Firestorm PBR Release Is Out

[Ocean Starchild]

I think I’ll avoid it for a while at least. I tested one of the beta viewers and my 3060 started to overheat. 

[Codex Alpha]

29 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

I've been playing around with PBR environments, which I've not really got around to until now (been too busy making knickers and nipple covers).

First, it's just the same in LL's viewer as in Firestorm (I checked every case). So any complaining that it's Firestorm's fault... it's not, and defecting to the other team in protest over PBR or how your PC handles it is pointless. Rant at LL, not the Firestorm devs.

1. Many of the free PBR environments I've tried are just as unusable as most of the old windlight and EEP environments are.

2. Placing reflection probes in a building is an utter nightmare, with terrible results, unless you only have cuboidal rooms or live in a spherical bubble (then it's child's play - are we allowed to use that phrase given recent ToS issues?). Curves? Non-right-angle corners? Vaulted ceilings? Then get used to silly shadowing that completely ruins your beautiful decorating! I can see a lot of very boring buildings being sold. "Little boxes made of ticky-tacky. Little boxes all the same".

3. Make sure those reflection probes don't coincide with the edge or face of a mesh, because you'll get the weirdest texture flicking issues (nothing to do with VRAM / texture thrashing).

4. It's easy to set up a PBR environment and materials to look good in an isolated setting (which is sort of what I've been doing up to now, without realising that). It's not so easy in the 'real' world.

Maybe I need much more practice, but I feel sorry for the many users who don't even know how to open the edit tool.

And that's the thing. Should we rush to make PBR everything when the customer may not even know how to set it up in the first place? Guess who they blame when the stuff doesn't look good after they spent their 25 cents?

[Cristiano Midnight]

25 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Most photographers in SL are.probably NOT thrilled.with the PBR.  The do a.lot of photo manipulation anyway so it hardly makes a difference.  They will be upset when EEP settings they have used no longer look good.

If anyone is excited about PBR, it's creators of products.  

As someone who takes a lot of pictures, that has not been my experience. PBR has been a boon to my photography. I needed a bit of adjustment months ago, but I never find any of my eep settings that I use that I think “damn, they look bad now”. I specifically rarely do any post on mine, so I rely on eep and lights for my pics. I have been pleased with texture clarity I see in pics even with no pbr materials.

[RicDelMoro]

3 minutes ago, Ocean Starchild said:

I think I’ll avoid it for a while at least. I tested one of the beta viewers and my 3060 started to overheat. 

This is the real problem, it is not just about bad appearance, but something really harmful to our PCs !

[Perrie Juran]

1 hour ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Agreed, but if something is causing severe texture thrashing, that probably should be easier to access

Maybe after some of the PBR dust has settled I will suggest it. Right now they appear to be buried up to their ears with all the other issues.

[Cristiano Midnight]

1 minute ago, Perrie Juran said:

Maybe after some of the PBR dust has settled I will suggest it. Right now they appear to be buried up to their ears with all the other issues.

I do not envy their support right now. People are losing their freaking minds in group chat.

[Harper Held]

24 minutes ago, Ocean Starchild said:

I think I’ll avoid it for a while at least. I tested one of the beta viewers and my 3060 started to overheat. 

I'm giving firestorm a couple of releases from now before I bother about it in any serious way.

 

[lovestofu]

I politely dissent against the majority opinion in this thread. I welcome the recent PBR changes, I think SL looks a lot better with PBR.  SL21B in particular looks amazing.

If SL is supposed to be the premier metaverse experience, it should look good. PBR is a step in this direction. And I don't even have a supercomputer, yet the PBR viewer has been running well.

I'm genuinely concerned by the resistance to PBR's adoption, and I think it indicates that these forums are a poor source of actionable feedback for Linden Lab.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

52 minutes ago, Anna Salyx said:

Thought, I'd hardly say it was "breaking the crap" out of RLV though, but again I'll restate my own perspective that I'm a light/casual RLVa user and don't deal with objects that try to do a lot of RLVa related command in a short time frame. So my opinion by it's nature is biased.  I own that.  Now, Since RLVa is a feature set imported largely from the efforts over at the Catznip viewer camp, it might be something that those devs can look into. 

No.

This isn't the first time Bloatstorm has done something like this.

When Server side Appearance came in, FS devs MESSED with the way the rlv command buffer worked., and it had a percentage chance of flushing the command buffer, every time you logged in/

 

what this meant was that rlv commands sent by attachments, likke collars, relay huds, etc, basically got sent to the viewer, and then *flush* those commands were ignored.

Detach=no commands for "locked items" were never actioned, people noticed their collars fell off. They complained, and an FS dev claimed this was:

1. A problem that didn't exist, and

2. LL's fault, and

3. Affected all viewers, and

4. Could easily be worked around by unlocking and re locking all attachments after log in, and

5. didn't need fixing anyway.

 

Problems with that were:

1. It did exist, and

2. It was nothing to do with LL. and

3. Didn't affect Catznip, the viewer that makes Bloatstorms RLVa, and

4. That work around wasn't an option for a lot of people, and

5. Needed fixing as it broke the functionality of many rlv attachments.

 

Later, Bloatstorm claimed OpenCollar was "broken" because they "fell off when locked", but that only happened to Bloatstorm users who got that 1 in 8 login buffer fail bug.

Six months later, Bloatstorm changed something else, and it went from 1 in 8 logins to 1 in 8 teleports or logins., It was about 18 months before Bloatstorm did some unmentioned thing that cured that mess.

 

1 hour ago, Anna Salyx said:

Now, Since RLVa is a feature set imported largely from the efforts over at the Catznip viewer camp, it might be something that those devs can look into. 

They supply a working RLVa body of code to Bloatstorm, but they don't do all the coding for Bloatstorm, the broken buffer wasn't THEIR problem, and odds are the fix is out of their hands.

 

RLV command buffers self deleting when more than one command is heard, actually can break an awful lot of rlv items, as sending more than one command is very very common.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, RicDelMoro said:

What I feel : LindenLab is often trying to satisfy the SL photographers, mainly because those users are an important part of SL's livelihood. Those users are literally "poseurs", they mostly gave up to interact

Sorry but no.

PBR wasn't done to please "photographers who don't interact", it was done to appease content creators who had paid for a subscription to "industry standard tools" like Adumby Rental-Ware Substance Abuse.

None of the changes to rendering in PBR is particularly friendly to SL's photographers, nor was it ever meant to be. This was purely for the Futureness Cultists, and the more "professional" content creators who use expensive software.

[Rowan Amore]

32 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

As someone who takes a lot of pictures, that has not been my experience. PBR has been a boon to my photography. I needed a bit of adjustment months ago, but I never find any of my eep settings that I use that I think “damn, they look bad now”. I specifically rarely do any post on mine, so I rely on eep and lights for my pics. I have been pleased with texture clarity I see in pics even with no pbr materials.

The thing is, my EEP.and lighting were perfectly fine before which is why I don't think the comment that "LL did PBR for photographers" is valid.   At the moment, 'stuff' inworld looks the same as there is not a ton of PBR content.  What it will do.is make some of.that content NOT look good which,.to me, is counterintuitive if PBR was done for photographers.

Don't get me wrong.  I'll adapt just fine but to me, it was perfectly fine before.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

What it will do.is make some of.that content NOT look good which,.to me, is counterintuitive if PBR was done for photographers.

Don't get me wrong.  I'll adapt just fine but to me, it was perfectly fine before.

Theoretically, once we learn to "adapt", it should look "even better than before".  And by "adapt", I mean such things as "check if we need to rez our own reflection probes", etc.  Fun for the whole darn fambily!

ETA: And rez Local Lights, of course so rooms aren't totally dark. I haven't seen too many people complain about that yet with the Firestorm PBR release, but I've been dealing with it for a couple months in the Official viewer.

Edited June 22 by Love Zhaoying

[Rowan Amore]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

Theoretically, once we learn to "adapt", it should look "even better than before".  And by "adapt", I mean such things as "check if we need to rez our own reflection probes", etc.  Fun for the whole darn fambily!

 

So basically, more work for the casual photographer, like myself, for little to no gain depending on whether the content in my photo is PBR or not?

Yep, sounds like fun for the whole famn damily!

And by adapt, I just meant learning to adjust my EEPs.  I probably will never touch a reflection probe if I can help it.

[Toothless Draegonne]

7 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Sorry but no.

PBR wasn't done to please "photographers who don't interact", it was done to appease content creators who had paid for a subscription to "industry standard tools" like Adumby Rental-Ware Substance Abuse.

None of the changes to rendering in PBR is particularly friendly to SL's photographers, nor was it ever meant to be. This was purely for the Futureness Cultists, and the more "professional" content creators who use expensive software.

As someone who does not ever want to use Substance or Adobe's everything-as-a-service model, PBR has literally nothing to do with them. It's been a thing since 2013, and is used by absolutely everyone that isn't Linden Lab until recently.

Go ahead and try any other platform. It's all PBR. All of it. Every single one. Linden Lab just finally joined last decade is all. Well done.

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

As someone who does not ever want to use Substance or Adobe's everything-as-a-service model, PBR has literally nothing to do with them. It's been a thing since 2013, and is used by absolutely everyone that isn't Linden Lab until recently.

Go ahead and try any other platform. It's all PBR. All of it. Every single one. Linden Lab just finally joined last decade is all. Well done.

In SL we have the honor of not just being luddites....we are SUPER luddites!

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

So basically, more work for the casual photographer, like myself, for little to no gain depending on whether the content in my photo is PBR or not?

Yep, sounds like fun for the whole famn damily!

And by adapt, I just meant learning to adjust my EEPs.  I probably will never touch a reflection probe if I can help it.

Personally, I am getting tired of using the "New Midday" setting (since EEP's didn't solve my issue with the "too dark" problem, even with local lights). So, yeah.  But I "adapted" (did not quit).  Luckily, I don't take a lot of pictures, and when I do they're always "at home".

Edited June 22 by Love Zhaoying

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

any other platform.

Which other platforms would you be referring to specifically?

[Toothless Draegonne]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

And by adapt, I just meant learning to adjust my EEPs.  I probably will never touch a reflection probe if I can help it.

You will likely need to do so for skyboxes, unless you want the outside sky's colour reflecting off stuff inside the skybox. You don't need to worry that much though. Spherical probes are not that hard to deal with, and you have a 0.85x LI reduction to help "pay" for putting probes and lights in your skyboxes.

[Rick Nightingale]

Despite my problems with reflection probes, PBR compliant environments and odd-shaped rooms, I do like PBR and the associated changes overall. With some reservations - for instance, I miss coloured specular maps for iridescence (although nothing to stop still doing that and just ignoring PBR), and invisiprims for my watery builds.

The metallics really are so much better than baked-on materials. Shiny, polished rubber - yes! And reflective surfaces that really do reflect the surroundings; at least once that pesky reflection probe is set up (or, rather, eight probes and still some corners missing).

If we could have arbitrarily shaped reflection probes that would be so much better (like uploaded as mesh, or just an edited prim). I'm guessing there are technical reasons that's not going to happen though, or they would already exist.

[Toothless Draegonne]

5 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Which other platforms would you be referring to specifically?

Unity, UE5, all the popular engines that so many people have wanted a viewer to be made in. They are all PBR.

VR Chat, Resonite, other "VR World" platforms, all are PBR from the ground up.

Blender, Maya, 3DS Max, all are PBR, albeit full-on raytraced creation tools. Hell, the raytracers were the first implementation of PBR, way before techniques for implementing it became possible in realtime via GPUs.

PBR is a lot more than "shiny chrome wow."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physically_based_rendering

Edited June 22 by Toothless Draegonne

[Cristiano Midnight]

18 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

The thing is, my EEP.and lighting were perfectly fine before which is why I don't think the comment that "LL did PBR for photographers" is valid.   At the moment, 'stuff' inworld looks the same as there is not a ton of PBR content.  What it will do.is make some of.that content NOT look good which,.to me, is counterintuitive if PBR was done for photographers.

Don't get me wrong.  I'll adapt just fine but to me, it was perfectly fine before.

Ultimately anything that makes second life look more realistic is better for photographers. I have noticed that a lot of my stuff that had normal maps and specular maps look better to me even without any PBR material added. I use a lot of landscaping that has high-quality textures with additional maps applied and they got a visual boost with PBR. Even something as simple as the stucco wall next to my pool looks richer. I compared it before and after and while it is not dramatic, the way the light looks on it and the slight bumps just look better. I don't think it was done for photographers specifically, but for the visual fidelity of SL, which did need an upgrade to modernize even more.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

Probably unrelated, but...

After rolling back to the December version of Firestorm, I was hanging out at SL21B and got a BSOD.  I'm on Windows 10, and the error was "UNEXPECTED KERNEL MODE TRAP"  I checked for Windows updates, and found none, then ran Glary Utilities, to clean up (I've been uninstalling and reinstalling lots of stuff lately).  Then, I changed my 3060 nVidia video driver from studio to game ready, then updated my AMD chipset drivers.  Everything seems to be running fine, so far.  I hope there's no PBR stuff, or residual firestorm stuff from the new version causing problems.  There probably isn't, but I thought I would mention my experience here, in case others get the same problem.

[Rick Nightingale]

3 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

I have noticed that a lot of my stuff that had normal maps and specular maps look better to me even without any PBR material added.

Agreed. I've noticed that during beta testing. I don't know if it's 'technically' more accurate rendering or anything like that, but to my eyes things do look better.

Edited June 22 by Rick Nightingale

[Rowan Amore]

3 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

VR Chat, Resonite, other "VR World" platforms, all are PBR from the ground up.

Then that makes sense.  All their content is made for it unlike SL.  LL is basically trying to stuff a square peg in a round hole?    Sort of seems like trying to shove a Corvette engine into a Model T at this point.   

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

18 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

In SL we have the honor of not just being luddites....we are SUPER luddites!

I'm not a luddite, I just have a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these things than, well, most Secondlifers, because I actually mess with graphics a lot, games modding, and all that.

I'm aware of what PBR is supposed to be, and thus aware of what LL's PBR obviously is not.

That's why I call it a half finished abortion of half a PBR system.

That's why I find clumsily crowbarring in a broken version of PBR into a platform which by it's VERY nature will never really be suitable for PBR, just to appease a few content creators who have taken out a mortgage on Adumby Substance Abuse, at the expense of EVERYONE else in SL, with poor rendering, poor colour tone mapping, poor environment settings, poor lighting,  poor documentation, and poor quality coding, really, really, annoying.

 

It's almost as if they are TRYING to drive away enough of their customers to push the platform into a loss making spiral.