I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Porky Gorky]

I think mixing and matching between blinn/phong and PBR is the way to go. I’ve been testing terrain materials in the past week and I learned that rocky stoney ground looks better in PBR and grass with baked-in AO looks better in Blinn Phong.

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

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).

It's just a case of placing reflection probes, just try it!

 

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour 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.

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.

I agree with this. The time was probably years ago to end the old non-ALM renderer, keeping it around has only taught users that SL will run on a potato and that can't be true if there's any desire to move forward.

It's unfortunate if people are pushed out by hardware requirements but then that is how computers work, you have to keep at least somewhat up to date.

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

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.

Look on the "bright" side: Now indoors we can actually tell we have lamps, and whether they're on or off. Also, windows.

(I do admit that, post-PBR, I do appreciate my well-lit dressing/pose stand while adjusting an outfit.)

[Ayashe Ninetails]

9 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

It's just a case of placing reflection probes, just try it!

This is assuming I know what the term even means, where to get them, and how they work. I have no clue. I was a print graphic designer. Ask me about preflight and I'll know how to do it. Anything that involves mesh or technical 3D whatever - zero interest zero clue.

Other relevant info - I'm on an old version of Firestorm because I've been too lazy to update, so I doubt there's PBR anyway. I also don't want to spend unnecessary prims as I'm a decorating fanatic who is always maxed out, so unless it's 0 land impact, it ain't happening.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

21 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

This is assuming I know what the term even means, where to get them, and how they work. I have no clue. I was a print graphic designer. Ask me about preflight and I'll know how to do it. Anything that involves mesh or technical 3D whatever - zero interest zero clue.

Other relevant info - I'm on an old version of Firestorm because I've been too lazy to update, so I doubt there's PBR anyway. I also don't want to spend unnecessary prims as I'm a decorating fanatic who is always maxed out, so unless it's 0 land impact, it ain't happening.

Speaking of what probes are, I just made a video on that: 

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

7 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Speaking of what probes are, I just made a video on that: 

 

Thanks! That's a great tutorial and also a good illustration of what others have said on the subject of PBR, lighting is extremely important and, while reflection probes won't magically solve all the current issues with PBR, setting them up correctly can make a big difference to the way content appears in SL.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

10 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Speaking of what probes are, I just made a video on that: 

Thank you soooooo much! That's the first time I've ever actually seen one of those things and what they do. 

I do think it's a bit unreasonable (generally, not on your part at all) to think that the average user is going to even know this exists and needs to be done, though. I've met people who had NO clue about building whatsoever and had to teach them that they can multi-select their items in their homes and move them together, group them to save prims, etc. I also had to show someone how vendors work, sooooo...

That this is a thing everyone will have to be doing or else they'll suffer with ugly visuals is a bit weird to me. Your video is going to help a lot of people, but they first need to know this is a thing!

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

5 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

That this is a thing everyone will have to be doing or else they'll suffer with ugly visuals is a bit weird to me. Your video is going to help a lot of people, but they first need to know this is a thing!

It should definitely be more prominently advertised to residents in general but in typical LL fashion I assume they'll leave the education of residents up to other residents?! 🙄

I think there is also the assumption that creators of things like houses and skyboxes will provide reflection probes packaged with their products rather than leaving their customers to set them up (if they aren't already doing so then I'm sure having to answer the same questions about reflection probes a few hundred times will encourage them to adopt that practice).

The problem is that not every item with PBR should be packaged with it's own reflection probe and doing so would most likely lead to all sorts of confusion and unexpected results once you reach a certain number of probes.  So until everyone has upgraded their houses, skyboxes, gardens, etc with PBR versions that contain preset probes there will most likely be a lot of folks who are understandably underwhelmed by how PBR looks.

[Polenth Yue]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

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.

Even as someone who likes glowing stuff (in the fantasy plants and fungi way), those early days were painful. Pure white rooms set to max glow... and the creator would always think it looked good and wasn't making anyone's eyeballs bleed.

PBR does have an issue with this. People were told it'd make things shiny. So everything must have maximum shine! This can catch creators, but also means customers expect all PBR items to be very shiny. I've said elsewhere that I won't be making matt items in PBR until people get over it. I'll only make things you'd expect to be very shiny.

Once people do get over it, I can start on upgrading matt textures and things with minimal shine. I like some of the features and that it's possible to get very different looks by editing the texture tints and values. But right now, most customers won't understand that a PBR label does not mean inherently more shine.

[Flea Yatsenko]

4 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

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..)

Creators can definitely create bad things in programs like Substance Painter and even though it'll do a lot of the work for them, if they don't make it right in Substance Painter it's not going to be right even if sp exports everything properly.

Most of the free materials you can find for SP are also done wrong too.

PBR removed one big thing that can go wrong, like no one using alpha for spec and norm. But there are a lot of ways for people to still screw things up. At least now it's more like not following industry standards instead when someone screws up, instead of not following the special SL way that only really exists in a wiki page and only works for SL.

PBR is a step in the right direction but it's not going to magically make bad creators good creators. I'm fact it might make creators you thought were good look bad.

[Flea Yatsenko]

5 hours 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.

Sorry for the double post I'm on my phone. Environments might not be physically based right now and they might have problems but that can be fixed later. If you make PBR standard stuff and it's not accurate in SL at the moment, the environment can be updated later to be physically accurate and the existing stuff that followed PBR standards will with fine.

People who are changing PBR just for SL are assuming the environment will never change and LL has brought major environment changes to the viewer several times. Those creators are gonna have a bad time when LL does something about the lighting and environments. And they will eventually since the current environments are designed around preserving legacy materials and I doubt that's going to be a big priority in the medium to far future.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

4 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It should definitely be more prominently advertised to residents in general but in typical LL fashion I assume they'll leave the education of residents up to other residents?! 🙄

I know, right? RIP! 

 

6 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I think there is also the assumption that creators of things like houses and skyboxes will provide reflection probes packaged with their products rather than leaving their customers to set them up (if they aren't already doing so then I'm sure having to answer the same questions about reflection probes a few hundred times will encourage them to adopt that practice).

The problem is that not every item with PBR should be packaged with it's own reflection probe and doing so would most likely lead to all sorts of confusion and unexpected results once you reach a certain number of probes.  So until everyone has upgraded their houses, skyboxes, gardens, etc with PBR versions that contain preset probes there will most likely be a lot of folks who are understandably underwhelmed by how PBR looks.

Exactly, and would a user even know if they already have a probe set up or if they need one, should they avoid buying items that include them, do they have 30 rezzed out unnecessarily, etc. I'm just not a fan of backend things that require my participation and/or attention to work well, LOL. There's a reason why games configure themselves to ideal settings for your PC hardware (and those are far easier to adjust with sliders than whatever all this is). I know SL can't work that way but...it gets tiresome that it doesn't, honestly.

[Porky Gorky]

48 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Speaking of what probes are, I just made a video on that: 

I think it was your sim I visited a few months back with the Alchemical Sandbox. Many overlapping reflection probe spheres, from large all encompassing ones to small ones for individual areas. It reminded me of how I used to do it in Unity and I've been using that system ever since. Overlapping Spheres for the win!

[Zalificent Corvinus]

6 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

People who are changing PBR just for SL are assuming the environment will never change and LL has brought major environment changes to the viewer several times. Those creators are gonna have a bad time when LL does something about the lighting and environments. And they will eventually since the current environments are designed around preserving legacy materials and I doubt that's going to be a big priority in the medium to far future.

Hmmm.

Translating from Futureness junkie Nonsense to real English, please wait.

Translation complete.

"People should make industry standard Pretentious Bloody Rubbish, and load it into SL KNOWING it will look like sh*te, and tell customers it's supposed to look like sh*te, until one day 'Loser Lab Sort of Not-Really Soonish (tm)' the fail devs responsible for the half finished abortion of a rendering engine will get around to releasing a half finished abortion of a lighting system, where upon the looks-like-sh*te Pretentious Bloody Rubbish will HOPEFULLY look LESS sh*te, assuming the creator wasn't a talentless numpty who did it all wrong all along"

 

Wow, that's fantastic advice, we should all just shut up and accept that PBR looks sh*te for the next couple or three years and hope that LL change their dev strategy that they have used for the last 20 years.

 

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

10 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

I know, right? RIP! 

 

Exactly, and would a user even know if they already have a probe set up or if they need one, should they avoid buying items that include them, do they have 30 rezzed out unnecessarily, etc. I'm just not a fan of backend things that require my participation and/or attention to work well, LOL. There's a reason why games configure themselves to ideal settings for your PC hardware (and those are far easier to adjust with sliders than whatever all this is). I know SL can't work that way but...it gets tiresome that it doesn't, honestly.

It does seem like the default reflection probes that are placed automatically on each sim are somewhat lacking.

Of course in the old days LL would disable log-ins for a day, kick all the residents out and then release roaming herds of magical hippos that would have manually placed all the reflection probes in just the right places, but those days are long gone!  

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It does seem like the default reflection probes that are placed automatically on each sim are somewhat lacking.

Of course in the old days LL would disable log-ins for a day, kick all the residents out and then release roaming herds of magical hippos that would have manually placed all the reflection probes in just the right places, but those days are long gone!  

This would be amazing, honestly. I certainly can't see myself doing this otherwise. 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

11 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

I know SL can't work that way but...it gets tiresome that it doesn't, honestly.

PBR was intended as a quick and dirty HARDWARE based fake ray-trace look-a-like for video games, based of pre-made STATIC scenes.

You're doing a cave with 20 burning torches around the edge?

Make your cave mesh, add the torch meshes, add 20 small lights, bake the lighting and shadows into the cave textures,, take an HDR light probe of the lit cave for the FAKR image based lighting and FAKE reflections, delete the 20 lights, add a light probe with the HDR image you made earlier, export in game asset format.

Ideal for which ever flavour of Useless Engine Build-an-FPS-Kit you use.

But bloody useless for something like SL, and PBR's FEW advantages over blinn-phong, don't in any way out-weigh the disadvantages..

It's like taking a race horse off the FLAT track and expecting it to do well pulling a 2 ton coal wagon in the mountains.

[Janet Voxel]

Reflection probes really aren’t that hard to place. They made it a little more difficult to find them. They used to just be in the build menu.

Last year I bought a house from Onsu. It’s a nice house, I’m happy with it. I started messing around with the Alchemy viewer so I could play around with PBR items in blender. Took some getting used to, but in the end it became my daily driver. I had the same thoughts on the colors being off, etc. I figured out the reflection probe thing after a while and started placing probes around my house and on my parcel.

About a month or so ago, I get an update from Onsu. The update had the probes placed and the glass tweaked so I don’t get an alpha glitch on my hair.

I’m not saying every creator is going to do that,  but it was a nice surprise. It’s going to take a while for a lot of creators to adopt a PBR workflow, but I like what creators are doing already.

Edited June 19 by Janet Voxel

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

what is this reflection probe you speak of?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

27 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

what is this reflection probe you speak of?

It's a special box or spherical object that you can create for (mostly) interior environments. The probes (it's a confusing name, I know!) should cover the entire space, from wall to wall, and are used to 1) determine what within the room gets reflected in metalic or mirror surfaces, and 2) set the ambient lighting of the space in a way that's different from the exterior.

In terms of the former, the probe (as I understand) essentially creates a 360 deg image of what it contains that is used for reflections. For lighting, it allows you to set an interior as brighter or darker than the outside. (The lighting part has lots of options, some of which don't actually seem to work very well, but you can adjust the interior lighting to reflect both exterior ambient light, and interior local lights.)

They're kind of a pain to set up (especially if you're not just setting them for a regular square or rectangular space) and adjust, but not in theory really very difficult to use.

They do count towards your LI.

Edited June 19 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

wtf. 

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

2 hours ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Speaking of what probes are, I just made a video on that: 

 

what would we do without furries?

[Coffee Pancake]

5 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

They do count towards your LI.

and we got a Li reduction on all mesh recently to offset the need to rez light sources and probes.

 

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Just now, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

what would we do without furries?

Considering the balance of furries in the IT field, world would probably stop turning without em. Also made a proper topic on the forums with a bunch more videos: