Linden Lab your PBR is giving me a headache

[Scylla Rhiadra]

10 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

I don't believe LL will walk this back either, but I do believe that creating/modifying viewers of our own will greatly help the situation. So will spreading the word about existing viewers that can help, like [henri please don't stab me for this] viewer

Sure, but it's a very temporary solution, because PBR is going to become a lot more common. And when we get PBR ground textures, the situation will likely be untenable for those who haven't switched over.

I think this is just buying time. Which, in fairness, may well be exactly what many people need.

[BriannaLovey]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Sure, but it's a very temporary solution, because PBR is going to become a lot more common. And when we get PBR ground textures, the situation will likely be untenable for those who haven't switched over.

I think this is just buying time. Which, in fairness, may well be exactly what many people need.

I have gone into detail in other replies about why this will not be as big of a problem as people say. TL;DR: there are ways to convert PBR materials into diffuse textures in order to approximate their appearance. I will be experimenting with them very shortly after I get basic changes implemented in my Firestorm 6.6.17 fork.

[NaomiLocket]

There are also some videos people are making to make use of the existing diffuse as a basis for the PBR material I think. If people can wrangle their situation to at least usable then mod superiority can salvage some useful things without going full process. Maybe.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

I have gone into detail in other replies about why this will not be as big of a problem as people say. TL;DR: there are ways to convert PBR materials into diffuse textures in order to approximate their appearance. I will be experimenting with them very shortly after I get basic changes implemented in my Firestorm 6.6.17 fork.

Yes. I've done that on occasion, "baking-in" the AO map to the colour map, and adjusting the rough map to serve for a spectral. It's imperfect, but it works.

But you need to get creators doing that, adding both Blinn-Phong materials AND PBR materials to new objects. And for a while some will, but an awful lot won't, because of the extra work.

And it's not going to help with terrain textures at all, because you can't back up the PBR materials on them with BP ones. They're just going to appear grey to those using older viewers.

[Irina Forwzy]

On 6/25/2024 at 9:55 AM, Drayke Newall said:

(the former) My issue is that LL have had over a year if not more of working on PBR and have done diddly squat to inform users that they will need to upgrade their comp. LL have consistently refused to not listen to PBR feedback and that it isn't ready in its current form to be used (i.e. it is still alpha/early beta stage). LL released it in November 2023 and it took 7 months of feedback from firestorm and other TPV's to half fix the garbage LL released.

The only reason why Firestorm seems to have pushed out their buggy release is due to pressure from LL to have it ready for SLB.

I have no issue with Linden Lab upgrading their graphics system as that is a given considering SL has to adapt to times. That said, there is clearly varying issues with overheating comps on even high end systems (not that some believe it) not to mention the complete alienation and ignoring of a quite substantial part of the userbase on low end systems.

Should they have updated their pc's? Yes, they should have. That said however, other than regular forumites or blog readers (a tiney subsect of the SL userbase) there was no hint to the majority of users that they would need to update their pc's.

The min specs should have been updated at least 10 months ago to ensure that any new person or (if told) existing user is aware of what min requirements there are for the new viewer to be released. People rely on those specifically to gauge what system they need. Just look at the numerous people in the Tech forums asking 'what pc do I need'. Wouldn't it be nice if we had proper system requirements on the SL website where we can say go there and buy recommended.

Would it have been hard for LL to send an email stating, "we have updated our min specs for a new graphics system, please ensure that you check you meet the min specs" or had a update link on the login page stating as such?

Firestorm is also partly to blame as the largest TPV. They relied on posting on their blog stating that an update to specs would be needed (only about 1 month ago mid you) to the tiny fraction of people that read it. Instead they should have had a big banner like their update banner when a person starts the viewer highlighting the change. To their credit though at least their min specs are reasonable, if a person can find them hidden in their wiki.

No one is arguing that, what people are arguing is that PBR was released to early, is still very buggy, is WAY to bright and glowy with existing content and EEP settings, has effected people completely unaware of the need to upgrade until the **** hit the fan and is overheating certain pc's.

All of this was preventable and easily handled with a little PR work from LL. Instead nothing of the sort. What were they expecting was going to happen?

I would say it wasn't that it was released to early as much as a change of this magnitude which a complete new rendering system should have been treated completely different from the get-go. It should have included mass communication BEFORE it went into beta phase.

With a thorough beta staging, where Emails/Coms are sent out to the vast number of users to try to lure different Computer specs into the environment. And if our viewers do show that to us, that means LL has a means of collecting that data (as in the type of systems) and targeting 95-98% of them in their beta testing.  

Once that started, they should have started to implement weekly or biweekly changes to the Beta environment to fix issues. Then, once they rolled it out the 1-5% with the last remaining issues could have been worked on by TPVs.

Instead,  it's been a hot mess. This is not mesh, where a sim can still operate without it. This is a complete overhaul of how you look at the world regardless of whether it is nonmesh, mesh, or this.

[BriannaLovey]

15 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yes. I've done that on occasion, "baking-in" the AO map to the colour map, and adjusting the rough map to serve for a spectral. It's imperfect, but it works.

But you need to get creators doing that, adding both Blinn-Phong materials AND PBR materials to new objects. And for a while some will, but an awful lot won't, because of the extra work.

And it's not going to help with terrain textures at all, because you can't back up the PBR materials on them with BP ones. They're just going to appear grey to those using older viewers.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear.

I am talking about a viewer feature here. Henri's viewer already does this to some degree, but does not make use of the other maps to add to the approximation.

The same exact thing can be done for terrain. It isn't complicated once you look at the basic components involved.

Edited Thursday at 05:37 AM by BriannaLovey

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, BriannaLovey said:

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear.

I am talking about doing it automatically by the viewer itself, for every PBR material that the viewer downloads. Henri's viewer already does this to some degree, but does not make use of the other maps to add to the approximation.

The same exact thing can be done for terrain. It isn't complicated once you look at the basic components involved.

Henri's does this? It automatically generates and loads a Blinn-Phong version of the PBR basic colour map directly in the server, and delivers it to the user's screen? Really?

As for terrain, it's not the same as mesh or prims. Maybe that could be done? But I honestly don't know.

[BriannaLovey]

8 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Henri's does this? It automatically generates and loads a Blinn-Phong version of the PBR basic colour map directly in the server, and delivers it to the user's screen? Really?

As for terrain, it's not the same as mesh or prims. Maybe that could be done? But I honestly don't know.

From what I understand, the process looks like this, simplified (correct me if I am wrong):

Viewer downloads PBR material -> PBR material's color map is extracted and converted to a texture locally -> resulting texture is rendered.

Whereas the process for a texture is:

Viewer downloads texture -> texture is rendered.

This works the exact same way for every texture that has to be downloaded in SL, regardless of what it is applied to.

Fundamentally, PBR materials and textures are very similar; both are just structured lists of pixels. PBR materials just have more channels for the other fancy stuff.

Edited Thursday at 05:48 AM by BriannaLovey
simplification

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, BriannaLovey said:

Fundamentally, PBR materials and textures are very similar; both are just structured lists of pixels. PBR materials just have more channels for the other fancy stuff.

I can see, notionally, how that works.

No normal or spectral maps though?

And I'm still not sure that you could do this with terrain.

[Irina Forwzy]

6 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I don't support this sentiment. I think we should be positive about older residents, but not at the expense of everyone else. I do advocate at user group meetings for tools aimed specifically at getting residents who are left behind into creating for instance continually at UG meetings.

Personally, I don't feel Gen Xs or the newer generation which are the current target of this will be wasting time in a game that their parents may have played. But I don't know,  having seen their psychology and how it's impacted retail and other enterprises in real life may play completely different here.

Maybe they can also rebrand the game,  Second Life to hmmm... "Third Life"?

[BriannaLovey]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I can see, notionally, how that works.

No normal or spectral maps though?

And I'm still not sure that you could do this with terrain.

There is a way to convert to normal or spectral maps, but I am not really focused on that for now since those who can run ALM can generally run PBR viewers.

Think of it this way: Right now, terrain uses textures. Mesh uses textures. Prims use textures. Profiles use textures. In nearly every instance, the textures are loaded the exact same way. In the future, when any of them use PBR, the process I described above can be used.

If computational overhead for the PBR->texture conversion process is a concern, of course a caching system could be created for the converted stuff. If storage is a concern, the downloaded PBR materials could be discarded since they wouldn't be needed after this conversion takes place.

[Irina Forwzy]

6 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

I'd put forward that a platform that can't attract new residents is a financial ticking time bomb. People don't live forever, you know?

Except they are trying to attract the younger crowd not the other ones within the same age range.  The younger one that used to have disposable income and doesn't have as much anymore and the younger ones that have not gone to the old retailers.. hence why so many brands have actually had to file bankruptcies. They shift to try to cater to the young, but they don't really hit well with them.

[Dorientje Woller]

1 minute ago, Irina Forwzy said:

Except they are trying to attract the younger crowd not the other ones within the same age range.  The younger one that used to have disposable income and doesn't have as much anymore and the younger ones that have not gone to the old retailers.. hence why so many brands have actually had to file bankruptcies. They shift to try to cater to the young, but they don't really hit well with them.

Lols, I have helped a couple of months ago an 78 year old lady dive into the world of bento heads and bodies, EvoX style, because she wanted to update her looks.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

There is a way to convert to normal or spectral maps, but I am not really focused on that for now since those who can run ALM can generally run PBR viewers.

Think of it this way: Right now, terrain uses textures. Mesh uses textures. Prims use textures. Profiles use textures. In nearly every instance, the textures are loaded the exact same way. In the future, when any of them use PBR, the process I described above can be used.

If computational overhead for the PBR->texture conversion process is a concern, of course a caching system could be created for the converted stuff. If storage is a concern, the downloaded PBR materials could be discarded since they wouldn't be needed after this conversion takes place.

It's an interesting idea, but I have nowhere near the expertise to know how viable it is. Or how much work it would take.

The other issue is of course buy in. I find it very hard to believe that LL would go to the effort to do this. Would FS? Or other TPVs?

I dunno, in part because I don't know how much is involved.

[BriannaLovey]

42 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's an interesting idea, but I have nowhere near the expertise to know how viable it is. Or how much work it would take.

The other issue is of course buy in. I find it very hard to believe that LL would go to the effort to do this. Would FS? Or other TPVs?

I dunno, in part because I don't know how much is involved.

I don't expect any official TPVs other than Henri's and the one I am working on myself to use a feature like this. I am forking firestorm, because a lot of the people I recommended Henri's viewer to ended up having baby duck syndrome about the interface.

As for the difficulty, who knows. The absolute worst case scenario is that I have to learn GL Shader Language in order to implement compute shaders for efficient conversion to textures. I have done a bit of OpenCL before though, so it shouldn't be all that bad. I don't expect I will have to do that though, since it will be only a few addition or multiplication operations, and the tradeoff of sending stuff to the (i)GPU and back will favor CPU-based PBR->texture conversion.

Edited Thursday at 06:40 AM by BriannaLovey

[animats]

1 hour ago, BriannaLovey said:

If computational overhead for the PBR->texture conversion process is a concern, of course a caching system could be created for the converted stuff. If storage is a concern, the downloaded PBR materials could be discarded since they wouldn't be needed after this conversion takes place.

If you really want to do that, it's not that compute-intensive. Much cheaper than JPEG 2000 decode. You can do it in a loader thread, not the render thread.

I have the reverse operation in Sharpview. The rendering back end has been PBR for years, and I have to convert classic SL content to PBR. My conversion is OK, but not great. See

https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

which is part of Fantasy Faire rendered in Sharpview.

Part of the problem is that we now have PBR rendering with old lighting. Going forward, we need proper glTF-standard lights, correct sun brightness, and proper tone-mapping.

The way PBR is supposed to be used is with lights and materials match real-world materials and light sources as closely as possible. There's a defined right way to do this. Any user-selected aesthetic color transformations are then applied after rendering, like camera filters.

Otherwise, you end up with the user's camera filters fighting with the environment and lighting settings of creators. Then there are big arguments and no settings that will satisfy everyone.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, BriannaLovey said:

There is a way to convert to normal or spectral specular maps

They're called specular maps.  Spectral maps are something very different and are most commonly used for acoustic analysis.

 

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's an interesting idea, but I have nowhere near the expertise to know how viable it is. Or how much work it would take.

Taking the albedo (colour) map and applying it to the legacy texture slot should theoretically be simple.  Converting PBR material maps to the old Blinn/Phong system is (for the most part) not that difficult either.  The main issue would most probably be the incompatibilities between the normal maps since the normal maps for the old and new materials systems are calculated using different tangent spaces.  Converting the roughness/metalness maps and adding them to the alpha channels of the normal and specular maps would be fairly trivial and you could just copy the albedo and use that as your specular colour map since PBR doesn't use colour specular maps and instead calculates specular colour based on the albedo map anyway.

Attempting to combine all those maps in order to generate extra detail on a diffuse/colour texture would probably be a great deal harder (and results would vary greatly depending on the original material maps used).  It's still technically possible but the results would most likely look worse than manually baking in lighting and shadow to the base texture and essentially you're just reinventing the wheel at that point because your pc is probably going to be working just as hard continually converting new materials and generating textures as it would if you were running a PBR viewer.

Edited Thursday at 07:10 AM by Fluffy Sharkfin
typos n stuff

[BriannaLovey]

4 minutes ago, animats said:

If you really want to do that, it's not that compute-intensive. Much cheaper than JPEG 2000 decode. You can do it in a loader thread, not the render thread.

I have the reverse operation in Sharpview. The rendering back end has been PBR for years, and I have to convert classic SL content to PBR. My conversion is OK, but not great. See

https://video.hardlimit.com/w/7usCE3v2RrWK6nuoSr4NHJ

which is part of Fantasy Faire rendered in Sharpview.

Part of the problem is that we now have PBR rendering with old lighting. Going forward, we need proper glTF-standard lights, correct sun brightness, and proper tone-mapping.

The way PBR is supposed to be used is with lights and materials match real-world materials and light sources as closely as possible. There's a defined right way to do this. Any user-selected aesthetic color transformations are then applied after rendering, like camera filters.

Otherwise, you end up with the user's camera filters fighting with the environment and lighting settings of creators. Then there are big arguments and no settings that will satisfy everyone.

Thanks! I will keep this in mind.

5 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

They're called specular maps.  Spectral maps are something very different and are most commonly used for acoustic analysis.

 

Taking the albedo (colour) map and applying it to the legacy texture slot should theoretically be simple.  Converting PBR material maps to the old Blinn/Phong system is (for the most part) not that difficult either.  The main issue would most probably be the incompatibilities between the normal maps since the normal maps for the old and new materials systems are calculated using different tangent spaces.  Converting the roughness/metalness maps and adding them to the alpha channels of the normal and specular maps would be fairly trivial and you could just copy the albedo and use that as your specular colour map since PBR doesn't use colour specular maps and instead calculates specular colour based on the albedo map anyway.

Attempting to combine all those maps in order to generate extra detail on a diffuse/colour texture would probably be a great deal harder (and results would vary greatly depending on the original material maps used).  It's still technically possible but the results would most likely look worse than manually baking in lighting and shadow to the base texture and essentially you're just reinventing the wheel at that point because your pc is probably going to be working just as hard continually converting new materials and generating textures as it would if you were running a PBR viewer.

lol I don't know why I typed spectral, maybe I am too sleepy. Thanks for the info, I will not combine the maps then. I don't want to make things any more inconsistent than they already would be.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

14 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

They're called specular maps.  Spectral maps are something very different and are most commonly used for acoustic analysis.

MY fault. Getting this wrong is a sort of reflex that I seem to have. (A CHARMING one, of course!)

14 minutes ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

The main issue would most probably be the incompatibilities between the normal maps since the normal maps for the old and new materials systems are calculated using different tangent spaces.

Interesting, as I'd assumed they were more or less the same. The certainly LOOK the same. I wonder which I've been generating all this time???

If I understand Brianna's idea, she's actually not all THAT concerned, at least immediately, about converting stuff like the normal or SPECULAR maps, as she points out that those most likely to want to use this viewer would likely not be using ALM anyway. If so, then the main thing would be the Albedo map. Which would be packed with the Occlusion map, would it not?

Anyway, as I was saying to Brianna just now, waaaaaaay above my pay grade.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

37 minutes ago, BriannaLovey said:

lol I don't know why I typed spectral, maybe I am too sleepy.

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

MY fault. Getting this wrong is a sort of reflex that I seem to have. (A CHARMING one, of course!)

I'd been watching you guys bandy that word back and forth for the last few posts like a cat watching a tennis match on TV, eventually I could no longer contain myself and had to pounce on it! 😅

 

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Interesting, as I'd assumed they were more or less the same. The certainly LOOK the same. I wonder which I've been generating all this time???

The differences between the various formula used for calculating normal maps can be subtle (unless you're trying to use the wrong type entirely) and a lot of the time you may not notice unless you happen to be the creator and know how something is meant to look.  The most obvious tell-tale signs are mismatched "seams" that can appear raised or indented and will show up along UV edges.

 

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

If I understand Brianna's idea, she's actually not all THAT concerned, at least immediately, about converting stuff like the normal or SPECULAR maps, as she points out that those most likely to want to use this viewer would likely not be using ALM anyway. If so, then the main thing would be the Albedo map. Which would be packed with the Occlusion map, would it not?

I think you're confusing the Albedo (colour) map with the Ambient Occlusion map (which is packed with the roughness and metalness maps, hence the combination of the three being referred to as "A.R.M.").  Since all three (AO, roughness and metalness) are 8 bit greyscale images they're easily combined into the respective red, green and blue channels of an image whereas the Albedo (colour) map uses all three RGB channels to define the surface colour so it requires it's own separate image/file.

 

32 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Anyway, as I was saying to Brianna just now, waaaaaaay above my pay grade.

I mean technically, since LL aren't paying any of us to learn this stuff, it's above all our paygrades, yet still we persevere!  

ETA:  The combined AO, Roughness and Metalness maps are more commonly referred to as "ORM" (Occlusion-Roughness-Metalness) maps rather than "ARM" maps.  I swear I've seen people on these forums refer to them as "ARM maps" but maybe I'm also too sleepy and was imagining it?!  Anyway I think the term "ORM map" is a lot less confusing since there's no other maps that start with "O".  

Edited Thursday at 08:04 AM by Fluffy Sharkfin

[Dorientje Woller]

@BriannaLovey Easy reponse from you, install linux and over are your problems. Forgetting that most, not all users aren't that tech savvy, don't want to risk of losing their data and that not all linux distributions are that easy to use/install. Will you sitting next to these users, holding their hands helping them out when everything goes sour? I bet you won't and will sneak away like a thief in the night, not willing to take your responsibility for the damage you have caused.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

10 minutes ago, Dorientje Woller said:

Will you sitting next to these users, holding their hands helping them out when everything goes sour?

Are you suggesting that people shouldn't offer advice to someone online unless they're willing to travel to that persons home and do it for them?  If everyone abided by that rule the internet wouldn't be nearly as useful or instructional!

13 minutes ago, Dorientje Woller said:

I bet you won't and will sneak away like a thief in the night, not willing to take your responsibility for the damage you have caused.

That's a pretty bold assumption to make about somebody you don't even know!

"Just install Linux" wouldn't be the first advice I'd give to somebody having issues with the viewer (or any other software) but it may be a good solution for some, and as has been pointed out dual booting works quite well so it's not a case of "either/or", you can quite easily use both.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

that he's offered to help people assemble their own low-cost computers. Which is great, but doesn't really address the issues being raised by hundreds -- actually, undoubtedly thousands -- of SL users.

His offer isn't worth a damn.

He blathers on, and on, and on about "You can get blah blah modern gpu blah for UNDER $200". but realistically, he's talking sh*te,.

Here is a LINK to a PC parts seller in the UK showing their available GPU's. All the prices are in GB £, multiply by 1.33 for US $.

Sorting price low to high, Nvidia cards only ( because SL hates AMD and it's sh*te-tech OpenGL drivers ), and cards under $150 = 1030 GT, a card that has 2GB of VRAM, gives single digit frame-rates with ALM, and will struggle to reach 5fps with PBR.

Under $200?  Same deal.

You want a 1650, that's going to start at over $200.

20x0 Series? They stopped advertising them, as they have none in stock, and haven't for a year or two.

The cheapest 30x0 series is a 3050, for about $250. Prices for 3050's climb from there.

The cheapest 3060 is about $360.

The cheapest 16GB 4060 ( because they keep telling us you NEED 16 GB VRAM for all that Texture Heavy PBR "goodness" ) weighs in at about $680.

 

The Futureness Cultists keep telling people that x030 and x050 cards don't cut it for gaming, but that's all they have under $350.

Then they tell us "But you can buy a modern PC for $500 that will do the job.", but I wonder how many of these people have actually LOOKED at prices.

The cheapest of what they describe as a "gaming laptops" are over $1100, and those are x050 series GPU's.

 

Some people don't HAVE $1100 to spare for SL, JUST to be able to log in and get over 10 FPS.

Those "EVIL Luddites who are holding me back from deluding my self that SL will ever look like CyberPuke 77 leet gamerz leetness!".

 

[AlexandriaBrangwin]

Sadly we got so good at faking actual lighting over the years, even fancy ray tracing (where it's actually used) in mainstream gaming disappoints on all counts.

Also I prefer fake raspberry flavour to actual raspberries.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 hours ago, BriannaLovey said:

linux

Can you STOP pushing Linux, 98% plus of SecondLifers don't and WON'T use Linux.

Linux is for nerds who enjoy spending more time with their PC's cover off, screwdriver between teeth, with a user manual in one hand, and a soldering iron in the other, than ACTUALLY using the PC to have, you know, FUN.

Linux Cultist Easy Install Instructions

"Installing on Linux is easy, you simply re-thrutch the overflange de-balancer with the command line switch -asshatnerdspeak ( unless you use Venusian Linux when it's -asshatnerdspeek , or Jupiterian Linux when it's -asshatnerdspoke ), then initialise the .blob file, and make sure to unlink the dependancy globs blah blah blah"

 

Grown-Up Operating System Install Instructions

"find the application installer .exe file you downloaded, double click on it."

 

This is why 98% plus of SecondLifers don't and wont use Linux, so enough propaganda about how "hella kewl" it makes you for using it.