I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Rick Nightingale]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

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

Don't think I've come across that one before. Looks good at a quick glance, and is open source too. I'll take a look, thank you

 

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

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.

I'm glad you brought it up.

Because, even though we've had plenty of threads and posts about probes for PBR (mostly in the context of the original mirrors), I have NOT seen a lot of posts that say, "Hey - you need to rez out some reflection probes or your PBR stuff won't look good". 

Assuming this is true - the word isn't really out there for the need to rez probes just so PBR looks good - that explains a lot of the complaints (even for the Original Post in this thread).

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

44 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I take it you wear flexi, but not PBR!

No II don't wear flexi.

But comparing PBR to flexi is still an insult to flexi, at least flexi does what it's supposed to, even if that is ponytails that double as "chest bursters" when you lean forward.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

I'm glad you brought it up.

Because, even though we've had plenty of threads and posts about probes for PBR (mostly in the context of the original mirrors), I have NOT seen a lot of posts that say, "Hey - you need to rez out some reflection probes or your PBR stuff won't look good". 

Assuming this is true - the word isn't really out there for the need to rez probes just so PBR looks good - that explains a lot of the complaints (even for the Original Post in this thread).

 

It wasn't well explained except for one small section of a Second Life University video. From my experience working with PBR in SL all the way back when it was still in project phase is that the reflections probes are actually the most important part of the entire featureset and currently needs the most education. PBR materials themselves are easy to grasp since it's just well-defined data channels and formats.

[Rick Nightingale]

2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Hey - you need to rez out some reflection probes or your PBR stuff won't look good". 

Yep - and gives a bit of a problem with clothing and wearables. (You cannot wear a reflection probe).

The only non-wearable I sell comes with a reflection probe as a coalesced object with it, so it's easily (re)moveable/modifiable.

[Rowan Amore]

11 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Well made PBR content should look good with any properly probed up scene.

Therein lies the problem.

11 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

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

I'd say 95% of users are not going to have any clue how to do this nor even care.  All they'll know is something looks like crap.  

I'm a fairly savvy SL user overall.  What I do not want to have to do is deal with all that when I'm used to setting out my house, furniture and some lights and done.    I change my parcel EEP depending on the season and not depending on the items I have set out.  That's how the majority of people are going to go about their SL.   I think as soon as the Firestorm PBR goes full release and more PBR content is out and about, there will be a lot of "WTF happened?!?!"

Edited June 19 by Rowan Amore

[Porky Gorky]

14 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

Don't think I've come across that one before. Looks good at a quick glance, and is open source too. I'll take a look, thank you

It’s cool, it’s like the old Substance B2M, Bitmap 2 Material software.

B2M has now evolved into Adobe Sampler and got all jacked up on AI juice. It is an excellent tool and I hear on the grapevine it is also morally acceptable to obtain from Adobe in nonstandard ways 😁

Edited June 19 by Porky Gorky

[Love Zhaoying]

5 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

Yep - and gives a bit of a problem with clothing and wearables. (You cannot wear a reflection probe).

What?!?!? That stinks!

[Nagachief Darkstone]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

 

I'd say 95% of users are not going to have any clue how to do this nor even care.  All they'll know is something looks like crap.  

I'm a fairly savvy SL user overall.  What I do not want to have to do is deal with all that when I'm used to setting out my house, furniture and some lights and done.    I change my parcel EEP depending on the season and not depending on the items I have set out.  That's how the majority of people are going to go about their SL.   I think as soon as the Firestorm PBR goes full release and more PBR content is out and about, there will be a lot of "WTF happened?!?!"

The hope is that skyboxes and houses creators come up with that are PBR-ready will have probes included so that it's not an issue. But sim builders and those doing things custom have to deal with probes themselves. There's really no way around this. It's not a situation where LL released something half baked. It's something that is completely unavoidable when using PBR renderers anywhere. Even movies and television CGI and VFX struggles with this. They often have complex rigs and stand-in systems just to avoid their CGI looking like some direct-to-tv movie garbage. There are no known (performant) automatic solutions to this problem that aren't proprietary like Lumen.

Godot's SDFGI system is close, but it still needs some pointers.

Edited June 19 by Nagachief Darkstone

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

18 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

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

I'd say 95% of users are not going to have any clue how to do this nor even care.  All they'll know is something looks like crap.  

I'm a fairly savvy SL user overall.  What I do not want to have to do is deal with all that when I'm used to setting out my house, furniture and some lights and done.    I change my parcel EEP depending on the season and not depending on the items I have set out.  That's how the majority of people are going to go about their SL.   I think as soon as the Firestorm PBR goes full release and more PBR content is out and about, there will be a lot of "WTF happened?!?!"

I think one potential "fix" for this is to have a simple, ready-to-go option to "Rez a Reflection Probe" in the viewer without needing to dig down into all the Prim properties in order to setup a Probe. (Of course, some sellers are including Probes as we are reading.)  

But talk about multiplying your complexity!

 

 

Edited June 19 by Love Zhaoying
Added "in the viewer"

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

It's not a situation where LL released something half baked.

Good luck convincing people whose "go to" complaint is, "LL released something half-baked".

 

[Rick Nightingale]

My bugbear with reflection probes is that they are only available as cuboids or spheres. You can't manipulate them much either; it's their bounding box that matters, not the 'visible' shape. My house has a lot of curved walls, non-90-degree corners, vaulted ceilings and so on. Trying to fit reflection probes into it is a nightmare.

Edited June 19 by Rick Nightingale

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Just now, Rick Nightingale said:

My bugbear with reflection probes is that they are only available as boxes or spheres. My house has a lot of curved walls, non-90-degree corners, and so on. Trying to fit reflection probes into it is a nightmare.

That's about on par with what you get with other game engines. I think there is a strong use case for being able to specifically assign objects to a probe, though.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

I don't know anything about reflection probes and have zero desire to learn. I stopped being a creator here many years ago. I'm not going to be probing my home or studio.

I am big on SL photography, but if this is going to make doing that even more complicated (wearing body lights and playing with EEP is as far as I go), then I'll be giving that up, as well.

@Scylla Rhiadra has been documenting her experiences with PBR and photography - it doesn't sound good (unless something has changed recently).

[Luna Bliss]

57 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

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: 

Love those cliffs...where can I buy them?

[Rowan Amore]

10 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

It's not a situation where LL released something half baked. It's something that is completely unavoidable when using PBR renderers anywhere.

IMO, it is a situation where LL released something that the majority couldn't care less about nor have any idea whatsoever how to use.  I mean, yippee?  We're now up to standards from 10 years ago?  We've been perfectly fine for the last ten years without PBR.  Sure, it might attract a few people who are curious right up until they realize it's NOT making SL look anything like those games that have had professionally done PBR content.

Time will tell, I suppose.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

17 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Love those cliffs...where can I buy them?

It's something I grabbed off of Gumroad since I'm kind of bad at making natural stuff like that: Stylized Rock Asset Pack by J Roscinas (gumroad.com) I only got the Personal version so it's dubious if I could give it out or not.

11 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

IMO, it is a situation where LL released something that the majority couldn't care less about nor have any idea whatsoever how to use.  I mean, yippee?  We're now up to standards from 10 years ago?  We've been perfectly fine for the last ten years without PBR.  Sure, it might attract a few people who are curious right up until they realize it's NOT making SL look anything like those games that have had professionally done PBR content.

Time will tell, I suppose.

That's the flashy part of the project. The actual purpose is to transition over to rendering and authoring content as per the glTF 2.0 specification. The changes to the viewer and simulator sets up the ability to rewrite and refactor a large amount of the code to support new features, faster rendering, and restructuring the renderer to better handle modern APIs like DX12, Vulkan, and Metal.

One improvement that was shown off recently was that gltf skeletons are transformed using the GPU rather than the CPU. This is generally the most demanding part of the viewer right now and is why your FPS can go from good to terrible when an avatar comes into view.

Edited June 19 by Nagachief Darkstone

[Persephone Emerald]

3 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

On the plus side—and for my money, the most significant improvement resulting from PBR—soon enough practically everybody will have ALM enabled all the time, so old water tricks won't look as pathetic as they did on non-ALM viewers.

Why do you (and others) care if other people are seeing the full graphics with all the shadows, reflections & etc.? I turn off ALM most of the time because I'd rather have scenes rez faster & not have much lag. We can't all afford the newest computers. Mine is by no means a potato. It's an Alienware gamer's laptop, but it's over 5 years old now & I've replaced the keyboard & battery once already. We each make choices on how best to manage our finances and enjoyment of SL, but we don't all have the same resources to draw from. 

[Nagachief Darkstone]

2 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Why do you (and others) care if other people are seeing the full graphics with all the shadows, reflections & etc.? I turn off ALM most of the time because I'd rather have scenes rez faster & not have much lag. We can't all afford the newest computers. Mine is by no means a potato. It's an Alienware gamer's laptop, but it's over 5 years old now & I've replaced the keyboard & battery once already. We each make choices on how best to manage our finances and enjoyment of SL, but we don't all have the same resources to draw from. 

The ability to wholesale disable Advanced Lighting Model was likely the biggest mistake LL ever made. It held back content forever. I'm glad LL is putting their foot down on this.

ALM on its own doesn't really impact performance on dedicated GPUs, in most cases some more modern GPUs actually gain performance if you keep shadows and SSAO off, but have ALM on.

Speaking of potatoes, I had to do some wrangling but on a Intel UHD 770, I could manage around 15-20 FPS @ 2560x1080 on Alchemy Viewer, closer to 30 FPS if I lowered resolution scale.

[Luna Bliss]

10 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

On the plus side—and for my money, the most significant improvement resulting from PBR—soon enough practically everybody will have ALM enabled all the time, so old water tricks won't look as pathetic as they did on non-ALM viewers.

Why do you (and others) care if other people are seeing the full graphics with all the shadows, reflections & etc.? I turn off ALM most of the time because I'd rather have scenes rez faster & not have much lag. We can't all afford the newest computers. Mine is by no means a potato. It's an Alienware gamer's laptop, but it's over 5 years old now & I've replaced the keyboard & battery once already. We each make choices on how best to manage our finances and enjoyment of SL, but we don't all have the same resources to draw from. 

Light attributes are vitally important to see beauty. While I think everyone could benefit from more beauty in their life I'm understanding of those who just use SL to chat and don't care much about the visuals.

[Qie Niangao]

12 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Why do you (and others) care if other people are seeing the full graphics with all the shadows, reflections & etc.? 

This:

6 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

It held back content forever.

SL content walks a fine line between low quality graphics that everybody can render under all conditions, and all the bells and whistles that are tablestakes for contemporary gaming (and that more than half of SL residents expect in order to take fashionista pics, etc). That line moves constantly in one direction. SL content has to stay somewhere in the current ballpark of the line.

[Luna Bliss]

16 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

The ability to wholesale disable Advanced Lighting Model was likely the biggest mistake LL ever made. It held back content forever. I'm glad LL is putting their foot down on this.

Good to know this. It might just help me cope better with my now dark skyboxes on higher graphic settings, realizing in the end visuals in SL will be better overall.

[Modulated]

I guess it is progress, even if SL is late to the party. Once Firestorm releases their pbr viewer, there will probably be another release for Webrtc, putting 6.6.17 on the end of the support list. It has been stated in the FS preview group that version will not receive extended life just because users hardware can't support pbr. Once it falls out of support, it's done and will be blocked and will be necessary anyway with the full roll out to Webrtc for voice, as the current vivox will no longer work when that happens.

I have been using the pbr viewer since its 2nd alpha and now nearing a Release Candidate, I prefer it and no longer use the older one. It just runs better for me, and looks better too IMO.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

20 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Why do you (and others) care if other people are seeing the full graphics with all the shadows, reflections & etc.?

From my own perspective I care because it makes creating certain types of content so much easier and ensures that everyone gets to see it the way it's intended to be seen. 

A good example of this is more organic models where there are no hard edges to define the shading and you have to rely heavily on the normal map to provide the definition in order to keep the poly count at a reasonable level.  Here's an old example I posted in a thread a while back which illustrates just how drastic a difference a single normal map can make before even adding "shininess" to the equation.

And, since I'm delving through old attachments, here's a couple which show the subtle difference between ALM and non-ALM...

Done properly, there shouldn't be an overwhelming difference between a lot of objects using PBR and their earlier counterparts, the human brain is capable of picking up all sorts of subtleties in a scene that we aren't necessarily consciously aware of and it's all those subtleties combined that help to give a sense of realism rather than seeing something and thinking "OMG, it's sooooo shiny!"

I do appreciate your concerns regarding performance though.  As I've said before my current pc is probably more of a potato than yours (i7-3770/16GB/GT1030) and the new update has definitely inhibited my ability to explore SL to some degree but I do still agree with @Nagachief Darkstone that overall the removal of the forward renderer is a good thing and with some tweaking of settings even an old potato like mine is capable of running the PBR viewer with at least some of the new features enabled.

[Cristiano Midnight]

I am a fan of PBR personally, and have been creating a lot of materials in Substance Painter and Materialize to put on my builds. Even non-pbr materials that had a normal and specular map on them look better than the previous implementation, with no changes. It does take some getting used to in order to create effective pbr materials, but it does dramatically improve how some things look in my builds. Examples - I replaced the texture on a rock that sits out in the water to cuddle/etc.. on, which is fairly large and had an ok texture on it, but it was a bit blurry. The pbr material rock texture I created for it looks much better, and has more shape to it without changing the mesh. The same with the texture on a road and driveway that was fairly blurry and now looks sharp and has cracks and slight shininess to it. It is a definite improvement, but I didn't go crazy with it either. When used correctly, pbr materials bring much more realism to how SL looks.

Switching to an industry standard for materials and lighting was not pointless, but the implementation is definitely rocky. Once it goes live in Firestorm, I think we will finally see more widespread use of it, for good and bad  (and a lot more complaints). I hope they continue to improve it - so far they seem willing to.