I have used PBR in landscaping, and hated it

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

4 minutes ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Considering the balance of furries in the IT field, world would probably stop turning without em.

Thank you for teaching me how to probe my areas. 

[Modulated]

1 minute ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

Thank you for teaching me how to probe my areas. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

10 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

wtf. 

Yeah, kinda. @Nagachief Darkstone's video does show quite well what they are and what they do, although he doesn't address the fine-tuning of the ambient light within the probe, which is glitchy to say the least. ( @Qie Niangao has done a number of informative and sometimes discouraging posts, some time ago, on his experiments with this.)

Honestly, although creating and setting a probe isn't all that difficult in and of itself (and it's got easier since they first introduced them), this is going to be waaaaaaaay beyond what most residents are going to be capable of doing for themselves. In fact, I suspect it will be years before most residents even have more than a very foggy idea of what a reflection probe is.

In practice, we'll all be depending upon creators to start including well-calibrated probes with their builds. Some are doing that now. But until that happens, probes will, I suspect, be something of a rarity within SL.

[Rick Nightingale]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

this is going to be waaaaaaaay beyond what most residents are going to be capable of doing for themselves

Rick Nightingale gets a service business idea...

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Rick Nightingale said:

Rick Nightingale gets a service business idea...

Yes, dahling. There's money in them thar hills!

[Nagachief Darkstone]

4 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yeah, kinda. @Nagachief Darkstone's video does show quite well what they are and what they do, although he doesn't address the fine-tuning of the ambient light within the probe, which is glitchy to say the least. ( @Qie Niangao has done a number of informative and sometimes discouraging posts, some time ago, on his experiments with this.)

Honestly, although creating and setting a probe isn't all that difficult in and of itself (and it's got easier since they first introduced them), this is going to be waaaaaaaay beyond what most residents are going to be capable of doing for themselves. In fact, I suspect it will be years before most residents even have more than a very foggy idea of what a reflection probe is.

In practice, we'll all be depending upon creators to start including well-calibrated probes with their builds. Some are doing that now. But until that happens, probes will, I suspect, be something of a rarity within SL.

Conveniently, I did make a clip talking a bit about ambience in my PBR tutorial playlist. The perception of glitchy likely comes from that the 'secondary bounces' from the feedback from other probes has to settle out over a few bakes.

There's also the current issue where the only HDR source in the scene is the sky, emissive strength is coming and punctual lights should be able to be driven beyond SDR light ranges, which current lights are limited to.

Edited June 19 by Nagachief Darkstone

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Conveniently, I did make a clip talking a bit about ambience in my PBR tutorial playlist.

Excellent, and convenient indeed! Thank you!

Just now, Nagachief Darkstone said:

The perception of glitchy likely comes from that the 'secondary bounces' from the feedback from other probes has to settle out over a few bakes.

That's undoubtedly part of it, but it also seems, on the basis of both my own messing about, and Qie's experiments, that not all of the parameters work exactly as expected.

But it may be they've adjusted that -- it's been a while since I played with it.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Excellent, and convenient indeed! Thank you!

That's undoubtedly part of it, but it also seems, on the basis of both my own messing about, and Qie's experiments, that not all of the parameters work exactly as expected.

But it may be they've adjusted that -- it's been a while since I played with it.

That sounds interesting, I'd love to read up on the posts where those experiments took place since that could be useful info.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Nagachief Darkstone said:

That sounds interesting, I'd love to read up on the posts where those experiments took place since that could be useful info.

Finding them now in this forum would be . . . difficult.

Paging @Qie Niangao!!!

[Flea Yatsenko]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

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.

 

 

I'm assuming you're taking about the blue hue that's completely ridiculous when taking about landscaping stuff. Which would be on LL and environments. If PBR looks good everywhere else except SL then the problem is SL and not PBR.

But if you are talking about materials that are looking plastic and wrong, go search the web for "free PBR textures" and look at the maps and it's probably going to explain why a lot of PBR stuff doesn't look good. I bet there are going to be a lot of people downloading free PBR materials that aren't very good and using them.

It's a lot easier to find free textures that are just diffuse maps than it is to find PBR materials for SL. It's probably going to out a lot of creators who just use free stuff without even modifying it.

And I think it's unreasonable to expect SL to ever come close to AAA graphics. The very nature of SL is the antithesis of static scene. I'm just saying LL is probably going to do something about the environment making PBR look bad and the people that work PBR around the default environment are probably going to have issues later.

I just think it's funny people use a PBR grass material and it looks bad so they blame PBR instead of the material.

[Porky Gorky]

30 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Honestly, although creating and setting a probe isn't all that difficult in and of itself (and it's got easier since they first introduced them), this is going to be waaaaaaaay beyond what most residents are going to be capable of doing for themselves. In fact, I suspect it will be years before most residents even have more than a very foggy idea of what a reflection probe is.

I think SL’s complexity is part of the appeal for many users. You arrive looking like a noob, not knowing your arse from your elbow and see all this amazing stuff and as you level up your knowledge and skills it turns out that with some effort, you can make it too. Before you know it you find a niche and open a shop selling glow in the dark, ***** shaped candles…or whatever.

[Qie Niangao]

17 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Finding them now in this forum would be . . . difficult.

Paging @Qie Niangao!!!

Well, it started out hopeful enough.

And after a few weeks, some expert advice, and several more posts it ended up pretty discouraged.

(I think the bulk of my floundering was in that thread, in the first half of those 29 pages.)

[Zalificent Corvinus]

12 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I think SL’s complexity is part of the appeal for many users. You arrive looking like a noob, not knowing your arse from your elbow and see all this amazing stuff and as you level up your knowledge and skills it turns out that with some effort, you can make it too. Before you know it you find a niche and open a shop selling glow in the dark, ***** shaped candles…or whatever.

There's a world of difference between "Wow I've learned to make glow in the dark **** shaped candles in SL for fun and profit, after only 15 yrs on the platform" and being told you need to go and sign up for a 6 month 3000 dollar training course in AAAA Game rendering systems, so the inside of your living room doesn't leave you screaming "What moronic effing futureness junkie turned off the effing midday sun?".

 

They have spent SO much time and effort and money trying to make this "compatible" for professional AAA game devs, that they have overlooked that 99% of their users will just scream in frustration and install a NO Effing PBR viewer that won't do the 3 version auto lockout.

Edited June 19 by Zalificent Corvinus

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I think SL’s complexity is part of the appeal for many users. You arrive looking like a noob, not knowing your arse from your elbow and see all this amazing stuff and as you level up your knowledge and skills it turns out that with some effort, you can make it too. Before you know it you find a niche and open a shop selling glow in the dark, ***** shaped candles…or whatever.

I think this is true of a great many people, including to some degree myself.

I don't know that it's true of the majority of residents, though. Most of those in my circles in SL are neither techies nor gamers, and have in past found things like BOM challenging. 95% of people of my acquaintance will be assiduously avoiding having to even think about reflection probes.

[Coffee Pancake]

SL's complexity isn't special or unique to SL, the mismatched ad-hoc undocumented mess that it is .. well .. we do own that.

[AmeliaJ08]

3 hours 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 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.

It's a good point. LL have the ability to reach every single user, run building courses etc if only to show off how to use the new features they are implementing.

I understand that they don't want to be a how-to-use-SL authority or provide ongoing support in that particular aspect of their product but they could be doing a lot more though. Leaving it all up to the users to figure out or well meaning user groups is a bit hands off but then that's LL isn't it?

They clearly have the ability to organize events, why not a week long "PBR" launch party including tutorials, demonstrations etc?

 

 

Edited June 19 by AmeliaJ08

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

why not a week long "PBR" launch party including tutorials, demonstrations etc?

Woohoo! You sure know how to have a good time!!!!

Will there be music and dancing?

ETA: Sorry, I didn't mean that to sound sarcastic or critical. I just find the linking of "PBR" and "party" pretty hilarious. Not even party hats and cake are going to make PBR fun.

I DO take your point, however, about communication. LL is not good at that, as you note. What I think would be actually useful is a kind of "Dummy's Guide to PBR," that avoids most of the techie stuff and focuses squarely on what PBR will mean for the average user.

And a more advanced guide for creators would sure be useful. The wiki sucks.

 

Edited June 19 by Scylla Rhiadra

[AmeliaJ08]

Yeah you're right, I'm sure it'd get in the way of their exciting plans for yet more shopping events anyway

[Codex Alpha]

59 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I think SL’s complexity is part of the appeal for many users. You arrive looking like a noob, not knowing your arse from your elbow and see all this amazing stuff and as you level up your knowledge and skills it turns out that with some effort, you can make it too. Before you know it you find a niche and open a shop selling glow in the dark, ***** shaped candles…or whatever.

That's only for tenacious people, everyone else will drop off with the more complex, or more 'workarounds' that mess up their usual workflow JUST to put in SL.. is it worth it at this point?

The bar keeps going up even as you skill up, so does everyone else, and the 99% of normal people are going to be left behind. I know too many that built stuff in the past, but now it takes a lot of skill and software to keep up.

With severe lack of documentation, or consistent documentation - or even knowing where to find it, along with relying on their users to make tutorials - it takes forever to learn anything in SL, where another platform or engine like Unity you can learn and do tons of stuff on your first day.

My workflow was do it all in PBR, make the SPC/GLS conversion from those maps, up it to SL - find out people with no ALM want to low-rate my stuff and leave bad reviews - start baking the light in lol, then now PBR, but now people need probes, special lighting yeehaw good luck with that for the average user and their parcel. Gonna be issues

[BilliJo Aldrin]

5 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

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.

No matter how beautiful Second Life becomes, it will never come close to matching RL. Maybe all this crap is important for bedridden shutins who can't get outside, but I can go sit out in my garden and it looks 10 times better than anything LL could ever come up with.

[Luna Bliss]

4 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

6 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

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.

No matter how beautiful Second Life becomes, it will never come close to matching RL. Maybe all this crap is important for bedridden shutins who can't get outside, but I can go sit out in my garden and it looks 10 times better than anything LL could ever come up with.

IKR, and my foot will never look like my hand.  I'll be sure and keep pointing this out whenever I can.

Edited June 19 by Luna Bliss

[Codex Alpha]

5 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

No matter how beautiful Second Life becomes, it will never come close to matching RL. Maybe all this crap is important for bedridden shutins who can't get outside, but I can go sit out in my garden and it looks 10 times better than anything LL could ever come up with.

Gameplay or (Experiences/Chat/Social in World) > Graphics in the end, always will be.

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

5 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

Maybe all this crap is important for bedridden shutins who can't get outside

I'm not sure what all your second life boyfriends would say about this! 

[Luna Bliss]

9 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

The bar keeps going up even as you skill up, so does everyone else, and the 99% of normal people are going to be left behind.

It's so easy to think most in SL are like us, those who like to tinker or talk about complexities on the forum. But the reality is that most in SL aren't like us, and most don't know there's a forum even.

Edited June 19 by Luna Bliss

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

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.

Ingrid's reaction to this was perfect, lol.

Nothing against you AT ALL Scylla, but where in the world would a regular a@# resident even learn such a thing? 😂

And don't say classes (they won't go), and don't say the Knowledge Base. I have done enough basic default to mesh makeovers to know nobody reads nuffin' round these here parts (including bottle-shaped vendors to find the demos) and if someone doesn't take them aside and teach them things, they'll never know it exists. That's not true for everyone, of course, but it's certainly true for some - usually the ones who just log in to hang out and chat.

Hell, there are TONS of features and shortcuts I keep finding out about and I've been here forever both on the creator side and the "SL and chill" side. Imagine how my world changed when a friend told me about cam shopping and area search, LOL. I had somehow never discovered all that myself (omg).