Cancelled my membership after nearly 20 years - cause of PBR Viewer Graphics issues

[Qie Niangao]

It looks pretty good but it's hard to tell from a 2D image. They're definitely claiming 2K (the 2048x2048 resolution) and they could achieve it with an applier, but a tattoo is BoM so ithat can't be 2K yet. I don't think it would be wrong to bundle both or to explain what's involved, but otherwise there could be some (temporary) disappointment if they showed a 2K applier skin and sold only a BoM tattoo now, even if eventually it would bake to full resolution.

I probably should get in-world and check out what's at the store to see if it's less mysterious.

(I should mention that apparently the plan is to deliver 2K BoM and (somehow) PBR BoM at the same time. It's certainly possible to do that, but it's kind of a logistics stretch—especially for creators.)

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I probably should get in-world and check out what's at the store to see if it's less mysterious.

(I should mention that apparently the plan is to deliver 2K BoM and (somehow) PBR BoM at the same time. It's certainly possible to do that, but it's kind of a logistics stretch—especially for creators.)

Let us know what you learn, so we can grok.

[SandorWren]

9 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

It looks pretty good but it's hard to tell from a 2D image. They're definitely claiming 2K (the 2048x2048 resolution) and they could achieve it with an applier, but a tattoo is BoM so ithat can't be 2K yet. I don't think it would be wrong to bundle both or to explain what's involved, but otherwise there could be some (temporary) disappointment if they showed a 2K applier skin and sold only a BoM tattoo now, even if eventually it would bake to full resolution.

I probably should get in-world and check out what's at the store to see if it's less mysterious.

(I should mention that apparently the plan is to deliver 2K BoM and (somehow) PBR BoM at the same time. It's certainly possible to do that, but it's kind of a logistics stretch—especially for creators.)

I had an issue changing settings in Substance Painter to output both Blinn-Phong, and then PBR. The initial setting dictates the output, from what I've found. Maybe I should try loading a PBR textured object I create with the setting set to Blinn-Phong, and see if that works. If it works, then it's very easy.

[Qie Niangao]

16 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

I had an issue changing settings in Substance Painter to output both Blinn-Phong, and then PBR. The initial setting dictates the output, from what I've found. Maybe I should try loading a PBR textured object I create with the setting set to Blinn-Phong, and see if that works. If it works, then it's very easy.

Yeah, although once a creator has that workflow streamlined, they'll still need to decide what to do about a whole catalog of BoM content that was diffusemap only before. Even if they have materials-aware source, it would be a chore to re-package and redeliver a store-full of skins, so I imagine few will bother with that, instead just introducing new "lines" of skins or something.

Not that it really affects creators, but some customers (like me) will end up frustrated. There are still SLUV skins I wish an alt could wear on EvoX for the extra layers (hairbases mostly) available only with that UV map. After ridiculously extensive search, I've found and bought almost satisfactory substitute EvoX skins, but none quite right.

[Qie Niangao]

56 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Let us know what you learn, so we can grok.

Didn't learn much, unfortunately. I could find no further explanation posted in the store nor at the event where that skin is sold. The demo looks like the picture as best I could tell, and in 3D it's a nice skin, but it's definitely baked to 1024 resolution (which we know is the current capability of BoM, so this is just confirming that fact in the viewer). Because the skins themselves are no-mod, there's no way to see the resolution of the underlying textures inside. There are some mod-enabled add-ons layers such as "contouring" tattoos and those textures are just 1024, but that's more than plenty for those so it doesn't really reveal anything about what's in those no-mod skin tattoos.

My hunch is those underlying textures are 2K and all that detail will show up when the baking service can handle it. The current product images look indistinguishable from the 1024 demo, at least to me, so I kinda doubt they were created by applying 2K textures by non-BoM means.

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Bagnu said:

It's not. EvoX uses 2 UV maps, each 1024, instead of the single one Evo uses. 2K equivalent would be four UV textures. But true 2K would be a single texture .

They're really counting the separate ears texture and adding it to the face/head and coming up with 2048x2048? I dunno.

 

[1Arden]

That's also an insane amount of editing/airbrushing to come up with that image 

[steeljane42]

2 hours ago, Bagnu said:

It's not. EvoX uses 2 UV maps, each 1024, instead of the single one Evo uses. 2K equivalent would be four UV textures. But true 2K would be a single texture .

It is, in fact, 2k face skin and 1k ears skin. EvoX is just a different UV, with separated universal ears layer. It can be any resolution. Those two new ones are both 2k.

[SandorWren]

49 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

They're really counting the separate ears texture and adding it to the face/head and coming up with 2048x2048? I dunno.

 

It isn't 2048x2048. It's two 1024 textures.  2048 would be four 1024 textures. 2K has 4x the resolution of 1024.

[SandorWren]

Just now, steeljane42 said:

It is, in fact, 2k face skin and 1k ears skin. EvoX is just a different UV, with separated universal ears layer. It can be any resolution. Those two new ones are both 2k.

So it IS 2k now?

[steeljane42]

3 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

So it IS 2k now?

It is 2k texture right now indeed. So we may call those "future proof" skins for when LL will update their baking system so those won't downscale to currently max supported 1k ones.

[BlightCirus]

On 7/19/2024 at 2:44 AM, Blue said:

Today i have cancelled my membership cause of the worst graphics and issues of PBR Viewers. I tried any kind of settings and the issues with PBR viewers are to much for me. It is totally frustrating and i don't have the time to do beta / alpha tests etc. or wasting my time with that kind of problems. 

I am in SL since 2006 now and i hever had any kind of problems with graphics or viewer issues. My iMac Pro has an AMD Vega 64 Graphicscard and it worked fine and perfect before PBR Update.

My avatar is bright, shiny and missing the hair. Every reflection is a pain in eyes and my NAIM Optimal Prim / Mesh environment was broken. I could not get it to work, so i am done. I don't understand why LL is doing that kind of things to the long term users and change everything to "unusable". 

Totally frustrating experience and waste of time

 

Use the second older version of firestorm the second new one not new new one. They do need make on and off button or way to turn it down but still enjoy it.  Show up to meeting asking them make on and off button or way to turn to tune it so all can enjoy.  Sorry you ran in to problems but speak up make ticket but be fair just wait out bit don’t give up sl over pbr thier other older viewers the older sl one and firestorm they will have to look in to it people are having problems but more must speak up be fair. But keep living your sl embrace it. 

Edited July 22 by BlightCirus

[BlightCirus]

@Blue  this for you blue            

 

[Qie Niangao]

10 minutes ago, steeljane42 said:

It is 2k texture right now indeed. So we may call those "future proof" skins for when LL will update their baking system so those won't downscale to currently max supported 1k ones.

Just to be absolutely sure, it is indeed possible to make a tattoo with 2K textures (that of course bakes to 1024). I had a moment of doubt because textures get an alpha channel added to them for masking when used in a body surface asset (skin, tattoo, etc) but nothing in that process pre-downscales the 2K textures.

I'm still a little queasy about merchants distributing skins as 2K that cannot currently be seen in 2K, without some note about what's going on there and how it is or isn't reflected in the image on the vendor (and not in a demo worn today). Thing is, a doubled pixel density could well make a skin look considerably older—not all detail is flattering—so the demo may end up being unintentionally deceptive as a representation of the eventual appearance of the product. Nonetheless, overall it's good to see the future-proofing of the skins themselves, albeit necessarily diffusemap only at this stage.

[Clem Marques]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Because BoM can't do 2K textures yet

I tried that out when making a tiny leg tattoo, uploaded it as a 2048x2048 texture and it worked, giving me a higher level of detail. It's BOM. So maybe they've updated that. That has been my experience with it.

Edited July 22 by Clem Marques

[SandorWren]

1 hour ago, Clem Marques said:

I tried that out when making a tiny leg tattoo, uploaded it as a 2048x2048 texture and it worked, giving me a higher level of detail. It's BOM. So maybe they've updated that. That has been my experience with it.

It's hard to tell, because downsampling always looks better.

[Qie Niangao]

I think you can tell that the baking is still limited to 1024, but it's a pain with most mesh avatars. It's possible to select the specific face to which the 2K-textured tattoo was applied, then Control-Alt-Shift-T to get a viewer pop-up with the (diffusemap) texture information for that surface. The tricky bit is selecting that right face, the one with the relevant tattoo baked onto the texture. Control-, and Control-. can step through all the faces in a selected linkset, but that's a stupidly long list for mesh avatars with multiple onion-skin layers; less so for mesh heads (which I used to test  a 2K opaque map of Heterocera applied as a cosmetics layer, to find it baked as 1024 alpha).

[Randy Pole]

On 7/19/2024 at 8:44 AM, Blue said:

Today i have cancelled my membership cause of the worst graphics and issues of PBR Viewers. I tried any kind of settings and the issues with PBR viewers are to much for me. It is totally frustrating and i don't have the time to do beta / alpha tests etc. or wasting my time with that kind of problems. 

I am in SL since 2006 now and i hever had any kind of problems with graphics or viewer issues. My iMac Pro has an AMD Vega 64 Graphicscard and it worked fine and perfect before PBR Update.

My avatar is bright, shiny and missing the hair. Every reflection is a pain in eyes and my NAIM Optimal Prim / Mesh environment was broken. I could not get it to work, so i am done. I don't understand why LL is doing that kind of things to the long term users and change everything to "unusable". 

Totally frustrating experience and waste of time

 

I am a bit late to this thread but I am assuming you are/were using the latest build of the Firestorm viewer. I assume this only because there does appear to be an issue with that and cache management particularly on the Mac platform. However I would suggest you do try the official LL viewer as that does not have the cache management issue and is also less stressful on machines generally due to it having less "bells and whistles". Yes you will lose some features and you will still have PBR but it may be a better experience for you.

[SandorWren]

3 hours ago, Randy Pole said:

I am a bit late to this thread but I am assuming you are/were using the latest build of the Firestorm viewer. I assume this only because there does appear to be an issue with that and cache management particularly on the Mac platform. However I would suggest you do try the official LL viewer as that does not have the cache management issue and is also less stressful on machines generally due to it having less "bells and whistles". Yes you will lose some features and you will still have PBR but it may be a better experience for you.

I am not having issues with the new FS, but my SL wife, Caitlin, absolutely IS having issues on her MAC. She went back to the pre-PBR FS. Alchemy gave her a headache with the interface. The official  LL viewer is useless to both of us, because it doesn't have RLV. There are others in the same situation.

[AmeliaJ08]

Since there's mention of MacOS again, hopefully everyone has seen this post where a fix for texturing issues has been identified. A debug setting and manually setting the VRAM amount seems to be the fix.

Performance issues are to be expected, M series Macs are not really made to run SL. Someone is working on a native Apple Silicon viewer called Megahapit that you might want to google, of course it still has to use the ancient version of OpenGL so your mileage may vary.

 

Edited July 28 by AmeliaJ08

[Persephone Emerald]

On 7/21/2024 at 6:44 PM, Qie Niangao said:

I think it's a challenging time for many merchants because items that are not expressly PBR-textured are going to be perceived as on the road to obsolescence, even if those glTF materials are doing nothing better than the Blinn-Phong materials did before. Worse, there are whole classes of products that are justifiably obsolete now, looking completely ridiculous once every viewer sees ALM all the time… latex with baked "shine" for example.

Also, nothing to do with PBR but related to the rendering upgrades in general, anybody buying BoM skins (especially faces) right now is making a very temporary investment. Unless those skins use 2K textures that will work when BoM goes 2K—is that even possible now?—soon enough they're going to look pretty lame compared to new products. Has anybody seen skin makers promoting "2K-ready" or anything like that yet?

Belleza's GenX v1.5 updated bodies have 2048 (2K) textures enabled.

Painted on shine for latex usually looks bad anyway. If the items come with texture change HUDs, maybe their creators could offer new texture HUDs, even if the new textures don't have fake shine? Would this be harder than updating all those old items? 

Edited July 28 by Persephone Emerald
Added "enabled" since 2K textures are not currently visible.

[Persephone Emerald]

On 7/22/2024 at 7:53 AM, Bagnu said:

It's not. EvoX uses 2 UV maps, each 1024, instead of the single one Evo uses. 2K equivalent would be four UV textures. But true 2K would be a single texture .

https://digitalregeneration.com/lelutka-evo-x-and-how-its-different-from-evo/

How will the availability of 2K textures affect Genus's so-called 4K heads, I wonder?

[SandorWren]

26 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

How will the availability of 2K textures affect Genus's so-called 4K heads, I wonder?

The bigger question is: "how much a 4K head truly matters". Past a certain point, our monitors and TV's can't show the extreme detail. We can only zoom in so far. 

[Persephone Emerald]

4 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

The bigger question is: "how much a 4K head truly matters". Past a certain point, our monitors and TV's can't show the extreme detail. We can only zoom in so far. 

I agree. I'm even happy with pre-EvoX skins sometimes. More detail isn't always necessary, depending on what kind of look one wants. It wouldn't be useful for an anime character, for instance. I don't think it's always necessary for my fantasy skins or for my alts.

I'd like Persephone and my guy alt to be able to look realistically middle aged, though, which more detail should be able to help.

[Clem Marques]

22 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I'd like Persephone and my guy alt to be able to look realistically middle aged, though, which more detail should be able to help.

Always nice to see middle aged and old avatars.

Hard to achieve that look, especially since there are not that many options out there. Most skins seem to aim for that 18-25 year old look, because that's what most people go for... creators try to match the demand. I know of four different mesh heads that can be used effectively for an older male look. Never seen one for women, but there are several great skins for them available in the MP. Would be nice to get recommendations for this type of thing. I have a customer support alt that is an old man and I like the way he turned out.

I personally don't believe "2k skins" are helpful, just seems like a marketing tactic to sell new products that are ultimately not a very significant improvement on what we already have available. Maybe people who favor extremely realistic avatars would care about it enough to get an upgraded skin. Fair enough, in that case.

Edited July 28 by Clem Marques