I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Just now, Arielle Popstar said:

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!)

No, because

1. Wrong time of day for me, UK vs California time

2. Beta Grid

3. No point, they don't listen to people with a clue.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

No, because

1. Wrong time of day for me, UK vs California time

2. Beta Grid

3. No point, they don't listen to people with a clue.

 

Too bad, I'd pay to see that sort of entertainment !

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

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

I do kind of miss the movement of it.  The biggest problem I see with it now is creators have no clue how to make it look good.  I showed an OLD flexi hair in another thread.  It actually looked pretty darn good.  It was from Damselfly.  If you compare it with today's flexi hair, the new hair looks amateur-made.   I did buy a polka-dot dress recently that came with an optional flexi skirt.  It made me smile to see it move as I walked.

I fear a lot of PBR items will end up being like the NEW flexi hair.  

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I do kind of miss the movement of it.  The biggest problem I see with it now is creators have no clue how to make it look good.  I showed an OLD flexi hair in another thread.  It actually looked pretty darn good.  It was from Damselfly.  If you compare it with today's flexi hair, the new hair looks amateur-made.   I did buy a polka-dot dress recently that came with an optional flexi skirt.  It made me smile to see it move as I walked.

I fear a lot of PBR items will end up being like the NEW flexi hair.  

The "new-ish" Flexi-hair I got along with the "Cat Hair" (from Dura? which you recommended) - doesn't have the same issues as some of my older Flexi-hair with "alpha swapping" or whatever it's called (where sometimes you see the hair, sometimes you see the background, and the hair is semi-transparent but shouldn't be). So, there are definitely some exceptions to the "new flexi is bad" general rule!

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I fear a lot of PBR items will end up being like the NEW flexi hair.  

ETA: I hope not!

 

Edited June 19 by Love Zhaoying

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I fear a lot of PBR items will end up being like the NEW flexi hair.  

That comparison is a MORTAL INSULT...

To "new flexi"...

 

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

8 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I fear a lot of PBR items will end up being like the NEW flexi hair.  

That comparison is a MORTAL INSULT...

To "new flexi"...

I take it you wear flexi, but not PBR!

(Queue the response along the lines of, "you don't wear PBR".)

Edited June 19 by Love Zhaoying

[Nagachief Darkstone]

What likely happened in OP's situation is that reflection probes weren't set up. Auto probes try their best, but they just aren't as good as manual probes. Auto probes on the ground are set up in an array and do...ok. But it seems that the autoprobe system for floating builds doesn't quite work well, leading to them either generating badly or not at all, leaving you with the fallback 'skyprobe' that is exceptionally bright (as it's the sky).

PBR content practically requires reflection probes to be set up or they end up looking like a fresh Unity project.

Here's my home scene with manual probes:

And here's the same scene without probes, only the skyprobe: 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

34 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

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

I was actually thinking of something which more closely resembles the way flexi-prims move, not dissimilar to the combination of using a vertex shader and vertex colours that I mentioned in an earlier post. 

Of course it would be a lot more complex since rather than using a simple animated noise texture to displace the vertices you'd have to first calculate the velocity, etc of the avatar and use that to work out the relative displacement for each vertex depending on its RGB values.

I don't have nearly enough experience working with the SL viewer code to be able to accurately guess how much additional work that would be (it's beyond both my ken and my barbie), it's just one of those neat "what if" features that I like to dream of from time to time.

ETA: My bad, my "earlier post" was actually in a different thread on the same subject

 

Edited June 19 by Fluffy Sharkfin
added link

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

What likely happened in OP's situation is that reflection probes weren't set up.

The concept that you'd need to setup reflection probes OUTSIDE - for landscaping items to look good - is counterintuitive!

I usually associate the usage of probes with "indoors" (or in the mouth of a cave, in my own testing).

ETA: I'll have to try and view those links on a non-work PC. (They are blocked.)

Edited June 19 by Love Zhaoying

[Porky Gorky]

46 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

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

As Zal said, accurate realism requires an accurate and realistic lighting range. In CGI we use the Kelvin Scale, so the candle would be at about 1000 kelvin and a midday sky would be 9000 - 10000 Kelvin. There are data tables that can be referenced for every type of light source imaginable. An Incandescent bulb is 2600K-2700K. Halogen bulb 2700K-3000K. Fluorescent light 4500 - 6500K. So we use the Kelvin scale to build realistic lighting environments from scratch.

A much easier way is to use a HDRI image of the environment we want to simulate. A HDRI image is a 360 degree panoramic photographic scan of an environment that contains all the lighting information needed. So you take a HDRI scan in Norway, 5pm in December, you can then simulate the lighting within that environment perfectly. 

So using realistic data values for lighting, combined with realistic data values for the PBR materials can result in 100% realistic looking environments that are hard to distinguish from reality. That’s the point of PBR. I can use PBR materials and render them in many different physically accurate environments and they reflect, absorb and scatter light in realistic predictable ways. Apart from SL that is.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The concept that you'd need to setup reflection probes OUTSIDE - for landscaping items to look good - is counterintuitive!

I usually associate the usage of probes with "indoors" (or in the mouth of a cave, in my own testing).

This is something game developers also have to contend with for every scene. Almost every PBR implementation in games requires some kind of reflection and irradiance source, and up until very recently that consisted of baked reflection and lighting probes (though SL makes the probes pull double duty right now). There are some non baking, non probe solutions, but they're fairly new, such as Godot's SDFGI system.

Raytracing is the other solution, but I doubt the average SL user's computer could handle that.

Edited June 19 by Nagachief Darkstone

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour 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.

I'd assume so too but I do have reservations... the availability of free tools to create PBR content for example, it's just not there. Lots of people won't even have the opportunity to learn, for the moment anyway... unless they're going to do as geeks always have and obtain the software packages they want by any means necessary.

Of course the argument about ease-of-accessibility of SL content creation was lost long ago when mesh became the standard, it has possibly become just one of those things but the barrier to entry only gets higher and crossing it requires ever more commitment from what is increasingly becoming a more casual user base.

I guess Blender now does-it-all and is basically the only free option, it's a much improved piece of software in its current iteration at least... still absolutely repellent to newbies though, anything that powerful is going to be. I've never successfully exported a rigged mesh from more recent versions of Blender either and I'm the type of geek to actually try, it's that kind of thing that will severely limit peoples learning though.

 

 

 

Edited June 19 by AmeliaJ08

[Nagachief Darkstone]

1 minute ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I'd assume so too but I do have reservations... the availability of free tools to create PBR content for example, it's just not there. Lots of people won't even have the opportunity to learn, for the moment anyway.

Of course the argument about ease-of-accessibility of SL content creation was lost long ago when mesh became the standard but there does at least exist free tools to make high quality mesh.

 

It's always morally acceptable to obtain adobe products in nonstandard ways, just sayin.

But if you don't mind eyeballing PBR materials, you can totally make them with something like GIMP or Krita by making the individual occlusion, roughness, and metalness maps and then using AiAi's packer to squish it into a gltf: GLTF Packer (aiaicapta.in)

[Rowan Amore]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The concept that you'd need to setup reflection probes OUTSIDE - for landscaping items to look good - is counterintuitive!

I usually associate the usage of probes with "indoors" (or in the mouth of a cave, in my own testing).

ETA: I'll have to try and view those links on a non-work PC. (They are blocked.)

And what looks good with one reflection probe and EEP setting may not look right with other EEP settings.   That's what bothers me the most about objects that come with the 'preferred EEP for optimal viewing".   What about anything else you set out that looks better in some other EEP?  One thing will look good and the rest not?  

As it is now, my stuff looks fine in whatever EEP I choose.  Who the heck wants to fuss around that much when putting out a sofa?  Or some trees?

[Ayashe Ninetails]

41 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

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)!

Don't overwhelm the search on the MP. I try to keep my searches really basic. "Lion tail" should do it. This one's pretty cute, but there are others.

 

45 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

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

I honestly have no idea. Some creators are starting to incorporate PBR into their builds, but I don't buy anything unless it's got non-PBR included. I think I've seen pictures floating around on the forum. General PBR items for sure - it all looks terrible to me, but it's an older tech and games have been incorporating things like ray tracing as well, so maybe I'm just biased.

[AmeliaJ08]

2 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

It's always morally acceptable to obtain adobe products in nonstandard ways, just sayin.

Absolutely no disagreement here, even doing that is a lot harder than it once was though!

 

 

[Rick Nightingale]

3 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Of course the argument about ease-of-accessibility of SL content creation was lost long ago when mesh became the standard.

Yes, one of the things on my 'wish list' for a complete SL do-over is an integrated, simple mesh creation tool that people can use without taking a degree in 3D design. While I'm comfortable with Blender now, that's taken a lot of time and I still probably don't even know a tenth of what it can do (I found a new function that saved a few hours only yesterday!).

I Use Avastar to make rigged mesh in it. I wouldn't like to even try without that.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

And what looks good with one reflection probe and EEP setting may not look right with other EEP settings.   That's what bothers me the most about objects that come with the 'preferred EEP for optimal viewing".   What about anything else you set out that looks better in some other EEP?  One thing will look good and the rest not?  

As it is now, my stuff looks fine in whatever EEP I choose.  Who the heck wants to fuss around that much when putting out a sofa?  Or some trees?

Prediction:

My couch looks great, if I use EEP#1.

My plants look great, if I use EEP#2.

There is no way to make my couch and plants look good at the same time.

Oh, and: I need to rez reflection probes both outside and inside, apparently..!

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Just now, AmeliaJ08 said:

Absolutely no disagreement here, even doing that is a lot harder than it once was though!

 

 

True, there's also some cheaper/free alternatives. Marmoset Toolbag, Quixel Mixer, Armor Paint, 3D Coat, and if you understand Blender well enough it also works.

[Rick Nightingale]

4 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

It's always morally acceptable to obtain adobe products in nonstandard ways, just sayin.

But if you don't mind eyeballing PBR materials, you can totally make them with something like GIMP or Krita by making the individual occlusion, roughness, and metalness maps and then using AiAi's packer to squish it into a gltf: GLTF Packer (aiaicapta.in)

Add a demo of CrazyBump to the above and you're all set!

AiAi's gltf packer sees a lot of use here too.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Don't overwhelm the search on the MP. I try to keep my searches really basic. "Lion tail" should do it. This one's pretty cute, but there are others.

Thanks! The listing doesn't specify except to say that it's "mod", so I hope it's tintable! (Or that other colors are available, I'll have to check later.)

Edited June 19 by Love Zhaoying

[Ayashe Ninetails]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Thanks! The listing doesn't specify except to say that it's "mod", so I hope it's tintable!

Check the reviews. I believe someone mentioned it is. But yeah, almost all good furry items will be mod and allow for tinting or creation of new textures entirely. 

[Porky Gorky]

4 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

Add a demo of CrazyBump to the above and you're all set!

AiAi's gltf packer sees a lot of use here too.

Materialize by Bounding Box Software is a good free tool for PBR

[Rick Nightingale]

2 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

almost all good furry items will be mod

The one you listed even includes the photoshop files.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Prediction:

My couch looks great, if I use EEP#1.

My plants look great, if I use EEP#2.

There is no way to make my couch and plants look good at the same time.

Oh, and: I need to rez reflection probes both outside and inside, apparently..!

Well made PBR content should look good with any properly probed up scene. There's not really any way to avoid setting up probes. It's not a problem unique to Second Life, it's how PBR works in all games. You'd have the same exact issues in Unity if you forgot to set up probes for the scene. The only exception being UE5.

SL just has the issue where users are expected to do it because of how highly dynamic the world is.