PBR: Ignorance is Strength

[Extrude Ragu]

47 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

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

Why declare something an abomination, before we have even figured out how it works?

People have been developing and testing PBR for SecondLife for years, why then, the instant it comes out, declare it broken after barely having had it for a week to try yourself?

Give it time. Mess about with it. The forum is an exciting place to create drama I know but it's rather quite unfortunate given the work that went into it to give it so little chance.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

12 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Why declare something an abomination, before we have even figured out how it works?

So, how does Midday work then, and why is it not an abomination?

12 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

People have been developing and testing PBR for SecondLife for years,

 Why did I not step into dog poo until yesterday, while dogs have been pooping on the streets for millenia?

14 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Give it time.

Until Midday is gone from the menu?

14 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

to give it so little chance.

Where in this entire threat and I giving 'the work' so little chance?

[Extrude Ragu]

Just now, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Where in this entire threat and I giving 'the work' so little chance?

It is in the loaded language

Quote

why does an abomination as Midday have

You intentionally write like this, to force me to agree with you that it's an abomination as though that is the accepted consensus.

In using this language, you declare you are not here to have a discussion, you're here to declare something to be broken. And you want to force me to agree with you, by forcing me to answer a question in which a new consensus is defined, despite I do not agree with it.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Extrude Ragu

[Chic Aeon]

Just wanted to say that your top screenshot was VERY much the issue we had in SANSAR. Dark was just way too dark and there ever though we could control the atmosphere somewhat it was almost impossible to get a building inside  with a window or two to look realistic. Like your shot it would be  daytime outside and pitch black inside the building. You had to add items with a shader that immitted light in order to have a semblance of normalcy. That was never fixed while "I" was there (when they sold). 

Here is an example. I never took any screenshots of the VERY dark interiors of some buildings :D.    This is a storage unit building with a full garage door open. The overhead light  was necessary and it doesn't seem all that realistic to me -- the lighting that is.

Hopefully this wont be tagged as advertising. I haven't been there in over four years and get no income from any sales that are still happening. 

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

28 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Hopefully this wont be tagged as advertising.

Of course it's not advertising. Advertising is meant to make something look desirable.

Almost nobody would ever visit Sansar if they knew it looked that awful.

Oh. Wait.

Almost nobody did, that's why it failed.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Why declare something an abomination, before we have even figured out how it works?

We know how it works, you select the Midday preset, that's part of the standard day cycle, and the sun goes out...

 

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

People have been developing and testing PBR for SecondLife for years, why then, the instant it comes out, declare it broken

Because it's bloody obvious that it's broken, just as EEP 1.0 was bloody obviously broken, and needed over a year's worth of hot fix patches just to reach a barely acceptable standard. Because the SoP is to release these new "features" a year or 3 too early,.

 

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Give it time. Mess about with it

Supposedly the WHOLE sodding point of this new shiny, is to modernise SL's graphics, to help bring in "new users" and improve "retention".

 

Now, imagine you were an actual noob, in your first hour of SL, and you'd witnessed part of the one hour night, and the sunrise, and then, the sun goes out for 2 hours, before magically reappearing for the sunset.

You ask why everything is too sodding dark, and some Clueless Captain Oldbie tells you its YOUR fault, for not signing up for and completing a 6 month course in "Advanced 3D Rendering & AAA Game Level Design" at the local polytechnic before joining SL.

How well do you think whining at noobs a few hours old that it's THEIR fault the graphics suck because they didn't learn to be content creating head-jammed-up-own-rectum "artistes" BEFORE coming here, how well will that HELP new user retention.

 

If I logged into a new game, and the lighting was this bad, I'd just quit and uninstall.

 

[Fionalein]

2 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

First thing I tell them is to NOT use midday.

I'd tell them to buy a skin that looks good in more than one environment next time... but that might just be my weird not-blogger point of view...

[Rowan Amore]

4 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

I'd tell them to buy a skin that looks good in more than one environment next time... but that might just be my weird not-blogger point of view...

I use region settings in all my pictures ( I don't technically blog). I've yet to come across a place using midday as it's default.  People.who build regions know it's bad for any skin.  Midday means the sun is above you which throws ugly shadows on your face regardless of what skin you use.  

[JeromFranzic]

2 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

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.  

I don't mind using Midday for adjusting my look a bit. If I do use it, I'll adjust the sun's angle and tweak the exposure level to reduce blown highlights for shots... have to do this or else I'll have a hard time in post process. By default, sure, Midday is terrible lighting but occasionally it might work for intentionally blown shots.  

[Extrude Ragu]

8 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Now, imagine you were an actual noob, in your first hour of SL, and you'd witnessed part of the one hour night, and the sunrise, and then, the sun goes out for 2 hours, before magically reappearing for the sunset.

That's not what happens though is it. You've gobbled up OP's statement and accepted it as the truth, despite the screenshot is non default settings

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, JeromFranzic said:

I don't mind using Midday for adjusting my look a bit. If I do use it, I'll adjust the sun's angle and tweak the exposure level to reduce blown highlights for shots... have to do this or else I'll have a hard time in post process. By default, sure, Midday is terrible lighting but occasionally it might work for intentionally blown shots.  

I always describe midday as the "flashlight under the face" look but in reverse.  And we use the flashlight to look scary.  Right?

[Sid Nagy]

I don't even want to know how many man hours LL had to cough up for this so far totally disappointing new improvement result.

Most people want to enjoy an as simple as possible SL IMHO.
What they get: Steep learning curves, that get steeper and steeper after each major improvement.
 

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Fionalein]

16 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

I don't even want to know how many man hours LL had to cough up for this so far totally disappointing new improvement result.

Most people want to enjoy an as simple as possible SL IMHO.
What they get: Steep learning curves, that get steeper and steeper after each "major improvement".
 

 

kitty fixed it for you

[Extrude Ragu]

Lets put the doom and gloom to bed. Here's what lighting actually looks like under the defaults in PBR viewer as a new user would experience in a region that hasn't been updated for PBR. It doesn't go dark inside interiors. OP had to mess about with probes and ambience settings and change the windlight to the new PBR midday to make that happen.

[arton Rotaru]

FWIW, the ambient color of the new Midday setting is black to make the ambient lighting driven only by the Image Based Lighting (IBL) of the irradiance map that is created alongside the reflection map by the reflection probes. So when there is no light source around there won't be any light.

The black ambient color and other parameters of the new Midday might be not set in stone yet.

Edited December 17, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

53 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

OP had to mess about with probes and ambience settings

That's not true.

In the first two pictures: I made a really simple probe and I set to Midday. I did not touch the Ambiance.

Stop misinterpreting/misrepreseting things here and twisting my words. For me you're going on ignore. Bye.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Extrude Ragu]

2 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

That's not true. Stop misinterpreting/misrepreseting things here and twisting my words. For me you're going on ignore. Bye.

Your very first screenshot, the one you were complaining about shows that you set the environment to the new PBR Midday.

You then go on to state:-

Quote

here are two snapshots taken with the building's reflection probe set to Ambiance 0 and 1

Which means you have a reflection probe in the building, something that won't be found in existing content. Are you saying the previous statement and screenshot are a lie? What

Edited December 17, 2023 by Extrude Ragu

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, arton Rotaru said:

FWIW, the ambient color of the new Midday setting is black to make the ambient lighting driven only by the Image Based Lighting (IBL) of the irradiance map that is created alongside the reflection map by the reflection probes. So when there is no light source around there won't be any light.

The black ambient color and other parameters of the new Midday might be not set in stone yet.

Google Translate was of no assistance in helping me understand any of what you say here.

I worry that this pretty much sums up why the average SL resident is going to feel cast adrift and lost by PBR.

[Extrude Ragu]

9 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Google Translate was of no assistance in helping me understand any of what you say here.

I worry that this pretty much sums up why the average SL resident is going to feel cast adrift and lost by PBR.

He's talking about the guts of the system and some of the tweaks LL could make. It's techno talk.

Most residents also don't know what a vertex buffer is, a draw call or texel density means, but it hasn't stopped them enjoying mesh.

[Qie Niangao]

There may be call for a Second Life University YouTube video (and personally I hate YouTube videos, but still…) explaining and demonstrating the glories and pitfalls of Reflection Probes. A couple weeks ago I spent hours reading, re-reading, and experimenting to try to understand a few paragraphs on the wiki:

Quote

Fine-Tuning Reflection Sample Volumes

Warning: Sample volumes do not react to prim parameter changes. Options such as “Hollow” or “Taper” or “Shear” do not change how the sampling area behaves.

That said, it may be helpful to visualize Near Clip as the hollowing out of your reflection sample volume, but the hollow and near-clip are not in any way linked and doing so is purely a convenience. Reflection probe sample volumes only respond to changes in scale and position; however, different probe volumes behave differently when resized.

• Box Probes: These are affected by position and non-uniform scale.

Example: If I create a box reflection probe and scale it to 10m,30m,10m size, the full volume will be affected by the probe.

• Sphere Probes: These are affected by position and uniform scale only, otherwise the smallest dimension is used.

Example: If I create a spherical probe and scale it to 10m,30m, and 10m size , the probe will sample a 10 meter diameter spherical volume at the center of the probe. However, a 30m,30m,30m sphere will create a sampling volume of a 30 meter diameter sphere.

 

A diagram of how spherical probes function (or, don't function as you may expect) while non-uniformly-scaled.

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.

Ultimately I came away with a Reflection Probe that made the interior I was working on just perfect, better over the course of a day cycle than anything I could ever hope to achieve in the EEP editor (but I'm no master of the EEP editor, and anyway it was a one-room rental so I couldn't tweak the region environment itself; nonetheless I was thrilled with the outcome—which turned out to be an even 3.0 for Ambiance in this particular setting.

Now, even with all that time and effort, I have zero confidence I'd know how to make a new Reflection Probe do what I wanted without another long interval of trial and error thrashing about. Maybe I'm slow, or maybe the feature is b0rked, or just maybe somebody needs to distill the technique into a tutorial to help dullards like me make sense of a feature that may be just a bit too tricky for its own good.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

28 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

He's talking about the guts of the system and some of the tweaks LL could make. It's techno talk.

Most residents also don't know what a vertex buffer is, a draw call or texel density means, but it hasn't stopped them enjoying mesh.

Yes, thank you. I do understand that this is "techno talk," not readily accessible to the untutored masses, and hence not really any of their concern.

I don't need to know what a "vertex buffer" is to make my mesh look semi-decent in-world.

Bu it does seem as though I'm going to need to know how to use EEP settings, interior lighting, and reflection probes in order to make my view of my own structures and parcel look as they are supposed to -- and that, moreover, I'm going to have to rely upon the hope that those who own the places I visit will likewise study up on this so that I'm not immersed in darkness visible when I go there.

My comment wasn't actually so much addressed to arton, who is welcome to use any language and address any audience he chooses. Rather, the point I was trying to make is that the "techno talk" is generally going to need to be framed in language that most of us can understand, or this is going to become a disaster.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I spent hours reading, re-reading, and experimenting to try to understand a few paragraphs on the wiki

Oh, excellent . . .

2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Now, even with all that time and effort, I have zero confidence I'd know how to make a new Reflection Probe do what I wanted without another long interval of trial and error thrashing about.

And again . . .

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Maybe I'm slow, or maybe the feature is b0rked, or just maybe somebody needs to distill the technique into a tutorial to help dullards like me make sense of a feature that may be just a bit too tricky for its own good.

YES!!!

[arton Rotaru]

This might help to understand what these reflection probes actually do.

https://learnopengl.com/PBR/IBL/Diffuse-irradiance

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

This might help to understand what these reflection probes actually do.

https://learnopengl.com/PBR/IBL/Diffuse-irradiance

You have got to be kidding . . .

I'm seriously wondering if you're trolling us now.

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Scylla Rhiadra]

/me waits for the inevitable someone to show up and assert that if residents aren't willing to take the time to learn this stuff, then they really don't belong in SL . . .