Why I Don't Like PBR

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

7 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You are now stuck with a PBR-ized thing

 It's purely a viewer's shortcoming.

Blinn-Phong materials and PBR materials can be altered without the need for removing anything at any time. In the official viewer you can't do it in Edit (right now, that's definitely a problem), but with scripts you can and I'm pretty sure in future viewers you can do it in Edit too. (I'm pretty sure the good people at Firestorm are working on it already.)

Below, some proof. One and the same object as seen with a PBR viewer (left) and with Firestorm (right). Inside is a script that will toggle between a red and a green Blinn-Phong material when the object is touched.

Edited January 2 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Have a look at the SL PBR wiki page. Do you really think all that information there would be appropriate for a blog post announcing a new feature?

In fairness to Prok, the SL PBR wiki page is not exactly "user friendly," meaning that, you're right, it can't be easily distilled into a blog, but is also going to leave a lot of people's heads spinning. And it omits important things.

I was in the Phoenix-Firestorm test group chat last night; lots of people enthusing about how great PBR looked on their supersonic gaming computers, and one or two, including one creator, asking essentially the same question as Prok: how do you have both legacy textures and PBR on an object? I explained that you needed to add the legacy textures first. I doubt that any of them had read the wiki, but even if they had, it doesn't actually TELL you that.

What is required is something between a breezy "ISN'T PBR WONDERFUL?!!?!?!?" blog post, and the near techno-babble of the wiki: a simplified, step-by-step manual on how to actually do things using PBR and reflection probes. As Prok notes above, most residents don't know, and won't care, that legacy textures are now called "Blinn-Phong": they might well want to know how to texture a prim using both systems, and they're going to want that information in a form that doesn't assume a knowledge of the difference between "forward rendering" and whatever we're using now.

Edited January 2 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Love Zhaoying]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In fairness to Prok, the SL PBR wiki page is not exactly "user friendly,"

Also in fairness, Prok said they never heard of Blinn-Phong. How could they miss all the Forum posts about BP lately? Who doesn't read all the Forum posts, every day??

[arton Rotaru]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In fairness to Prok, the SL PBR wiki page is not exactly "user friendly," meaning that, you're right, it can't be easily distilled into a blog, but is also going to leave a lot of people's heads spinning. And it omits important things.

I was in the Phoenix-Firestorm test group chat last night; lots of people enthusing about how great PBR looked on their supersonic gaming computers, and one or two, including one creator, asking essentially the same question as Prok: how do you have both legacy textures and PBR on an object? I explained that you needed to add the legacy textures first. I doubt that any of them had read the wiki, but even if they had, it doesn't actually TELL you that.

What is required is something between a breezy "ISN'T PBR WONDERFUL?!!?!?!?" blog post, and the near techno-babble of the wiki: a simplified, step-by-step manual on how to actually doing things using PBR and reflection probes. As Prok notes above, most residents don't know, and won't care, that legacy textures are now called "Blinn-Phong": they might well want to know how to texture a prim using both systems, and they're going to want that information in a form that doesn't assume a knowledge of the difference between "forward rendering" and whatever we're using now.

That's why we are here, helping. Answering questions, trying to explain things in layman terms. The wiki is useful at least for those who are going to make tutorials, videos etc. to have a reference guide to how things work. The wiki page is mostly filled by residents as well. It's certainly not complete, or a perfect guide on "how to's".

You could argue that all of that should have been in place perfectly fine (tutorials, guides etc.) before the viewer would have been released. But c'mon, that's not how things go and never will be. Expecting that is somewhat naive.

In the official viewer Blinn-Phong has been changed to "Textures" again, as in the old viewers. Some complained it should remain Blinn-Phong, because that would be the appropriate term.
But I can see why the Lab did change that back to "Textures". Having 2 new material terms in that release would be even more confusing to the regular resident.

All this are somewhat expected teething problems, though. They will go away soon.

Edited January 2 by arton Rotaru

[Flea Yatsenko]

I don't know how they did such a good job making uploading PBR materials intuitive and easy and the rest of the system just kind of falls apart as far as figuring out what to do. Wiki page being confusing for a builder who doesn't know anything about PBR is a sure fire way to make sure lots of people are using PBR incorrectly and we end up with another spec/norm (Blinn Phong) debacle where people are using the wrong types of maps and all sorts of stuff. You can shriek about RTFM all day long but if people RTFM and it doesn't help them understand what they need to do then it's not really the user's fault. And honestly someone who just joined SL and wants to build and has zero experience with 3d content creation is going to be completely confused by the wiki pages for spec/norm and PBR. And now we are going between calling spec/norm blinn phong, material, spec/norm and now going between PBR material and Material and whatever. Which is gonna make trying to learn about this stuff by searching a nightmare for new users.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's why we are here, helping. Answering questions, trying to explain things in layman terms. The wiki is useful at least for those who are going to make tutorials, videos etc. to have a reference guide to how things work. The wiki page is mostly filled by residents as well. It's certainly not complete, or a perfect guide on "how to's".

You could argue that all of that should have been in place perfectly fine (tutorials, guides etc.) before the viewer would have been released. But c'mon, that's not how things go and never will be. Expecting that is somewhat naive.

In the official viewer Blinn-Phong has been changed to "Textures" again, as in the old viewers. Some complained it should remain Blinn-Phong, because that would be the appropriate term.
But I can see why the Lab did change that back to "Textures". Having 2 new material terms in that release would be even more confusing to the regular resident.

All this are somewhat expected teething problems, though. They will go away soon.

Come on.

On the basis of what I've learned here and elsewhere, *I* could write up a simple guide in 20 minutes or so.

SL literally exists because of user-generated content: NONE of this stuff is going to actually happen unless the people who produce and use that content know how to do it.

This is just typical LL.

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

This is just typical LL.

Yeah, and it's unlikely that it will ever change. Hence, I used the term naive in my previous reply.

They are relying on their users on many fronts.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

13 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Yeah, and it's unlikely that it will ever change. Hence, I used the term naive in my previous reply.

They are relying on their users on many fronts.

Which is why the standards for mesh and texturing are such a mess in SL.

As Flea notes, the lack of clear, consistent, standard-setting guidelines in this instance is just going to replicate that situation with regards to PBR. People are going to be loading the wrong kinds of materials into the wrong boxes, because they won't know the difference between ARM/ORM and "Metallic" or "Occlusion" or "Roughness," and they'll be using old diffuse textures with baked-in shadows for Base Color. Immense kudos to Charlotte for taking the time to learn the ins-and-outs, and experiment. A lot of people won't have that kind of patience.

[arton Rotaru]

12 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Which is why the standards for mesh and texturing are such a mess in SL.

As Flea notes, the lack of clear, consistent, standard-setting guidelines in this instance is just going to replicate that situation with regards to PBR. People are going to be loading the wrong kinds of materials into the wrong boxes, because they won't know the difference between ARM/ORM and "Metallic" or "Occlusion" or "Roughness," and they'll be using old diffuse textures with baked-in shadows for Base Color. Immense kudos to Charlotte for taking the time to learn the ins-and-outs, and experiment. A lot of people won't have that kind of patience.

As I'm long enough around, I certainly do know all that, and I do aggree with all of that as well.

However, I do have a more relaxed view on all this. We will indeed see all kinds of cruel stuff appearing on the grid. But, so what? I won't have to spend any L$ on those if I don't want to.

Your world, your imagination is still the biggest strength of SL IMO.

Edited January 2 by arton Rotaru

[Qie Niangao]

6 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

I won't have to spend any L$ on those if I don't want to.

We're going to need a PBR-inspection personal Experience EEP "flashlight" and cam-control tool to buy furniture. (Not only furniture, and not only PBR, but I'm not entirely joking.)

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

We're going to need a PBR-inspection personal Experience EEP "flashlight" and cam-control tool to buy furniture. (Not only furniture, and not only PBR, but I'm not entirely joking.)

Next, there will be clubs that kick you out if you're not wearing PBR, just like mesh..

@Qie NiangaoETA: Not for Platypi..

 

Edited January 2 by Love Zhaoying

[Orwar]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

We're going to need a PBR-inspection personal Experience EEP "flashlight" and cam-control tool to buy furniture.

   I already kind of did that .. How an object looks in a bright light that one may use whilst out and about shopping/exploring or tinkering with stuff (like Neutral or Nam's Optimal Skin & Prim) and how it looks in the sky setting I actually use at home with local lights can be very different (especially since subtle shine is nigh-impossible to see if the entire scene is flooded with ambient light). My solution has always been to just swap the sky setting to what I use at home (a dark one!), and if the local lighting on the display is insufficient to actually see the materials look, I've got attachable lighting prims that I can move around the object to see how the materials react to them. Annnd I do cam back and forth to see when and how stuff deforms - there are few frustrations when it comes to furnishing your home as taking a step back to see how it all came together only for the bookshelves at the back wall to turn into an imploded hedgehog of stray triangles.

   .. But then I guess I'm quite nit-picky.

[arton Rotaru]

43 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

We're going to need a PBR-inspection personal Experience EEP "flashlight" and cam-control tool to buy furniture. (Not only furniture, and not only PBR, but I'm not entirely joking.)

Once we have full glTF support, the plan is to have the MP showing the models like in Sketchfab with it's Model Inspector. I know, we aren't there yet, but one can dream, right. 😇

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, arton Rotaru said:

Once we have full glTF support, the plan is to have the MP showing the models like in Sketchfab with it's Model Inspector. I know, we aren't there yet, but one can dream, right. 😇

..under different lighting conditions!

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

 It's purely a viewer's shortcoming.

Blinn-Phong materials and PBR materials can be altered without the need for removing anything at any time. In the official viewer you can't do it in Edit (right now, that's definitely a problem), but with scripts you can and I'm pretty sure in future viewers you can do it in Edit too. (I'm pretty sure the good people at Firestorm are working on it already.)

Below, some proof. One and the same object as seen with a PBR viewer (left) and with Firestorm (right). Inside is a script that will toggle between a red and a green Blinn-Phong material when the object is touched.

So the official viewer of Second Life -- which I definitely prefer for many historical and practical current reasons -- does not work so well with LL's new shiny, PBR.

It works better on Firestorm, as many things do (starting with Search, which thank God, was rescued by Cinders back in the day on Firestorm).

And...It will work better if I add to the script load on my already heavily loaded Mainland regions.

OK, got it.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Also in fairness, Prok said they never heard of Blinn-Phong. How could they miss all the Forum posts about BP lately? Who doesn't read all the Forum posts, every day??

I let weeks go by without reading your forums, dear.

I didn't "read down into" the one thread on PBR. There aren't "scads".

One can look up Blinn-Phong. I'm glad he/they are getting credit for his work.

Which is more than you can say for lots of things in SL.

Plus a lot of people who don't have much going on in their lives rn can get a certain frisson of superiority over others because they know this double-barreled exotic nerd term, right up there with Epstein-Barr and Anton-Babinski syndrome (quite common in SL).

 

Edited January 2 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

In fairness to Prok, the SL PBR wiki page is not exactly "user friendly," meaning that, you're right, it can't be easily distilled into a blog, but is also going to leave a lot of people's heads spinning. And it omits important things.

I was in the Phoenix-Firestorm test group chat last night; lots of people enthusing about how great PBR looked on their supersonic gaming computers, and one or two, including one creator, asking essentially the same question as Prok: how do you have both legacy textures and PBR on an object? I explained that you needed to add the legacy textures first. I doubt that any of them had read the wiki, but even if they had, it doesn't actually TELL you that.

What is required is something between a breezy "ISN'T PBR WONDERFUL?!!?!?!?" blog post, and the near techno-babble of the wiki: a simplified, step-by-step manual on how to actually do things using PBR and reflection probes. As Prok notes above, most residents don't know, and won't care, that legacy textures are now called "Blinn-Phong": they might well want to know how to texture a prim using both systems, and they're going to want that information in a form that doesn't assume a knowledge of the difference between "forward rendering" and whatever we're using now.

In fairness, the Black Forest supplied such a tutorial, touted by Lindens, but with its brutalist approach in the first graph, I gave it a pass.

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's why we are here, helping. Answering questions, trying to explain things in layman terms. The wiki is useful at least for those who are going to make tutorials, videos etc. to have a reference guide to how things work. The wiki page is mostly filled by residents as well. It's certainly not complete, or a perfect guide on "how to's".

You could argue that all of that should have been in place perfectly fine (tutorials, guides etc.) before the viewer would have been released. But c'mon, that's not how things go and never will be. Expecting that is somewhat naive.

In the official viewer Blinn-Phong has been changed to "Textures" again, as in the old viewers. Some complained it should remain Blinn-Phong, because that would be the appropriate term.
But I can see why the Lab did change that back to "Textures". Having 2 new material terms in that release would be even more confusing to the regular resident.

All this are somewhat expected teething problems, though. They will go away soon.

Um, we're not talking about wiki-woos, we're talking about one line in a blog that says:

WARNING: TEST ON A PRIM FIRST AS YOU CANNOT REMOVE PBR TEXTURES EASILY ONCE APPLIED.

That's all. That.

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

One thing I noticed is that using the Materials in the Library folder directly from the Library folder (without making copies in "My Inventory") pops up the warning "We cannot display a preview of this material because it is no-copy, no-transfer, and/or no-modify." I understand what's happening there, but it's pretty confusing, and not something that happens with ol' timey Library textures.

I'm long, long used to that silliness in the library now and I push past it.

I'm actually glad things in the Library tend to be on no-transfer now.

For years and years, the Lindens put all the Library items not only on all perms, but on "share."

This created endless griefing vectors not only with Philip's party hat, making it appear that he had created a grief object; your own library object, left outdoors, could be swiped and it could be made to appear that YOU created a griefing object.

So it's good they closed off that loophole, I suppose, although it's too bad all the things in the library aren't on full mod, especially the avatars and clothing, which can be hideous otherwise.

[arton Rotaru]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Um, we're not talking about wiki-woos, we're talking about one line in a blog that says:

WARNING: TEST ON A PRIM FIRST AS YOU CANNOT REMOVE PBR TEXTURES EASILY ONCE APPLIED.

That's all. That.

I get ya!
But it's actually not that hard to remove a PBR material as you know by now. In fact you can remove the materials easily.

And spreading fear and, uncertainty on an announcement of a new shiny is rather uncommon.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, arton Rotaru said:

I get ya!
But it's actually not that hard to remove a PBR material as you know by now. In fact you can remove the materials easily.

And spreading fear and, uncertainty on an announcement of a new shiny is rather uncommon.

 

Nope. I am going to go on posting on social media and warning my tenants about this because it is NOT easy, NOT intuitive, and a general PITA.

If I DON'T do that, my customers will soon be saying YOUR LAND IS MAKING MY THING SHINY AND I CAN'T TAKE IT OFF *REFUND*

If more of you were in high-contact business with low-rent customers, you'd be less cocky and assured about all things LL. 

Having a Marketplace page is not the same thing as being in business inworld although I do appreciate binoculars that are far less land impact than the one I've had for years and just deleted, let's hope I can resize it. (I don't care about Materials and most people don't.)

[arton Rotaru]

4 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Nope. I am going to go on posting on social media and warning my tenants about this because it is NOT easy, NOT intuitive, and a general PITA.

If I DON'T do that, my customers will soon be saying YOUR LAND IS MAKING MY THING SHINY AND I CAN'T TAKE IT OFF *REFUND*

If more of you were in high-contact business with low-rent customers, you'd be less cocky and assured about all things LL. 

Having a Marketplace page is not the same thing as being in business inworld although I do appreciate binoculars that are far less land impact than the one I've had for years and just deleted, let's hope I can resize it. (I don't care about Materials and most people don't.)

That's all fine and such!

You know, all I'm saying is that the new feature announcement blog isn't the place to look for how things are done.
We are still going to answer all your questions to our best knowledge, even if you are treating us as we were all idiots, over the years.

[Solar Legion]

1 hour ago, arton Rotaru said:

That's all fine and such!

You know, all I'm saying is that the new feature announcement blog isn't the place to look for how things are done.
We are still going to answer all your questions to our best knowledge, even if you are treating us as we were all idiots, over the years.

Speak for yourself.

That level of hostility across years should end up with an end user being on their own and rethinking their actions.

[Stephanie Misfit]

3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

Once we have full glTF support, the plan is to have the MP showing the models like in Sketchfab with it's Model Inspector. I know, we aren't there yet, but one can dream, right. 😇

Well, that's probably not going to make merchants happy, given how easy it is to steal models from Sketchfab thanks to their inspector.

[Extrude Ragu]

1 hour ago, Mistress Morbid said:

Well, that's probably not going to make merchants happy, given how easy it is to steal models from Sketchfab thanks to their inspector.

Easy solution is just to make it opt in.

In the end, being a merchant is all about picking and choosing compromise. Increased security necessarily compromises convenience for customer in nearly all forms. In the end, life is risk/reward.