'm thinking I should accommodate folks with non-PBR viewers who are otherwise surrounded by blank textures. It's gonna be a project to sneak all those base color albedo maps onto all those diffusemaps, shuffle some repeats and offsets (oh how I wish the editor could transform PBR's texture coordinate system onto the old one and vice versa!).

I think I'll just let those non-PBR-viewer users see grey until either they update or there's some semblance of Build Tool support for this.

(Or… Hey! Does anybody already have a script that pushes the albedo onto the diffusemap with the coordinates transformed? It should be possible because I made all the PBR material maps myself, but I really can't be the first scripter to need this thing.)

Both of these things -- the fact that you can't go back to Blinn-Phong maps after you've applied PBR without removing the PBR, and the fact that you can't rescale and tile the maps in PBR (as you say, adjust repeats and offsets) the way one usually does with Blinn-Phong ones -- are for me the reason why I'm not bothering with PBR right now.

Honestly, how absurd was it to go live with this with the in-world creation tools so obviously screwed up? I think you're right that "professional" creators who work in Blender aren't going to find this as onerous, but for building and texturing in-world? It's an utter mess.

[Arielle Popstar]

2 hours ago, Bagnu said:

I just learned from The Firestorm Preview group, that there IS a way to revert back from PBR. It's easy. We click on the material window where our textures usually display, and then choose "none" from the popup window.  Setting it to "default" worked for me too.

I'm not getting the "None" option. I must be doing something wrong?

[Qie Niangao]

4 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I'm not getting the "None" option. I must be doing something wrong?

I usually start from "Choose from inventory" but I think it now works to just click the little swatch labelled "Material" where texture maps used to appear. (This is from the Linden viewer so the nomenclature may be different in the Firestorm Beta, which I'll eventually load again but I've got such "viewer salad" I need to stick with one or the other for a while.)

19 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

… you can't rescale and tile the maps in PBR (as you say, adjust repeats and offsets) the way one usually does with Blinn-Phong ones…

Right. Well, you can, but they're using the "standard" UV 0,0 origin in the upper left instead of the familiar XY origin in lower left, or something like that, which is documented somewhere but you probably know it already. What's maddening to me is that the outline of the texture (glowing borders with a crosshair in the middle) doesn't scale, rotate, nor offset with the material, but stays fixed to the surface's original UV coordinates (which is perfectly useless for any purpose I know).

[SandorWren]

37 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I'm not getting the "None" option. I must be doing something wrong?

Then use "default". You have to click on what we use as a texture box first, and then select from there.

[Arielle Popstar]

5 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

Then use "default". You have to click on what we use as a texture box first, and then select from there.

Default is the plywood texture which the test prim i made came with.

[SandorWren]

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Default is the plywood texture which the test prim i made came with.

Yes. If you see it, then you have reverted from PBR.

[SandorWren]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Both of these things -- the fact that you can't go back to Blinn-Phong maps after you've applied PBR without removing the PBR, and the fact that you can't rescale and tile the maps in PBR (as you say, adjust repeats and offsets) the way one usually does with Blinn-Phong ones -- are for me the reason why I'm not bothering with PBR right now.

Honestly, how absurd was it to go live with this with the in-world creation tools so obviously screwed up? I think you're right that "professional" creators who work in Blender aren't going to find this as onerous, but for building and texturing in-world? It's an utter mess.

I've been able to rescale and tile in PBR. It's just different than with Blinn Phong. I had to do that in this room with the tiles.

[Janet Voxel]

25 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

I've been able to rescale and tile in PBR. It's just different than with Blinn Phong. I had to do that in this room with the tiles.

Whispers It might be helpful to explain how you did it

It looks good though

[Henri Beauchamp]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

(It appears that the Cool VL Viewer can choose which materials system is being applied, but I haven't found a way to actually see the Blinn-Phong materials on the surface while working with them if there's a PBR material already applied. To be honest, I can't really use that viewer's UI effectively, so untold magic may lie within and I'd never find it.)

You can see diffuse texture and legacy material maps rendered on the face by simply toggling off the PBR renderer, e.g with CTRL ALT P. For legacy materials, also make sure Deferred rendering/ALM is on, the toggle being CTRL ALT D.

Render modes toggling happens instantly (provided you already toggled it once in a former session or the current one, and your graphics driver is properly configured to cache compiled shaders), so you can do this a gazillion of times during edits, if needed. 😉

Also, you can apply all three (and in whatever order suits you): diffuse texture (used in forward mode), diffuse + normal/specular (used in ALM) and PBR material, all to the same face: this way, it will render just fine and as you intend it to render, with any viewer.

Finally, you can remove materials from the edited face(s) (both ALM and PBR) via the ”Reset materials” button, which would leave you with just the diffuse texture on the edited faces.

Edited February 16 by Henri Beauchamp

[Frionil Fang]

You have to use the PBR channel radio buttons:

Complete material sets all the channels' scale/rot/offset at once, otherwise you change only one of them.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

they're using the "standard" UV 0,0 origin in the upper left instead of the familiar XY origin in lower left, or something like that, which is documented somewhere

Somehow I thought this was "documented" in the wiki or some viewer operations guide or somewhere, but apparently I first learned this in January in the Scripting Forum  (first by experimentation then from @Jenna Huntsman who, thank god, knows all), complete with a link to the Khronos spec:
https://registry.khronos.org/glTF/specs/2.0/glTF-2.0.html#images

I'd still like to think this will be made more explicit in some LL-supplied documentation that mere mortals can find, but maybe I've just forgotten all the magic we had to learn in order to use everything else.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Bagnu said:

I've been able to rescale and tile in PBR. It's just different than with Blinn Phong.

Yes, that's my point. If you are using both legacy and PBR textures, scaling them involves different processes.

It also means you need to use math to tile a PBR math on an irregularly sided object. For instance, tiling a square map onto a rectangle now means calculating the number of repeats along each axis, something that is mostly unnecessary if you can tile a texture while stretching the object.

I'm not a scripter . . . but if I understand what @Qie Niangao says above correctly (and maybe I don't!), the inversion of the Y axis is also going to have ramifications for script handlers for texture maps.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

I'd still like to think this will be made more explicit in some LL-supplied documentation that mere mortals can find, but maybe I've just forgotten all the magic we had to learn in order to use everything else.

/me sighs.

I knew that this had changed, just from observation while doing it. I didn't know why.

I have seen NO documentation explaining this.