Why I Don't Like PBR

[Theresa Tennyson]

10 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

None of which represents an actual response to my point.

Okay, coming right up...

21 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Which rather begs the question: why did they devote time and resources to developing something so badly borked that its best defense is that you don't need to use it?

They didn't because it isn't.

[Theresa Tennyson]

15 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I honestly did not understand it was an issue until I rezzed one of my common structures.  I had read about it but dismissed it with a *shrug* until then..

But seriously, what's the answer to my earlier post? Just add local lights? (These old pre-made scene builds did not have them, or need them until now.)

 

What kind of a build is it? Luna was talking about "Skyboxes are dark; chah..." before as if that was some sort of given. If there's some type of dome or enclosure around it you'd want it to transmit outside light or you're going to get the windowless room thing. The alternative would be to use an environment with a higher background light level, which is how things were set up before.

One of my alt relatives has a store that sells houses and she was using Catznip to take pictures of a newer model so it would look similar to the pre-PBR lighting of older models. It was striking how milky and flat everything looked after getting used to the PBR look.

[Qie Niangao]

The scope of reflection may be how "reflection probes" got their name, but that's really not where they're basically indispensable, which is controlling (to some degree) how much damage an EEP setting can do to various scenes when viewed in a PBR viewer.

That's of practical significance because in SL one EEP setting may apply to a whole region or at least a bunch of distinct structures.

But wait: the EEP gets revenge! It can partially neuter the Ambiance setting of all reflection probes in that environment. This too might even be practically useful, but this lighting tit-for-tat is anything but intuitive.

[Love Zhaoying]

19 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

What kind of a build is it? Luna was talking about "Skyboxes are dark; chah..."

Prim build on land.  Either "buildings with transparent windows", or "closed box buildings" (sometimes with no windows).

The builds I use are "Paradise Blanket" builds, primarily.  (But have many others that will have the exact same issues.)

When I start my separate thread on this (unless someone gives the "answer" here), I'll give and show specific examples. I think that lately, I've got my light set to "mid-day" to defeat the "stuck in the dark" issue.

 

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Porky Gorky said:

as I have 100% control of the environment then the PBR will work

And therein lies the problem.  Each creator will build their creations with their own EEP settings.  Not the ones I use or the ones you use or the ones anyone else uses.  But I don't like the one they use? 

While some creators are jumping on this bandwagon and then including THEIR EEP settings so you can see how their creation is intended to look, I think they're going to find out that down the line, people will not be buying as much when there are 374839 items in their home and each requires a different EEP to look good.   How the heck does that seem like a good idea?

[Chic Aeon]

12 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

And therein lies the problem.  Each creator will build their creations with their own EEP settings.  Not the ones I use or the ones you use or the ones anyone else uses.  But I don't like the one they use? 

While some creators are jumping on this bandwagon and then including THEIR EEP settings so you can see how their creation is intended to look, I think they're going to find out that down the line, people will not be buying as much when there are 374839 items in their home and each requires a different EEP to look good.   How the heck does that seem like a good idea?

And "thus" I perceive a problem and have from the beginning.  Most of the creators I chat with are either waiting to see OR making a PBR items along side their regular items.  And some, like me, don't plan on implementing at all.  As long as your current items look good under PBR  then --- as long as you are happy with your workflow --- why change?  Honestly some of the PBR items made by the creators doing both versions do not look as good (to me) as the legacy baked and painted textures we have had for many years -- and they agree.   

So there MAY not be much of a change overall.   We will see.  

[Gabriele Graves]

33 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

And therein lies the problem.  Each creator will build their creations with their own EEP settings.  Not the ones I use or the ones you use or the ones anyone else uses.  But I don't like the one they use? 

While some creators are jumping on this bandwagon and then including THEIR EEP settings so you can see how their creation is intended to look, I think they're going to find out that down the line, people will not be buying as much when there are 374839 items in their home and each requires a different EEP to look good.   How the heck does that seem like a good idea?

The only reason this isn't a problem without PBR though is that most items use baked shadows/lighting.  If most creators had been using blinn-phong materials/EEP you would have the same kinds of issues.

Edited February 15 by Gabriele Graves
too little coffee

[Arielle Popstar]

11 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

And "thus" I perceive a problem and have from the beginning.  Most of the creators I chat with are either waiting to see OR making a PBR items along side their regular items.  And some, like me, don't plan on implementing at all.  As long as your current items look good under PBR  then --- as long as you are happy with your workflow --- why change?  Honestly some of the PBR items made by the creators doing both versions do not look as good (to me) as the legacy baked and painted textures we have had for many years -- and they agree.   

So there MAY not be much of a change overall.   We will see.  

The problem as I see it is not so much the PBR itself but the tendency of Creators to make their product No Mod so that those of us who do start to play with the prb settings, will not have the option of making changes if required.

[Porky Gorky]

47 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I think they're going to find out that down the line, people will not be buying as much when there are 374839 items in their home and each requires a different EEP to look good.   How the heck does that seem like a good idea?

I think a reasonable solution to the problem is for LL to deploy a new decent, default grid wide EEP setting that doesn't suck like the current one. We need a base standard default lighting model that both PBR and BP creators/users are reasonably happy with. This should offer consistency for creators and users and consistency is important for physical based rendering, People are still free to adjust their own EEP settings and creators are still free to support those niche requirements. Just give us an acceptable and consistent base standard to work from.

Edited February 15 by Porky Gorky

[Chic Aeon]

I may have said this already but maybe on the other PBR thread. Not sure.

PBR IS the industry standard. So true.  BUT the games using PBR are (mostly at least) produced by a company with hired professional help. ALSO and more importantly those games have control of the game  environment (for the most part again).  

In Sansar where we had PBR (I opted out and didn't use) it worked BECAUSE we controlled the atmosphere and lighting.  Visitors saw ONLY what individual creators wanted them to see and how we wanted them to see it.  

 

These millions of creators issue (well a lot anyway) has been problematic historically. When materials (the old ones of normal specular etc) came on there was the same problem. Things looked good in SOME lighting and horrid in others.     So once again people have to adjust to something that works for them.  

 

I agree that buying a no mod PBR item without seeing it inworld at least  could cause major disappointment.  AND at the moment the adjustments that people are supposed to be able to make really aren't working anyway.  

[Conifer Dada]

Slightly off-topic, but as I've said several times, the PBR viewer had very poor performance (for me) - probably not caused by PBR itself apparently, but some other change on the viewer.

Anyway - a happy ending . . .  I downloaded the Alchemy viewer and it's amazing - I can go clubbing again. 🙂

[AmeliaJ08]

21 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:

Slightly off-topic, but as I've said several times, the PBR viewer had very poor performance (for me) - probably not caused by PBR itself apparently, but some other change on the viewer.

Anyway - a happy ending . . .  I downloaded the Alchemy viewer and it's amazing - I can go clubbing again. 🙂

Weirdly I find the PBR viewer to perform significantly better... I was having some weird performance issues with current release Firestorm that I could not resolve but using the PBR Alpha brought performance up to where it should be.

Can't explain it at all, I even use the same graphic preference (as much as possible, PBR features enabled in the alpha of course).

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

58 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Weirdly I find the PBR viewer to perform significantly better... I was having some weird performance issues with current release Firestorm that I could not resolve but using the PBR Alpha brought performance up to where it should be.

Can't explain it at all, I even use the same graphic preference (as much as possible, PBR features enabled in the alpha of course).

 

I think it entirely depends on if you are limited by your CPU or your GPU with performance. PBR is going to use your GPU more effectively, so if the GPU is starving for data and not being used entirely then PBR is going to be an improvement. If your GPU is already struggling with old viewers, PBR is going to be worse since it's doing so much more stuff. Just my theory at the moment.

[AmeliaJ08]

10 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I think it entirely depends on if you are limited by your CPU or your GPU with performance. PBR is going to use your GPU more effectively, so if the GPU is starving for data and not being used entirely then PBR is going to be an improvement. If your GPU is already struggling with old viewers, PBR is going to be worse since it's doing so much more stuff. Just my theory at the moment.

I'm putting it down to something else, I was getting worse performance with a GTX1080 than I was with a GTX1650Ti for some weird reason, in Firestorm only of course. Everything else performed as expected.

PBR Alpha more than doubled the frame rate in the same situation. Even weirder is that a GTX1060 I also have tested performs as expected (slightly better than the 1650Ti), my issue was limited to the 1080.

Not a huge deal since I quite like the PBR alpha and am using it happily with no issues but something about the hardware really seems to mess with the current release Firestorm for me and I can't begin to work out what it is.

I now have a 1070 to test with since I'm collecting 10 series cards like they're pokemon cards right now, I'll log in on release Firestorm tonight to see what it does.

Edited February 18 by AmeliaJ08

[Charlotte Bartlett]

On 2/15/2024 at 1:50 AM, Porky Gorky said:

 

 

Needing to use Reflection Probes in interior spaces is a real hindrance. Completely ignoring the issue of needing lots of additional lighting, using the probes seems to be extremely restrictive. We have either a sphere or cube to choose from and they can be scaled and rotated and that is it. You can’t seem to overlap them either without undesired results. So if you want to use them in a conventional house with rectangular rooms they work ok. But what about tapered walls, curved walls or a curved roof or even just a corner that is not a right angle?

Maybe I am missing the bleeding obvious here and I really hope I am, but it seems to me this completely stifles creativity when creating PBR buildings and designs will need to be restricted in order to conform to the limitations of the Reflection Probe’s shape.

Also, is any creator who sells PBR prefab buildings expected to include the Reflection Probes positioned into the final product? It would seem like the right thing to do and would offer the best result for the end users. 

I recommend reading the Unity guide for probes.  Complex with overlapping for spheres works.   Rectangular isn’t there yet - I had an open Jira (before the migration) based on % overlap needed etc for complex.

I am testing organic shapes now.

Also don’t overthink the furniture and avatar stuff.  I have been batching mod EEPs with houses to give folk a starting point to create their own as let’s face it everybody will have their own settings.  But at least it gives a start.  Customers range from significantly savvy who will do complex mods and use those EEPs to create amazing effects to those who will just rez out of the box and leave it at that.  Furniture unless somebody has gone crazy with the “shine” tends to work well with the EEP I have been batching - including if you mix legacy and PBR items in a scene. 
 

i went in early to PBR items, purely as from many years of experience, it is better for me to identify the bugs I find and get them in the LL queue whilst they are active on the project.  I have had multiple of the ones so far resolved - LL have been engaged and super fast and this I hope will help other creators who won’t have to overcome them too.    There are still a “lot” to go.

To help bridge the gap I still provide a legacy “baked” version for those who prefer it. But honestly when done right (considering the limitations, issues and variances) a PBR house can look great.    So hope this encourages you to give it another go. I like problem solving so perhaps this isn’t for everybody.

Is it perfect god no.  ACES kills me.  But is it here to stay - yes, so personally I have found it fun to play with (with the mindset this is SL not a professional studio and whatever approach you take there are 20 more steps involved than there should be) so it is ALWAYS about the “workarounds” to find your happy middle ground in my opinion.  

We are now up to 12pct of customers using PBR so still a small number but it is slowly growing.  

 

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

13 hours ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

To help bridge the gap I still provide a legacy “baked” version for those who prefer it. But honestly when done right (considering the limitations, issues and variances) a PBR house can look great.  

This is probably off-topic, but I guess I need some remedial PBR training, having finally used some PBR materials on a complex structure and realizing I don't know "best practices" and I'm a little fuzzy on the tech, too.

It starts simple: I want to tile PBR materials on walls and floors. The walls in particular have real 3D features (columns, alcoves, etc.) that should naturally have an occlusive effect. For the life of me, I see no effect of enabling SSAO regardless of viewer or driver settings, so I guess I have to bake that occlusion into the red channel of the metallic-roughness-occlusion map. It's easy enough to do by subtracting the blackness of a greyscale AO-map from whatever occlusion is in the tiled Materials…

… so I do that and it looks pretty good, but doing it this way means I have lost the resolution advantage of tiling those source PBR materials: I had to tile them onto a final-resolution image before I could apply the structure-level occlusion, so a 3x3 tiling reduces effective resolution by a factor of nine. Worse, if the same tiled materials are used on different walls with different structural occlusion effects, I have to make a separate high rez material for each of them, a reversion to the download and memory bloat of unique per-face textures.

So I went to Scarlett Creative to inspect the two PBR models I found (search aided by highlighting reflection probes 😛 ) and from superficial inspection it appears they, too, use the baked occlusion approach along with other adjustments to the tiled textures.

I really hope there's a better way to do this.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I really hope there's a better way to do this.

Reflection probes are NOT "lights", they are image driven ambient based FAKE lighting, and IBL has a tendency to wash out shadows/occlusion.

 

The "better" way to do what you are asking would be to have the flat base wall as a tiled material "wall stucco 01", and have the columns and alcoves as separate faces with their own materials "wall alcove 01" and "wall column 01", which would include a narrow alpha blended border with it's occluded edge, which overlaps the hole cut in the flat tiled texture wall.

 

So you'd need a differently made model, made specifically for that PBR technique. Works great in pro-made games, not so much in amateur content.

 

You've been given a fustercluck coded edition of a cut down version of HALF a very basic PBR system, with NO decent documentation, and thrown out the back of the aircraft with no parachute with the words "Learn to fly really quickly!".

 

There are/were building kits in SL for medieval tunnels etc., which were made to use SEAMLESS tiled textures, for the walls and columns, but which had separate surfaces for the alpha blended "occlusion shadows" in the corners between the masonry surfaces. Those would work well with a careful PBR texturing with tiled seamless masonry materials, and just leave the occlusion layers with their own "shadow" material, tiled in one direction only.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So you'd need a differently made model, made specifically for that PBR technique. Works great in pro-made games, not so much in amateur content.

It took me a few readings to understand the "narrow alpha blended border with it's occluded edge" but yeah, if this were my own model, I can see how that would solve the problem. As a one-off, the best compromise I can concoct is essentially a shadow prim on top of the pretty tiled-Material surfaces on those that need the high resolution detail but lack structure-scale occlusion. It's horridly inelegant but actually looks pretty good so far.

[Charlotte Bartlett]

13 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

This is probably off-topic, but I guess I need some remedial PBR training, having finally used some PBR materials on a complex structure and realizing I don't know "best practices" and I'm a little fuzzy on the tech, too.

It starts simple: I want to tile PBR materials on walls and floors. The walls in particular have real 3D features (columns, alcoves, etc.) that should naturally have an occlusive effect. For the life of me, I see no effect of enabling SSAO regardless of viewer or driver settings, so I guess I have to bake that occlusion into the red channel of the metallic-roughness-occlusion map. It's easy enough to do by subtracting the blackness of a greyscale AO-map from whatever occlusion is in the tiled Materials…

… so I do that and it looks pretty good, but doing it this way means I have lost the resolution advantage of tiling those source PBR materials: I had to tile them onto a final-resolution image before I could apply the structure-level occlusion, so a 3x3 tiling reduces effective resolution by a factor of nine. Worse, if the same tiled materials are used on different walls with different structural occlusion effects, I have to make a separate high rez material for each of them, a reversion to the download and memory bloat of unique per-face textures.

So I went to Scarlett Creative to inspect the two PBR models I found (search aided by highlighting reflection probes 😛 ) and from superficial inspection it appears they, too, use the baked occlusion approach along with other adjustments to the tiled textures.

I really hope there's a better way to do this.

There has to be a better way.   I want to tile and keep resolution.  I am sitting in the camp of will release free updates as best practice evolves. 

[Chic Aeon]

9 minutes ago, Charlotte Bartlett said:

There has to be a better way.   I want to tile and keep resolution.  I am sitting in the camp of will release free updates as best practice evolves. 

Haven't really been following this conversation closely (just the clippets that show up on the list) but I had to smile at the best practices comment. 

We asked (well "I" and a few others) asked in SANSAR over and OVER again for a "best practices --- even o far as uploading of texture size (at one time you could upload a 4096 x 4096 png but it was down to 2048 when I arrived).  There was NEVER during my years there any info on best practices.  

 

At least with the PBR they did worn folks to put on legacy textures for the 75 percent of folks that didn't have PBR yet.    Not everyone read, researched or listen though so we have some messiness.  

 

While I have done lots of experiments I have no inclination to adopt PBR in my future builds but I might rethink that in a year.  I applaud those of you who are doing the alpha - beta (depending  on your point of view) testing.  LL as always needs some of the masses to actually test to see what is not working :D.

 

 

Edited February 21 by Chic Aeon
spelling

[Scylla Rhiadra]

10 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The "better" way to do what you are asking would be to have the flat base wall as a tiled material "wall stucco 01", and have the columns and alcoves as separate faces with their own materials "wall alcove 01" and "wall column 01", which would include a narrow alpha blended border with it's occluded edge, which overlaps the hole cut in the flat tiled texture wall.

it took me a minute to work out what you and Qie were addressing here (cuz "rank amateur").

The possibility of this never even occurred to me. It'd be a lot of work, but it would be a huge advance in some ways, technically (because some of the textures would still be tiled) and in terms of realism.

I can't even imagine this ever happening here though.

ETA: In somewhat related news, got into a long and frustrating convo in the Phoenix-Firestorm Preview group today with a creator who apparently didn't really understand the whole idea of tiling (which she kept confusing with "UV") because she did all her work in Blender and really had no idea of the procedures for building and texturing in-world. The current PBR system in SL was not made with in-world builders in mind.

Edited February 21 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Zalificent Corvinus]

5 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

he possibility of this never even occurred to me. It'd be a lot of work, but it would be a huge advance in some ways, technically (because some of the textures would still be tiled) and in terms of realism.

I can't even imagine this ever happening here though.

I started, 8 years ago, on a sim which had under ground dungeon-y tunnels and rooms for it's own in-sim portal park.

All the tunnel pieces were basically a kit, that used this exact method an L shaped strip around all the recessed surfaces, with a low res tiled-in-one-axis-only "shadow" texture, with the main panels using stock seamless stone.

The Forums own @Chaser Zaks has/had a full perm kit of mesh shapes called "Building Blocks" which includes partial inside out cubes, such as 2 sides of an inside out cube ( L shape ), that you can stretch and texture to make shadow trims for large tiled flat wall panels where they meet floor or ceiling or columns.

 

15 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

a creator who apparently didn't really understand the whole idea of tiling (which she kept confusing with "UV") because she did all her work in Blender and really had no idea of the procedures for building and texturing in-world.

Pretty much every modelling app supports the concept of TILED UV's. People are obsessed with laying every piece of the mesh out as little "islands", because they don't KNOW any better, then they scream that they NEED 4k textures so they can get all the wooden skirting boards on the same map with enough detail not to look sh*te, when they could have had better looking wood with a seamless 512, tiled along the length of the skirting boards or even a 256 x 1024 tiled along the length, with different offsets on the other axis for the diffuse/normal/spec sections of the texture at 256x256, ONE texture for all three element of the ALM material, or now 4 elements of a PBR mat texture, IF they understood tiling and offsets, and NON synced offsets for different channels.

 

Imagine that, using a single 256 x 1024 PBR material for all the wooden strips in an entire house, every skirting board, door frame, bannister rail, etc, in the entire house, instead of half a dozen 1024 x 1024 similar materials each with 4 maps.

 

A friend and I, as part of a build for a club, were asked to try and salvage some ancient prim-to-mesh bad building with over 250 MB of RAM for it's textures, over 140 of them not counting the normals and speculars.

We edited it down, colour coding all the faces by "type", floor boards, wooden rails, etc, and got it down to 40 ALM-Mats all using seamless textures.

From 140 materials to 40, though intelligent scaling and tiling of seamless textures. AND it looked better..

[Porky Gorky]

On 2/19/2024 at 11:47 PM, Charlotte Bartlett said:

I recommend reading the Unity guide for probes.  Complex with overlapping for spheres works.   Rectangular isn’t there yet - I had an open Jira (before the migration) based on % overlap needed etc for complex.

I am testing organic shapes now.

Hi @Charlotte Bartlett thanks for the encouragement / pep talk. It's genuinly appreciated.

I’ve been testing sphere probes in non rectangular interior spaces and I am achieving more acceptable results. Spheres seem to allow some level of overlapping. Do you know how overlapping probes work in SL with regards to their importance? We can’t assign importance values to probes. Unity documentation says “By default, Unity calculates the intersection between the reflective object’s bounding box and each of the overlapping probe zones; the zone which has the largest volume of intersection with the bounding box is the one that will be selected.” Do you know if this how it works in SL?

Also I seem to be using a lot more probes, do you know how costly probes are on performance? I’ve used many and haven't noticed any performance loss, but I am using a workstation built for rendering, so not your average rig.

Thanks

Edited February 21 by Porky Gorky

[Porky Gorky]

19 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The "better" way to do what you are asking would be to have the flat base wall as a tiled material "wall stucco 01", and have the columns and alcoves as separate faces with their own materials "wall alcove 01" and "wall column 01", which would include a narrow alpha blended border with it's occluded edge, which overlaps the hole cut in the flat tiled texture wall.

I’m not completely sure I understand this, which I'm sure is due to my brain and not your explanation.

The way I interpret this is to have 2 layers of polygons, a base layer with the high resolution tiled PBR materials and then another layer, offset slightly in front of the base layer which contains the occlusion shadows, blending into the alpha. So essentially layering shadows on top of tiled surfaces using extra polygons? Is that the gist?

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

The way I interpret this is to have 2 layers of polygons, a base layer with the high resolution tiled PBR materials and then another layer, offset slightly in front of the base layer which contains the occlusion shadows, blending into the alpha. So essentially layering shadows on top of tiled surfaces using extra polygons? Is that the gist?

the occlusion layer doesn't cover the whole surface, it's an L section strip, running along the corner join between say a wall, and a column, it has the occlusion shadow for the corner on it, transparent at left and right edges, opaque in the center, 1 repeat across the width of the L, section strip, multiple repeats along the length of the L section strip.

 

Like a glazing bead covering the place where glass meets frame, so to speak.

 

So the "corner occlusion" texture can be a very low resolution, and letting you use stock seamless textures across the main surfaces ( wall/column ).

 

Hmm, games mod level design, decals, right ?

You don't make 20 copies of the wall texture, you make alpha blended decal patches and place those OVER the wall where you need a non-wall detail, like a sign, or a blood stain, whatever. I'm sure Unity has such things.