bulk gtlf materials

[Aniki Seetan]

Hi,

How to avoid sending the emissive texture when sending a batch of glTF textures that don't need it, because paying $10 for an all-black texture is pointless...

[ChinRey]

You can always upload the maps you actually need separately and assemble them into a PBR material inworld. That makes sense for materials that don't need Metallic-Roughness maps at least and let's face it, many materials don't. But I thought there was no additional fee for the emissive map. Am I wrong?

Edited December 21, 2023 by ChinRey

[Cube Republic]

15 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

You can always upload the maps you catually need separately and assemble them into a PBR material inworld. That makes sense for materials that don't need Metallic-Roughness maps at least and let's face it, many materials don't. But I thought there was no additional fee for the emissive map. Am I wrong?

Don't do this, it will compress your normal map.

Use this instead and leave your opacity and emissive void https://aiaicapta.in/gltf-packer/

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 hours ago, Cube Republic said:

Don't do this, it will compress your normal map.

How is that not the case when importing gltf materials?

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, Cube Republic said:

Don't do this, it will compress your normal map.

Are you saying normal maps use lossless compression if and only if they are imported as part of a PBR material? There's no mention of that in the documentation and it makes no sense. Where do you have that information from?

Edited December 21, 2023 by ChinRey

[arton Rotaru]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Are you saying normal maps use lossless compression if and only if they are imported as part of a PBR material? There's no mention of that in the documentation and it makes no sense. Where do you have that information from?

That's the case and I'm guilty for it being a thing now. 😇

Edited December 22, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[Zalificent Corvinus]

40 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's the case and I'm guilty for it being a thing now

So, you're pleading guilty to victimising people who texture INSIDE SL, and don't have a mortgage on substance Painter to premake their PBR materials.

Outstanding, EVERY other texture in SL gets JPEG2k lossy-ness, the Pretentious Bloody Rubbish gets a free pass on that.

[Aquila Kytori]

44 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's the case and I'm guilty for it being a thing now. 😇

Hurrah for arton ! 👏👏👏    

 

[Cube Republic]

You can pack gLTF materials easily with this free software

https://aiaicapta.in/gltf-packer/

No need for a mortgage, blender also exports gLTF materials.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.80/addons/io_scene_gltf2.html

 

Edit: as per the SL PBR wiki please use later versions of blender .

Edited December 22, 2023 by Cube Republic

[arton Rotaru]

15 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So, you're pleading guilty to victimising people who texture INSIDE SL, and don't have a mortgage on substance Painter to premake their PBR materials.

Outstanding, EVERY other texture in SL gets JPEG2k lossy-ness, the Pretentious Bloody Rubbish gets a free pass on that.

How do you create a normal map inside SL?
In this very thread is also a free tool linked that creates gltf materials with ease.

So what?

 

[Candide LeMay]

It makes perfect sense to only use lossless compression for normal maps when you import gltf. Otherwise there would have to be an override "yes this is a normal map, upload losslessly" during normal texture upload and guess what people would do...

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's the case and I'm guilty for it being a thing now. 😇

It's not my problem, I'm uploading so many textures these days I had to switch to Premium Plus anyway but you're saying that

1. If you want to convert an old style texture to glTF PBR you are supposed to reupload everything and
2. If you have a dozen or more color variants of a texture you are supposed to upload separate duplicates of the normal and metallic/roughness maps for each.

There's gonna be a helluva lot of duplicate assets to store, download, cache and render this way.

Of course, there's a fairly straightforward workaround for #2 but how many are going to use it or even known about it?

 

38 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:

It makes perfect sense to only use lossless compression for normal maps when you import gltf.

Yes and no. If LL is implementing true mip-mapping, it may well be time to retire the lossless compression. But if so, why only for normal maps? It makes just as much sense to switch to lossless compression for textures and diffuse/albedo and roughness maps.

Edited December 22, 2023 by ChinRey
typos

[Jenna Huntsman]

2 hours ago, Cube Republic said:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.80/addons/io_scene_gltf2.html

FYI, this version of Blender has major issues with glTF.

The wiki has a big warning regarding this:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Blender

[Cube Republic]

9 minutes ago, Jenna Huntsman said:

FYI, this version of Blender has major issues with glTF.

The wiki has a big warning regarding this:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Blender

Oops my bad, I didn't know. I'm using 4 myself, but I rarely make materials in blender. 

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll see about editing my original post.  

 

I've been finding the gLTF packer to be a great help. 

[arton Rotaru]

17 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

It's not my problem, I'm uploading so many textures these days I had to switch to Premium Plus anyway but you're saying that

1. If you want to convert an old style texture to glTF PBR you have to reuplaod everything and
2. If you have a dozen or more color variants of a texture you are suppsoed to uplaod duplicate normal and metallic/roughness maps for each

There's gonna be a helluva lot of duplicate assets to store, download, cache and render this way.

Of course, there's a fairly straightforward workaround for #2 but how many are going to use it or even known about it?

 

Yes and no. If LL is implementing true mip-mapping, it may well be time to retire the lossless compression. But if so, why only for normal maps? It makes just as much sense to switch to lossless compression for textures and diffuse/albedo and roughness maps.

Compression artifacts aren't that much of a problem for non normal maps. Normal maps though suffer really bad from compression.
For color variants only the required map(s) should be uploaded separately anyway. Regardless of lossless compression or not.

We do have true mipmap streaming now, but I doubt that lossy compression will go away any time soon.
It wasn't like that the Dev has said, "hell yeah, great idea, compression sucks anyway". But he was willing to test it during glTF development.

And well, here we are.

Of course even this feature can be abused badly, for no good reason though. That's probably why it hasn't been hung on the big bell yet, but it's not a secret either.

Edited December 22, 2023 by arton Rotaru

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

If you want to convert an old style texture to glTF PBR you are supposed to reupload everything and

Nah, you can create a PBR material asset inworld. You would only want to reupload the normal map as a glTF material if you really want/need lossless compression on the normal.
 

[Extrude Ragu]

14 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Are you saying normal maps use lossless compression if and only if they are imported as part of a PBR material?

Uploading textures individually or via bulk texture upload is always lossy. That was because up until PBR materials the loss was not really perceptible.

With PBR materials, the lossy normal map is very perceptible, so they made the gltf uploader upload lossless normal maps. Hence it's important to upload PBR materials as gltf files.

[ChinRey]

45 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

With PBR materials, the lossy normal map is very perceptible, so they made the gltf uploader upload lossless normal maps.

I haven't noticed such issues in any of the PBR materials I've made so far but I haven't done that many tests and it's all been brick, stone and wood textures that don't need that kind of precision. So I can hardly claim to know everything about it (yet). It does make sense then. Of course, if you want max optimization for performance, the way to do it is to try upload the maps separately first and switch to uploading a complete material if that doesn't work out but I wouldn't hold it against anybody if they're unwilling to make that effort for a fairly minor performance gain.

Btw, I assume I'm not the only one to realize that this means we now can upload any texture or surface map with lossless compression. Just put it in the normal map slot of a glTF material and off you go.

[arton Rotaru]

9 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I haven't noticed such issues in any of the PBR materials I've made so far but I haven't done that many tests and it's all been brick, stone and wood textures that don't need that kind of precision. So I can hardly claim to know everything about it (yet). It does make sense then. Of course, if you want max optimization for performance, the way to do it is to try upload the maps separately first and switch to uploading a complete material if that doesn't work out but I wouldn't hold it against anybody if they're unwilling to make that effort for a fairly minor performance gain.

Btw, I assume I'm not the only one to realize that this means we now can upload any texture or surface map with lossless compression. Just put it in the normal map slot of a glTF material and off you go.

The Jira I have put in is titled "Normal map compression artifacts ruin highly reflective smooth surfaces". That has always been a problem, even with Blinn-Phong materials.
For things that doesn't fall under this category, it's not that much of a problem.

Actually you would be better of uploading the normal compressed in such cases where it doesn't matter much.
With glTF upload though, there was the opportunity to do something against these artifacts. Like I said, it's clear that this feature can be abused badly. But it's really not worth it for the other map types.

[ChinRey]

11 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

The Jira I have put in is titled "Normal map compression artifacts ruin highly reflective smooth surfaces".

Oh, I see. Yes, the problem with high reflectivity and normal maps is well enough known.

[Extrude Ragu]

What I think would be nice is if the texture uploader would look at the average color of a texture and if it's close enough to 'normal map blue' upload it lossless

[Aniki Seetan]

Finally, I just found this option that I had not seen, I uncheck 'emissive' and it's good.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I cannot wait for this to be abused to hell...