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Posted

This comparison is between the non PBR FS viewer and the PBR FS viewer. The EEP is DHS Guardian - legacy and now PBR. I even modified the PBR on one shot by turning the reflection probe to zero, While the sand/foreground looks good - the sky is still washed out as compared to the non PBR. The graphs to the right are videoscopes - top left shows exposure (Parade) in the 3 channels the bottom right shows saturation (Vectorscope) the right side of the graphs shows the Waveform and below that the Histogram
image.thumb.jpeg.b04ebc73b40a5ff95fe9c52134da97e2.jpeg

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Posted (edited)

I think by now most folks have figured out that they most likely will need to change there "favorite" EEP settings.  Here is my test.

testFSviewer133.thumb.png.66feb23daf11aff262078eae5211e659.png

FS NON PBR viewer 133 fps

testlinden.thumb.png.406e1473e6956a24f61864b227533148.png

Linden PBR viewer 86 fps -- same time -- same settings

Edited by Chic Aeon
adding info
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Posted

Im not concerned so much with FPS, but what I have been finding is bright daylight scenes are in general washed out and I have played with alot of different EEPs.  I am not sure why it is, or if there is a under the hood fix for it, but it is like a camera with limited dynamic range in bright daylight - either you expose for the foreground or you expose for the sky. Lower light and night scenes look good in PBR. And as I showed even a new PBR EEP compared with the non PBR version the sky is a washout even with some tweaking

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Posted
1 hour ago, Jackson Redstar said:

Im not concerned so much with FPS, but what I have been finding is bright daylight scenes are in general washed out and I have played with alot of different EEPs.  I am not sure why it is, or if there is a under the hood fix for it, but it is like a camera with limited dynamic range in bright daylight - either you expose for the foreground or you expose for the sky. Lower light and night scenes look good in PBR. And as I showed even a new PBR EEP compared with the non PBR version the sky is a washout even with some tweaking

Jackson, Onsu's main store has a range (with subtle variants) of EEPs, including a number of midday ones, for sale at L$1.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Onsu/163/142/204 (h/t @Cristiano Midnight)

Firestorm has also produced a reasonably good guide on tweaking existing EEPs for PBR viewers.

https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/pbr_updating_skies

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Posted

Everything I've read here doesn't sound like fun to me, just boring, hard work.You can call me ignorant and lazy but I have many years of experience  and I know how to identify when a product is totally NOT ATTRACTIVE ! Lindenlab is rolling the dice in a risky way .

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Posted
25 minutes ago, RicDelMoro said:

Everything I've read here doesn't sound like fun to me, just boring, hard work.You can call me ignorant and lazy but I have many years of experience  and I know how to identify when a product is totally NOT ATTRACTIVE ! Lindenlab is rolling the dice in a risky way .

I agree. It looks so boring and a pain the butt with all the reflection probes in rooms, encompassing in a box, etc all the weirdo things just to get it work, and not working 'out of the box' for a new user.. Makes me barf from boredom, actually.

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Posted
20 minutes ago, Codex Alpha said:

I agree. It looks so boring and a pain the butt with all the reflection probes in rooms, encompassing in a box, etc all the weirdo things just to get it work, and not working 'out of the box' for a new user.. Makes me barf from boredom, actually.

And did our world really look that bad before PBR?

At least we understood it.

But now half of us are trying to figure out how to block whatever a PBR probe is.

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Posted
6 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:

This comparison is between the non PBR FS viewer and the PBR FS viewer. The EEP is DHS Guardian - legacy and now PBR. I even modified the PBR on one shot by turning the reflection probe to zero, While the sand/foreground looks good - the sky is still washed out as compared to the non PBR. The graphs to the right are videoscopes - top left shows exposure (Parade) in the 3 channels the bottom right shows saturation (Vectorscope) the right side of the graphs shows the Waveform and below that the Histogram

The first one looks the most realistic.

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Posted
10 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

I think by now most folks have figured out that they most likely will need to change there "favorite" EEP settings.  Here is my test.

testFSviewer133.thumb.png.66feb23daf11aff262078eae5211e659.png

FS NON PBR viewer 133 fps

testlinden.thumb.png.406e1473e6956a24f61864b227533148.png

Linden PBR viewer 86 fps -- same time -- same settings

this sparked a new idea, I really love your house or wherever this is, that would be cool to make a desert/arizona type home lot, if possible whats the name of this house or can you attach a marketplace link? 

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Posted

Trompe Loeil last month release. My place is on Magenta. Blog post in the queue :D.  I can't link to posts here but if it is on the marketplace it should be one of the newest products.    Javier Desert Cabin

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Posted
7 hours ago, Codex Alpha said:

It looks so boring and a pain the butt with all the reflection probes in rooms, encompassing in a box, etc all the weirdo things just to get it work, and not working 'out of the box' for a new user.

I've been using the LL viewer with PBR since it came out, and for me it has "worked out of the box".  I went with the recommended graphic settings, only changing the LOD setting to 2.0, and using the EEP's from World -> Environment.  I haven't had to use reflection probes at all in any of the houses I've used since PBR came out. 

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Posted (edited)

All the settings in the post over here is with Shared enviroment, my editing of Battlescars EEP and water.

Maybe you wonder why the PBR viewers has lighter shadows and foliage. Look at the tree to the right. It is a LL made tree on public ground, I can not replace it with a tree with better foliage.

I tried to have an enviroment setting so light that the tree does not have solid green/black foliage, but highlights of normal green.

The scene may be a bit too light and pale shadows, but I always tweak enviroment settings. So we shall see.

Edited by Marianne Little
added about foliage
Posted
8 hours ago, MoiraKathleen said:

I've been using the LL viewer with PBR since it came out, and for me it has "worked out of the box".  I went with the recommended graphic settings, only changing the LOD setting to 2.0, and using the EEP's from World -> Environment.  I haven't had to use reflection probes at all in any of the houses I've used since PBR came out. 

 

3 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

Not PBR, Firestorm:

nopbr_001.thumb.png.1b8e564db2295153b20f67af94f65346.png

Alchemy with PBR:

aPBR_002.thumb.png.d5c5e40e7610a805a7f7146558e5f6e8.png

Linden Viewer with PBR:

lv.thumb.png.a38fd4e4694dc0837fcf295778f315b4.png

One needs to consider if the PBR (texture sets) are appearing as they should, without anything else being needed to the scene. It's not just about whether a "PBR Viewer" works for one person or not technically - but that it works 'out of the box' and displays properly PBR-textured items correctly.

As you can see with these screenshots, I think it's a very nice design, but what pops right now to me is the top one, as it has more depth, shadows and detail.

Not sure why these pics were posted and to show: as I seen no PBR-materialed objects in the scene - many of them seem to be the most commonly used 'baked' single textures. And that could still be fine to keep the texture load of the sim down.. But with PBR (which works with proper texturing), I would expect a shine to the water pond, some wetness patches on the stone work, some reflectivity of slight metal on the bed of rocks, some kind of light information from everything that tells me it is actually being lit by the environment first ( I see nothing) and by any other light sources in the scene.

With PBR you can tell a story. The walking stones would first have a base material of stone/concrete, but then in further texturing could allow splashes on them, even wet footprints, that show that 'someone recently was standing in that pool and just walked across these stepping stones'. Or that not only with the passage of time moss has grown on the pond walls, but also dirt on the bottom parts, each having their own combo of color,  metal(yes/no), and roughness.

Nice scene, nice assets, they look great, but I don't see a "PBR" scene at all.

Posted
2 hours ago, Codex Alpha said:

-----------------------------------------------

Nice scene, nice assets, they look great, but I don't see a "PBR" scene at all.

Oh, I did not understand that. I thought it was about if enviroment looked different in a PBR versus no PBR. My mistake. 🥺

Posted
4 hours ago, Codex Alpha said:

With PBR you can tell a story. The walking stones would first have a base material of stone/concrete, but then in further texturing could allow splashes on them, even wet footprints, that show that 'someone recently was standing in that pool and just walked across these stepping stones'. Or that not only with the passage of time moss has grown on the pond walls, but also dirt on the bottom parts, each having their own combo of color,  metal(yes/no), and roughness.

This type of scene is going to depend not only how the viewer renders the scene, but also the abilities and creative vision of the person creating the assets.  I think that may be a bit too much to expect right away when many creators are still probably in the early stages of exploring all that they will be able to do with PBR.  It does make me excited though about what may be becoming available as people and creators get more involved with building/using PBR assets. 

Posted (edited)
8 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

I tried to have an enviroment setting so light that the tree does not have solid green/black foliage, but highlights of normal green.

Shadows got broken for ”legacy” EE settings shortly before LL pushed PBR to release.

You may ”recover” proper shadows with such settings by increasing the ”RenderSkySunlightScale” debug setting from 1.0 (100%) to 1.5 (150%).

Be aware, however, that 1.5 is way too much for PBR-hacked environment settings (so you'd need to revert this value back to 1.0 for them).

In the Cool VL Viewer, I implemented an ”Automatic exposure” mode to auto-adjust this factor with the EE settings currently in use.

Edited by Henri Beauchamp
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Posted (edited)
5 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

Oh, I did not understand that. I thought it was about if enviroment looked different in a PBR versus no PBR. My mistake. 🥺

3 hours ago, MoiraKathleen said:

This type of scene is going to depend not only how the viewer renders the scene, but also the abilities and creative vision of the person creating the assets.  I think that may be a bit too much to expect right away when many creators are still probably in the early stages of exploring all that they will be able to do with PBR.  It does make me excited though about what may be becoming available as people and creators get more involved with building/using PBR assets. 

They will work together, but PBR is mainly for the textures and how they reflect light from the environment. "PBR Viewer" just means it's capable of seeing those materials and how they work with the environment. Unfortunately it seems there are some extra steps to ensure they all work together - which gets into 'game engine' and 'game developer' level interaction and knowledge - that is going to leave a lot of normal users behind. These users are not going to learn it, they'll just leave, hence why I keep promoting "It better work out of the box", or have fallbacks, or don't do it at all then.

Edited by Codex Alpha
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Posted

What's interesting is it never worked optimally out of the box.  Each person needed to configure their viewer of choice to their system.  My first laptop for SL had integrated graphics.  I used the LL viewer which set my 'recommended' settings far beyond what was actually usable.  I learned then, 16 years ago, that I would always have to adjust settings.  PBR viewers are the same in that respect.  They are not going to work out of the box as no viewer ever has.

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:

I'm not against PBR (I tweaked my settings and everything is fine)but I'm  also not seeing a huge difference in some of the photos....?

The quality of graphics obviously matters more to some people than to others. Anyone who has been wandering around for the last half dozen years without ever enabling ALM, for instance, probably doesn't care. And that's totally cool -- and a point that so many of the PBR enthusiasts miss, that for some people other things are more important.

I think too that if you're a photographer, you'll just tend to be more used to picking up subtle differences -- and you're right, the differences in Marianne's three pics are, objectively, fairly subtle.

But for me, the pre-PBR shot is much the better of the three: the colours are richer, the contrasts more pronounced, and the shadows sharper and more distinct.

Now, in fairness --

-- there are not, I think, any PBR objects or textures in this pic, so the newer viewers can't strut their stuff by showing how those look. Instead, they're rendering legacy materials using a new lighting system that is not designed for that.

-- Marianne is using a custom EEP, but possibly not one designed with PBR in mind. Older EEPs look great in pre-PBR viewers, and either too dark or (as is the case above, I suspect) too washed out in PBR viewers. So, an EEP that has been "tuned" for PBR viewers would probably make those two shots look better

-- contrast, saturation, and especially the quality of shadows, are things that can be adjusted in-viewer, using EEP settings, but also other graphical settings (such as shadow clarity, depth, and sharpness). So it would be possible, tweaking some of these things, to bring the three pics more in line

There is so little PBR out there in-world right now, that you have to try hard to find a scene that would show it to advantage.

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Posted (edited)
18 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

What's interesting is it never worked optimally out of the box.  Each person needed to configure their viewer of choice to their system.  My first laptop for SL had integrated graphics.  I used the LL viewer which set my 'recommended' settings far beyond what was actually usable.  I learned then, 16 years ago, that I would always have to adjust settings.  PBR viewers are the same in that respect.  They are not going to work out of the box as no viewer ever has.

No. There are extra steps that users will have to do to get the 'scene' to work correctly.

eg. Second Life - How to Set Up Reflection Probes for PBR

Users will have to set this up on their land. Also there are further posts and discussions that they will also have to be set up inside created buildings, and sometimes situations will need be enclosed in an entire box, like a skybox - depending on what is needed.

When I use the phrase 'work out of the box', I mean it. Sansar worked out of the box. A user had to do nothing but start plopping down stuff into their scene.

Everything takes skill, yes. But these forums are filled with techy nerds and game developers that couldn't make anything outside of SL who keep telling people 'all you got to do is buy a video card' and they're missing the point.

 

Edited by Codex Alpha
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