PBR: Ignorance is Strength

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

George Orwell wrote in his 1948 novel 1984: "War is piece, freedom is slavery, ingnorance is strength. I get some very 'ignorance is strength' vibes about environmental settings. Using the latest official SL viewer with everything shiny and reflective, shadows enabled, the whole shebang [edit] and the classroom has a dedicated reflection probe, why the bleep is Midday darker than Midnight?

Edited December 18, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Just to make the picture a little more complete, here are also the Sunrise, Midday (Legacy), and Sunset versions:

[Sid Nagy]

LL.
A new implementation.
'Nuff said.

The "midday (legacy)" setting isn't invented for nothing I guess.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

And just to add to the confusion with another 'left is right' example, here are two snapshots taken with the building's reflection probe set to Ambiance 0 and 1. Why is Ambiance 1 darker than Ambiance 0? (This is in my own fancyschmancy EEP environment with the ambient color set to really bright, btw.)

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Extrude Ragu]

Midday without legacy is the PBR version, do you have an environment probe set up for the room?

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

4 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

The "midday (legacy)" setting isn't invented for nothing I guess.

So, yet again, up is down and 'legacy'' is 'newly invented'?

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

2 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Midday without legacy is the PBR version, do you have an environment probe set up for the room?

Yes

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

This is with the reflection probe not crossing the walls (and a silver sphere added for more shiny):

Edited December 17, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Zalificent Corvinus]

14 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

why the bleep is Midday darker than Midnight?

Same reason Das Studio once had  "skin shader, that had an excessively red subsurface scatter colour, and an excessively blue backlight sheen. The DS dev who wrote the shader, was a body builder fan, used to people with zero % bodyfat, and lived in Utah, near the salt lake, and knew nothing about actual 3D rendering, so no body fat lit by salt lake midday glare is what he put in the shader.

I'm guessing the problem here is people who code what they don't use, trying to make presets for something they don't use and don't really have a grip on.

A lot of games have fairly lack-luster lighting, but gamers fix that with Reshade ENB settings.

In SL, you just have to try and kludge past the dev mistakes with custom EEP's, and make all your OWN day cycle settings.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

7 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

 

And THIS is supposed to be an "improvement" on ALM-Materials/EEP?

So much for PBR in SL.

But the brass lamp base is slightly better than in ALM, right? So, Yay! Futureness!

[Extrude Ragu]

My understanding is that Ambience controls the mix between environment ambient color (eg. The sky) and the overall contribution from lights within the probe volume (indirect lighting). Ambience 0 uses fully the sky color and nothing else, and 1 and above uses fully the lights and nothing else. The room might be getting darker because it is no longer picking up the sky at ambience 1.

Also, don't forget PBR introduces the concept of exposure. Your pupils dilate in a dark environment to let more light in and vice versa, so this can play a role in what you see I think.

 

 

 

 

[Frionil Fang]

37 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

why the bleep is Midday darker than Midnight?

Part of the reason is that all the other default environments don't have the same reflection probe ambience: Midday uses 1, others use "almost 0" but it's not exactly 0 since that would mean legacy mode. You can see the difference by having personal lighting open while switching between the environments: if it says "brightness" instead of "HDR scale", it's the so-called legacy mode.

Add to that the whole probe ambience/environment ambience mixing and yes, Midday is actually darker than Midnight in some situations, *especially* if a reflection probe is being used.

It's great, I love it. /s

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

29 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Ambience 0 uses fully the sky color and nothing else, and 1 and above uses fully the lights and nothing else.

That's completely the opposite to what I thought ambiance was. Zero ambiance = only light from the light sources, full ambiance, also all the light from 'everything else' (sky, walls, etc - some whatever image rendering trickery).

Like in these cases for EEP and projection:

Edited December 17, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Extrude Ragu]

I could be completely wrong. I'm still figuring it out myself.

I think it's one of those things where if you just want to play SL without fiddling with probes and lighting the legacy setting is for you. Legacy is the default because the newer one takes a little work to set up a region for full PBR/ambient effects.

But if you wanna create something really cool then some time is going to be needed figuring out/transitioning to fully committing to full ambient lighting and the pay off will be your region will look newer/shinier in the end with a little bit of love and care.

We should be careful not to muddy the water by claiming the first screenshot is what most people see. There are people lurking the forum who will take any opportunity to jump up and down on the neck of any new SL features, claim it's ruining SL until it dies because that's what they do and then we can't have nice things. Most people will see Midday legacy on old regions, which looks fine.

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

10 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

But if you wanna create something really cool then some time is going to be needed figuring out/transitioning to fully committing to full ambient lighting and the pay off will be your region will look newer/shinier in the end with a little bit of love and care.

That's asking a lot of consumers for whom everything should look at least decent out of the box.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

7 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

We should be careful not to muddy the water by claiming the first screenshot is what most people see

So you're claiming the NEW PBR Fail-Viewer's default midday isn't the default midday.

8 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

There are people lurking the forum who will take any opportunity to jump up and down on the neck of any new SL features, claim it's ruining SL until it dies

Only the terminally broken ones. If default Midday leaves you in the dark, if you are more than a couple of feet from a window, it's broken. A Light probe that leaves one end of a desk in bright daylight, almost as dark as as the inside of an unlit coal mine, is broken.

12 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

and then we can't have nice things

I haven't seen a SL PBR picture yet that looks like "nice things".

13 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Most people will see Midday legacy on old regions, which looks fine.

They will see the default midday by default, that's almost certainly NOT the legacy. That's been put in as a backup for when people complain that daylight is darker than night time.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Loving this whole Aztec vibe to the new day cycle...

a Warm sunset.

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

That fades into a dark night.

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Followed by a rosy Dawn.

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Whish fades into high Noon. 

Wait... What's happening?

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

The Gods are ANGRY, they have put out the Sun!

We must appease them, I know where to find a stepped pyramid, does anybody have a flint based open heart surgery kit, and a spare virgin ?

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The Gods are ANGRY, they have put out the Sun!

(Yes, yes, that's not Aztecs, but Incas, you nitpickers.)

[Extrude Ragu]

24 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

That's asking a lot of consumers for whom everything should look at least decent out of the box.

The point is, they're not being asked to do that. The region won't look like that unless they ask for it to look like that, at which point it's because they're trying to make something nicer than what they can make under the old legacy sky.

[Qie Niangao]

37 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

There are people lurking the forum who will take any opportunity to jump up and down on the neck of any new SL features, claim it's ruining SL until it dies because that's what they do and then we can't have nice things. 

I think not only on the forums. Also, when the poor, misunderstood new feature fails to die, they continue jumping up and down until the next new feature comes along. Folks forget that Windlight was utterly despised and loudly decried from its introduction right up until EEP came along; then suddenly Windlight was the good ol' times. Now the very folks who absolutely hated everything about EEP a month ago are all nostalgic about how their EEP settings looked one way in the pre-PBR viewer and offended that the new viewer can distinguish among the uncountably many ways to produce identical results in old viewers.

None of which is to say the interaction between EEP and the PBR viewer is in any way intuitive. It's a maze of twisty little passages, all different—and the best guidebooks are runic gibberish.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

12 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

The region won't look like that unless they ask for it to look like that, at which point it's because they're trying to make something nicer than what they can make under the old legacy sky.

Aren't you confusing creators with consumers here? Cosumers aren't trying to create anything, just rez stuff. And you can count on it that many have no clue what an environment even is, let alone going to the trouble of asking land owners to change it, potentially to no avail. Point in case: just teleport around to some decently-visited sims. How many times did you have to adjust your environment because the shared environments were outright horrible? (I'm just permanently using my own.) Just talking about the past decade and a half here.

I'm not againt PBR at all. I'm just pointing out some really weird stuff here that should obviously be addressed/improved. I'm also for not having to ask consumers to do, a, b, c to z in order to make my product look good.

If, as a newb, I saw five environments in the menu, Sunrise, Midday, Midday Legacy, Sunset, Midnight, my first pick would be Midday, because it's the lightest (one would expect) and Legacy sounds like some old sh**. Only to discover that these words in the menu do not mean what I think they mean.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Extrude Ragu]

Just now, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Aren't you confusing creators with consumers here? Cosumers aren't trying to create anything, just rez stuff. And you can count on it that many have no clue what an environment even is. Point in case: just teleport around to some decently-visited sims. How many times did you have to adjust your environment because the shared environments were outright horrible? (I'm just permanently using my own.) Just talking about the past decade and a half here.

Again, consumers aren't being asked to do anything. Legacy is the default on old regions. Things won't break unless people ask them to break.

[Candide LeMay]

1 hour ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

That's completely the opposite to what I thought ambiance was. Zero ambiance = only light from the light sources, full ambiance, also all the light from 'everything else' (sky, walls, etc - some whatever image rendering trickery).

Quote

Reflection Probe Ambiance controls how ambient light (Found in your environment preset) affects, or does not affect, the contents of the reflection probe, and the intensity of indirect lighting (aka Irradiance). This value is influenced by the Reflection Probe Ambiance value found in the user's environment preset, wherein if the Ambiance value given in the environment preset is higher than the value defined by the probe itself, it inherits the ambiance value of the environment preset, or alternately if the ambiance value defined by the probe is higher, the probe's value is used.

There are 3 operation modes that are set with the Reflection Probe Ambiance value, in tandem with above:

• 0 will allow the Environment Ambient color to be applied at full intensity.
• Greater than 0 AND Less than 1 will blend the Environment Ambient color and probe irradiance (indirect lighting) in a ratio corresponding to the defined value (e.g. 0.5 is a 50/50 split).
• 1 or above will block the Environment Ambient color from being applied within the probe volume and irradiance is applied at full intensity (or with a multiplier for values above 1).
  • 4 or above works the same as above, however only indirect lighting received from the sky will be multiplied to a value above 4. Local lights are clamped at 4.0.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Fine-Tuning_Reflection_Sample_Volumes

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

7 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Legacy is the default on old regions. Things won't break unless people ask them to break.

Ok, let me rephrase the question then: why does an abomination as Midday have such a prominent place in the top menu bar?

[Rowan Amore]

Midday is the absolutely worst setting anyone can use anywhere.  People are always asking...why does my skin look so horrible.  First thing I tell them is to NOT use midday.  It might be fine for building or whatever but as an everyday setting?  Hell no.  One would think after 20 yrs, someone at LL would know this and make a default that actually enhanced the avatars which, IMO, is what most people want.  Oh wait.  NVM.