Discrepancy between Substance Sampler/Painter and inworld PBR - Too shiny!

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

So I am trying to upload some PBR terrain textures and it feels like my materials look fine in Sampler/Painter, but when I bring them inworld, the normal maps feel very aggressive and the metallicity/roughness looks way too shiny. The only way I can get it to look good is by removing the roughness maps all together.

I also notice when I pull my camera backwards, the normal map details seem to disappear. Is this somehow the normal being overpowered by the shiny?

Is there any way I can match what I see in SA/SP with SL? Like, is there a HDRI I can download that will let me see how things will look in SL before I take the time to upload everything? Because in SA/SP, the materials look very nice.

I am a total noob to this who just picked up the Steam versions of SA/SP a few weeks ago, so the possibility of me being a clueless moron is high. But I also know the SL PBR implementation is a fudge. Are there some specific quirks I am unaware of? I know I need to be exporting normal as OpenGL.

Edited August 6 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

PS: I DID find the reference HDRI on the wiki page,

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PBR_Materials#Recommended_Application_Settings

but if you click on it, it just seems to send you round in a circle?

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Ah, ok, turns out the links further down the page ARE broken, but you can still get to it at the top of the recommended application settings section:

https://github.com/Jenna-Huntsman/Second-Life-Resources/tree/main/PBR/HDRi

Moral of the story: dont ask questions you have been stewing on overnight the moment you wake up without double-checking the documentation again.

Hopefully it will help someone in the future

 

[aht1981]

terrain you say. So I baked some grass from SP to a plane the other day  - somebody had uploaded the grass textures from AmbientCG to MP, but it looks incredibly bad - I turned off the height map and reduced the roughness and it was fine. Admittedly it's also under a reflection probe. I think sometimes you don't need the height map (I think sometimes height data is used for adding effects in SP, so you need it for that, but not on export)

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

I was wondering about that. As I understand it, the height info goes into the normal map. So perhaps that is why my normal maps look really amped up and ugly.

[Frionil Fang]

1 minute ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

. As I understand it, the height info goes into the normal ma

A normal map can be generated from a height map, but you can't put a height/displacement map (grayscale) into the normal map (light blue base tint, rainbow sheen relief details) slot. Not sure if it's just inconsistently labeled as a file or an actual height map on that site 

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Yes sorry, my bad on terminology. What I meant is the information from the height map is used (in part?) to generate the normal. So while we dont actually use the height in SL, it is still important to consider in SP for your Normals to look good (?)

[aht1981]

yes and no. I believe the height map is often supplied as in SP the data within the height map can be used for blending in other details. So for example you might have some carved detailing on furniture and you can use the height data in the wood to add dust within the crevices and by editing the levels adjust how it appears. Probably also using height is better for adding details in SP to your normal map - eg add a layer, add a mask and then reduce or lower the height.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

I resolved my roughness woes, but I am still having a time with Normals. So, this is the original texture on a sphere in Substance Designer....its clumpy grass, basically. 

 

and here it is in Substance Painter with the SL HDRI....... Not the greatest grass ever made, but its mine and it looks like grass, so yay.

Far

But when I bring them inworld I get this strange effect where they are really harsh looking close-up, and fade to near nonexistence when I cam back. This is a 2048 texture applied to a 5m by 5m mesh plane under a lighting probe. See how in this pic, they become quite dark and apparent the closer to the camera they are and fade out the further away they are.

And when I cam away....they crumble into nothing very quickly.

I have double checked that I am outputting OpenGL maps. I get that the dark patches are caused/exacerbated by the "clumpyness", but why is it disappearing like that?

 

Edited August 6 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[aht1981]

I guess you could just reduce the strength of the normal in SD. It's grass so it's not massively important.

Feel free to message me, as I think I saw something similar with a PBR tree and spend half my day in SD lately. Could also be linked to how you baked in SP.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

I have tried that, but what I find is the normal either looks non-existent or harsh and overblown, I cant seem to find any middle ground. Also, the map disappears at a distance regardless of its intensity.

I am guessing its something to do with how I am baking, but its difficult to know sometimes what is an error and what is "expected SL behaviour". 

I did also find this - https://blenderartists.org/t/normals-disappear/1243115/6 - that seems to describe a similar problem. Though talking about Blender rather than SP.

Edited August 7 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[aht1981]

send it to me inworld and I'll have a look.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

So I managed to find a hacky way to get what I wanted. Pretty sure now it is something I am doing with my normals in Substance Designer. Basically, I binned the normal maps from SD and took the color and height map to Materialize (its a free program for making PBR) and generated the normal map that way. By setting it to the "mids" setting, I was able to get something close to the result I was after.

Still needs some tweaking, but overall, a much nicer, softer, clumpier effect that doesnt look so aggressive up close. One thing I am noticing - putting materials on mesh landscape components really makes the overlap lines very obvious in some lighting conditions.

Yucky. So that's going to be fun to try to hide. So yeah.....seems I need to dig deeper into normal map generation in Substance Designer. Thanks for the help everybody!

 

Edited August 9 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[animats]

There are standard glTF test objects, with standard pictures of what they're supposed to look like.

"A Beautiful Game" - one of the standard open source glTF test object from Kronos. This is what it should look like in all PBR renderers under standard lighting conditions. There's a correct render result for physically based rendering.

Try importing that into SL and see what it looks like. Some of those Kronos objects are already in world at Rumpus Room on the beta grid. I've seen the water bottle in-world in several places.

It would be useful if LL set out the whole test set permanently at Bug Island or some other test region, for calibration purposes.

[aht1981]

I'm starting to wonder if what happened was you had alpha somewhere. Anyway glad you found a solution. 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 8/6/2024 at 9:18 AM, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

Is there any way I can match what I see in SA/SP with SL?

Essentially, NO.

SL's "PBR" is not an actual full PBR system, its a badly broken half finished mess of PART of a PBR system, just the shaders, and tone mapping, and the render pipeline, it doesn't have actual PBR lighting yet.

Even worse, SL's "PBR" doesn't use ANY "industry standard" PBR tone mapping, it uses a kludgy mess that is 2/3rds ACES & 1/3rd SL.

 

On 8/9/2024 at 6:45 PM, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

Yucky. So that's going to be fun to try to hide.

What you do is disguise it with shrubbery. Joins between mesh rocs, mesh terrain layers, etc., have always been clunky, and always will be, PBR won't cure that.

Sometimes you can minimise the effect by ignoring the UV mapping and setting it to "planar" instead of default, so both pieces are scaled, rotated and transformed contiguously., but the less FLAT the pieces are, the more likely the rather cubical "planar" mapping will mess up and create nasty interference patterns on corners.

 

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

21 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

What you do is disguise it with shrubbery. Joins between mesh rocs, mesh terrain layers, etc., have always been clunky, and always will be, PBR won't cure that.

Sometimes you can minimise the effect by ignoring the UV mapping and setting it to "planar" instead of default, so both pieces are scaled, rotated and transformed contiguously., but the less FLAT the pieces are, the more likely the rather cubical "planar" mapping will mess up and create nasty interference patterns on corners.

 

I know the usual drill, I was more making the observation that its even more noticeable now than previously. 
 

21 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Essentially, NO.

SL's "PBR" is not an actual full PBR system, its a badly broken half finished mess of PART of a PBR system.

Pretty standard LL really. Your the fool for expecting something that actually works as intended. 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

Your the fool for expecting something that actually works as intended

Oh I didn't, I'm well aware of LL SOP...

Take 6 month project, botch it into 6 year project, give up half way through, bemoan sunk costs, release it anyway, claim it works as intended, do nothing useful for 6 months, try to kludge fix it for another 12, finally give up and leave it broken forever.

 

I said PBR would be a hot mess, before it was released, and I was right.

 

[Gabriele Graves]

Perhaps I'm missing something but wouldn't LL have had to have come up with a custom tone-mapping for PBR or legacy inworld objects would have looked really awful under PBR and would have essentially made everything existing inworld before that total junk?  It seems to me that what we have is the compromise in order to do their best to preserve what we have already.

Edited August 11 by Gabriele Graves

[Nagachief Darkstone]

7 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Perhaps I'm missing something but wouldn't LL have had to have come up with a custom tone-mapping for PBR or legacy inworld objects would have looked really awful under PBR and would have essentially made everything existing inworld before that total junk?  It seems to me that what we have is the compromise in order to do their best to preserve what we have already.

That was indeed the reasoning to modify ACES a bit so that it's not as harsh on existing content.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

14 hours ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

That was indeed the reasoning to modify ACES a bit so that it's not as harsh on existing content.

So instead of SL tone mapping that makes the PBR content look crap, or ACES tonemapping that makes 99.999999 % of SL look like crap, they went with kludge-it-anti-technology, and used a hybrid that makes 100% of SL look like crap.

 

Good Job! 👍

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

15 hours ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

That was indeed the reasoning to modify ACES a bit so that it's not as harsh on existing content.

I understand the desire to compromise, but it feels like we have inadvertently gotten an outcome few are actually "happy" with. I know I am a bit snarky towards the lab, but I do sympathise with LL too. Its incredibly difficult to make changes like this without annoying people no matter what you do.

I still don't really get why we could not have PBR (TRUE PBR) regions, and non-PBR "legacy" regions. LL could probably have even charged a bit more for them, which seems like an idea they would be very happy with. I cant imagine it didn't come up at the board meetings. That way PBR people can PBR without changing workflows and everyone else can just get on with their virtual lives and pick it up when they are ready to and when there is enough content to actually create a full PBR region that the user would enjoy.

I've been told its "not a popular idea" on the forums (whatever that actually means) but I cant understand why that would be the case. This way just feels rather forced on everyone and its sour grapes all around. I mean, cant really change it now but it just boggles my brain. Its like they picked the method that would maximize annoyance. 

Edited August 12 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Gabriele Graves]

11 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I understand the desire to compromise, but it feels like we have inadvertently gotten an outcome few are actually "happy" with.

We have no idea of true numbers of people happy or unhappy.  The only conclusion we can draw is that it has made more people unhappy than some of the previous things LL have introduced but to be fair there seems always to be a fair number of unhappy people no matter what changes.

11 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I still don't really get why we could not have PBR (TRUE PBR) regions, and non-PBR "legacy" regions. LL could probably have even charged a bit more for them, which seems like an idea they would be very happy with. I cant imagine it didn't come up at the board meetings. That way PBR people can PBR without changing workflows and everyone else can just get on with their virtual lives and pick it up when they are ready to and when there is enough content to actually create a full PBR region that the user would enjoy.

I've been told its "not a popular idea" on the forums (whatever that actually means) but I cant understand why that would be the case. This way just feels rather forced on everyone and its sour grapes all around. I mean, cant really change it now but it just boggles my brain. Its like they picked the method that would maximize annoyance. 

Overall, content creators don't want to be making things twice, once for BP and once for PBR.  Some will want to create for one and some the other.  It will be a rare few that want to create for both.  Separating things by region type will not change this.  LL's decision is based on the premise that content creators will want to choose the easier and more familiar tools, workflows and creation process over the older and harder one and it's a fair call.

Just look at the main rationale for creators dropping Lara v5.3 for Lara X, an easier rigging process for creators.  I don't like it but that has no bearing on things.

 

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

3 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

We have no idea of true numbers of people happy or unhappy.  The only conclusion we can draw is that it has made more people unhappy than some of the previous things LL have introduced but to be fair there seems always to be a fair number of unhappy people no matter what changes.

That's fair I suppose, but the same could also be said of your point. We don't actually know how many content creators want to do what with their time. I don't think any extensive survey has been done.

But my point was not really about that. I don't disagree with anything you said, but what I am saying is separating it by regions would have made the transition easier and smoother for the userbase and content creators too. Let people come at it in their own time, to a degree. Over time I imagine that legacy regions would be put to bed for good as if PBR content is so game-changing, people will want to move over.

But now we are going to have a mish-mash of both types of content for quite some time. Which is much more disruptive for everyone involved.

Anywho, I think we may be in danger of going off the rails here folks. Lets not get mauled my the Moles. No point stewing over something thats not going to change. At the end of the day......my grass is looking much nicer. That's the main thing (for me anyway).

[Gabriele Graves]

24 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

That's fair I suppose, but the same could also be said of your point. We don't actually know how many content creators want to do what with their time. I don't think any extensive survey has been done.

But my point was not really about that. I don't disagree with anything you said, but what I am saying is separating it by regions would have made the transition easier and smoother for the userbase and content creators too. Let people come at it in their own time, to a degree. Over time I imagine that legacy regions would be put to bed for good as if PBR content is so game-changing, people will want to move over.

But now we are going to have a mish-mash of both types of content for quite some time. Which is much more disruptive for everyone involved.

Anywho, I think we may be in danger of going off the rails here folks. Lets not get mauled my the Moles. No point stewing over something thats not going to change. At the end of the day......my grass is looking much nicer. That's the main thing (for me anyway).

Fair enough and there are probably considerations that we cannot be aware of in LL's decision making.

Edited August 12 by Gabriele Graves