I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Another thing worth noting that doesn't seem to get mentioned much is that materials don't just work on mesh, you can add some really nice touches to mesh builds using just prims and a few decent tileable textures and trim sheets with corresponding normal maps, etc.

Warning!

Using materials on prims forces SL to use mesh LI accounting for prims instead of the artificially LOW prim accounting.

A friend build a structure out of 19 CUT prims, LI 19, they put materials textures on it, LI now 140+

 

The worst example I ever saw was a 7 LI object using cut torii, that went to 2200+ LI when a specular map was added. And yes it was almost instantly auto-returned for "exceeding parcel capacity".

 

[Flea Yatsenko]

I think there are going to be a lot of creators who make things unnaturally shiny because it's something new and they think it looks good. PBR is physically based but if you use metallic values wrong or go crazy with roughness it's not going to look natural at all.

It's also possible they're just using free PBR materials without knowing what they are doing, i.e. the PBR materials are not very good but they are using them anyways. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

They could have also messed up baking high poly to low poly but I doubt that judging by what you're saying the product is.

[Qie Niangao]

9 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

A creator friend of mine calls PBR the new flexi prims lol. 

Or glow. I remember the first SL Birthday after glow. Anything that could plausibly faintly glow was cranked all the way up. Some of those creators took years to come down from their glow high.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Warning!

Using materials on prims forces SL to use mesh LI accounting for prims instead of the artificially LOW prim accounting.

A friend build a structure out of 19 CUT prims, LI 19, they put materials textures on it, LI now 140+

 

The worst example I ever saw was a 7 LI object using cut torii, that went to 2200+ LI when a specular map was added. And yes it was almost instantly auto-returned for "exceeding parcel capacity".

 

Yeah you definitely have to think twice before slicing that twisted torus if you're using primitives and materials, but then one of the nice things about materials is that you can let the normal map simulate the smaller geometric details across an otherwise completely flat surface so you can still potentially use basic cubes, cylinders, etc without having to contort them into intricate shapes to have them look nice.

[Love Zhaoying]

16 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

A creator friend of mine calls PBR the new flexi prims lol. 

But..I LIKE flex-prims!!! * points at my whiskers, hairs and tail *

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

But..I LIKE flex-prims!!! * points at my whiskers, hairs and tail *

We all like things that aren't good for us, that's just part of being humans.... and lions!

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

But..I LIKE flex-prims!!! * points at my whiskers, hairs and tail *

We all like things that aren't good for us, that's just part of being humans.... and lions!

Tails and hair looks more "realistic" if they move. IJS.

I haven't tried much "made" PBR yet, since this was in landscaping, guess it's out of my normal wheelhouse of things to buy.

I hope someone chimes in on the thread that they bought some other PBR landscape product they DID like, so I can try that vs. the non-PBR version.

[Porky Gorky]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

"Don't buy PBR products"

Aaah i’ve seen this before. The old reverse psychology. She must mean “buy lots of PBR”. You heard her, lets paint the world in PBR!

/me starts a chant PBR! PBR! PBR!

[Porky Gorky]

44 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

It seems plastic-looking to me too. A creator friend of mine calls PBR the new flexi prims lol. 

The main problems I have seen are, non metallic PBR materials are too reflective resulting in the shiny plastic effect and the colours on them look too washed out or dark or desaturated. This is how PBR materials look when imported from the various free libraries on the web. PBR needs to be customized for SL, specifically the roughness map and the base colour map to compensate for the bastardised ACES implementation and to make the PBR appear as intended.

Edited June 19 by Porky Gorky

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

PBR materials are too reflective resulting in the shiny plastic effect and the colours on them look too washed out or dark or desaturated.

Noticed that too. 

[Rick Nightingale]

38 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I think there are going to be a lot of creators who make things unnaturally shiny because it's something new

Yep - it's literally "The new shiny!"

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

non metallic PBR materials are too reflective resulting in the shiny plastic effect

The first thing I noticed with PBR, with my mesh avatar. Rowan helped me fix this by turning off one of the features in the body HUD.

 

[Rick Nightingale]

The excess shiny can be mitigated somewhat using the edit window if the object/material have mod perms by turning down the metallic and increasing the roughness sliders (saying this for those who aren't familiar with it). Those controls modulate the materials in the maps.

[Porky Gorky]

53 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

PBR is physically based but if you use metallic values wrong or go crazy with roughness it's not going to look natural at all.

Physical based rendering only works when the PBR is rendered using a physically accurate shader or environment. Here lies the crux of the problem. I’ve yet to find a single environment in SL that is physically accurate. So PBR authored materials using realistic data values do not work as expected in SL. I’ve created numerous materials using realistic data values and I can render them consistently in UE5, Unity, VRay etc but not in SL. I have to customize the PBR for it to render correctly in SL, thus making the materials no longer physically accurate .

Using PBR materials with realistic data values in a non physically accurate environment is an oxymoron.

Edited June 19 by Porky Gorky

[AmeliaJ08]

5 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The effect of normal maps in SL have always seemed too intense when uploading maps exported from various apps.  Fortunately it's very easy to adjust the normal map prior to uploading.  If you add a layer beneath your normal map and fill it with <127,127,255> (i.e. the same colour you'd find in a completely flat normal map) then adjust the opacity of your normal map layer you can alter the intensity of the normal maps effect when it's uploaded and applied to objects in SL.

Yes. When making normal maps in GIMP I have always had to really mess with the tool settings as well, it has never been a particularly simple process since seeing the result in world inevitably makes me tweak it.

1 hour ago, VeeTach Littlething said:

Well, this sounds disappointing.  Hopefully things will get better over time.

 

I mean... is Blinn-Phong disappointing? there's a huge variation in product quality in SL and that won't change in the PBR era. Some will be good, some will be bad...

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

34 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Tails and hair looks more "realistic" if they move. IJS.

I haven't tried much "made" PBR yet, since this was in landscaping, guess it's out of my normal wheelhouse of things to buy.

I hope someone chimes in on the thread that they bought some other PBR landscape product they DID like, so I can try that vs. the non-PBR version.

Yes, a mesh-based alternative to flexi-prims would be a godsend for all sorts of things but would almost certainly get abused with reckless abandon by a lot of creators which is why we aren't likely to see it anytime soon.

If you get tired of waiting for someone to come up with some decent PBR landscaping textures you could always resort to sifting through some of the many free PBR repositories online and uploading a few textures yourself (although you may want to tone down the normal map as I mentioned in a previous post).

However I think part of the problem with current PBR content, aside from all the technical issues with it's implementation, is that it's just not as impressive if you have a mixture of PBR and non-PBR content and no continuity in the overall scene.  Sometimes presentation is everything and while you can hang the Mona Lisa in a cowshed and it will still be art, it would probably seem far more impressive hanging in a fancy gallery somewhere.

[Rick Nightingale]

3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

It's been more than NINE years since Blinn-Phone ALM Materials were introduced to SL, and the vast majority of SL creators still haven't RTFM because too damn lazy, and still haven't figured it out by experimentation because too damn dumb.

16 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I mean... is Blinn-Phong disappointing? there's a huge variation in product quality in SL and that won't change in the PBR era.

It amazed me some years back to discover just how many makers did not seem to know you could use the alpha channels in the normal and specular maps. It's all in the wiki, after all, and yet they are still rarely utilised where they could be to good effect. Some makers on the other hand clearly do understand them.

I have this, somewhat forlorn, hope that because PBR is a new system, more makers will actually learn how to use it effectively. Even though it has been implemented in SL in LL's typical way.

Realistically, I imagine an awful lot (both interpretations intended) of 'PBR' materials being simply cobbled together from existing Blinn-Phong maps and called 'PBR'.

Edited June 19 by Rick Nightingale

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Oh good! I've soooooo missed whining about PBR!!!!

Good times, good times.

20 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I’ve yet to find a single environment in SL that is physically accurate.

Sorry, for a non-techie, what do you mean by this? Do you mean the way that lighting is simulated/rendered?

[Zalificent Corvinus]

21 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Physical based rendering only works when the PBR is rendered using a physically accurate shader or environment. Here lies the crux of the problem. I’ve yet to find a single environment in SL that is physically accurate. So PBR authored materials using realistic data values do not work as expected in SL. I’ve created numerous materials using realistic data values and I can render them consistently in UE5, Unity, VRay etc but not in SL. I have to customize the PBR for it to render correctly in SL, thus making the materials no longer physically accurate .

Using PBR materials with realistic data values in a non physically accurate environment is an oxymoron.

And that's why I laughed my ass off when LL said they were forcing Pretentious Bloody rubbish on us to "be compliant with industry standard creation tools", because, it's NOT!

[Extrude Ragu]

3 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

I have this, somewhat forlorn, hope that because PBR is a new system, more makers will actually learn how to use it effectively. Even though it has been implemented in SL in LL's typical way.

Realistically, I imagine an awful lot (both interpretations intended) of 'PBR' materials being simply cobbled together from existing Blinn-Phong maps and called 'PBR'.

One of the nice things about PBR is that creators using standard tools like substance painter etc have an 'export to gltf' button which does all the technical channel packing work for them - It's difficult for a creator to screw up.

The trouble then comes with people making their materials in Blender. It's easy to screw up the Blender settings, the gltf export requires you to mess with nodes (ugh).

I made a packer to make this process easier out of blender, but some people really just don't seem to read. I kid you not I've had one person IM me asking me where they put the specular map they baked in my packer (Protip - Nowhere!! Please read which maps you need to bake before using my tools..)

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Tails and hair looks more "realistic" if they move. IJS.

All of my tails are mesh and fully animated. Some are animesh. They look really nice and some come with HUD options to control the movement (type, speed, etc.).

As for PBR landscaping, well, that just sounds like a nightmare. I won't be buying any of that unless non-PBR versions are included. It just looks so awful in SL.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Oh good! I've soooooo missed whining about PBR!!!!

Good times, good times.

Sorry, for a non-techie, what do you mean by this? Do you mean the way that lighting is simulated/rendered?

Real PBR is entirely dependant on it's lighting system, with light sources that actually emit light levels based on real life, a 1 candle power candle emits 1 candle poer of light, that's candle coloured, and all that.

SL uses a system of lighting with a range of 0 to 1, where by way of an example, the SUN should be maybe a 10 not a 1.

LL's PBR is about 25% of a REAL PBR system, being a half finished abortion of HALF the system, That's why it looks so bad.

The Abortion that is their tone mapping, 2/3rds PBR ACES & 1/3 SL makes matters worse.

Nothing created in "industry standard software" will look "right" in SL, by default, you basically have to eff about on a trial and error basis to correct for the epic failings of LL's PBR.

 

This doesn't make creation "easier" for creators, as claimed by LL, quite the reverse. It's the Third Lie of LL PBR, right up there with "Needed for mirrors" and "Needed for terrain".

 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

All of my tails are mesh and fully animated. Some are animesh. They look really nice and some come with HUD options to control the movement (type, speed, etc.).

I often forget that's an option.  Guess I could search for "animated mesh lion tails", but most searches in recent years didn't return things I liked.  I'm not necessarily looking for a "tuft", either (those always disconnected alarmingly when swishing flexi-tails)!

5 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

As for PBR landscaping, well, that just sounds like a nightmare. I won't be buying any of that unless non-PBR versions are included. It just looks so awful in SL.

So you've actually seen some? I haven't - hopefully someone posts examples in this thread (unless I missed it).

I assume the convo is about plants and stuff. 

Not textures to change the region / parcel grass, ground, sand, etc.

25 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

Yes, a mesh-based alternative to flexi-prims would be a godsend for all sorts of things but would almost certainly get abused with reckless abandon by a lot of creators which is why we aren't likely to see it anytime soon.

I always forget about animated mesh / animesh tails, which Ayashe just mentioned in the post I quoted.

Edited June 19 by Love Zhaoying

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not textures to change the region / parcel grass, ground, sand, etc.

Henri of Cool Viewer fame posted PBR/Non PBR comparison pics of LL's Terrain Test region, the same one featured in the Flab Blab video with Kyle "no AO" Linden, in another current thread about PBR.

 

The PBR version looks de-saturated, over-contrasted and too shiny, like cheap plastic. It really is bloody awful. It even looked bad in the Flab Blab video, but looks worse in a viewer screenshot.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

14 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

And that's why I laughed my ass off when LL said they were forcing Pretentious Bloody rubbish on us to "be compliant with industry standard creation tools", because, it's NOT!

Do you go to those Linden meetings to tell them they are doing it wrong? (want to be there at the next one when you do!)