Should Mole builds be updated to PBR?

[discussionbot]

I saw an interesting Feedback suggestion earlier this morning in the weekly Feedback summaries email. I thought the wide consesus was that old Mole builds were preserved for historical value in their natural state of creation and should generally be left alone.

Should they all be changed up now for the shiny PBR WOW?

https://feedback.secondlife.com/ldpw/p/update-some-of-the-mole-builds-at-sansaras-sea-of-fables-to-mesh-pbr

[Coffee Pancake]

It is extremely rare for moles to go back to a build.

[AmeliaJ08]

Personally I feel a lot of 'historical' stuff should be moved to museum type regions and the spaces they occupied re-purposed with new stuff.

People would probably get mad though.

[Kylie Jaxxon]

I think they have enough things to do just to keep up, without going back to older things....would just be opening up a can of worms, IMO

[Orwar]

   It kind of feels weird to go back and rebuild old stuff in the name of preservation. Surely the point of preserving that sort of thing is to let people see how things once were, not to display a reimagination of the past. It also feels as if the moles have a lot to do as it is, I'd think their focus can be better spent elsewhere. 

[Coffee Pancake]

17 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Personally I feel a lot of 'historical' stuff should be moved to museum type regions and the spaces they occupied re-purposed with new stuff.

People would probably get mad though.

Old builds should be picked up and put in the library & the land repurposed.

It's rarely "historical". More than likely something that failed to have any relevance at the time it was built, or was so quickly abandoned as corporate focus moved on it's no longer fit for purpose.

[Sid Nagy]

PBR is an effect one can use, not a goal on itself.
The roofs will not fall down when a house has no PBR textures.
 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It is extremely rare for moles to go back to a build.

So, kind of like how "Prim Builds" are a thing of the past, maybe someday all of the current pre-PBR LH builds will be "retired", the land "razed", and new PBR builds put in!

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

No. Leave all old builds alone. They are of their time and tell part of the story of how SL has progressed and changed over the decades.

Edited August 7 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[WeFlossDaily]

2 hours ago, discussionbot said:

Should they all be changed up now for the shiny PBR WOW?

 

No.

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

I happen to know directly from a Linden source

It must be nice!

Not to denigrate or criticize those with "special sources", of course.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, discussionbot said:

Should they all be changed up now for the shiny PBR WOW?

Why don't you share your own opinion with us?

[WeFlossDaily]

8 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Why don't you share your own opinion with us?

I believe he is showing us an example of the* inherently destructive nature of PBR and the March of Progress Mindset.

Edited August 6 by WeFlossDaily
missing word*

[Qie Niangao]

As with Belli, I think Bay City could benefit from some materials to augment the old (diffusemap-only) textures on roads and other Mole builds, especially as Mainland gets new PBR terrain. It doesn't so much matter whether the materials for older Bay City content are updated to glTF or Blinn-Phong, but diffusemap-only has been looking increasingly lame for about a decade, as more folks gradually adopted ALM.

The *really* old builds, pre-Bay City, might stay as-is somewhere. Personally, I'm not seeing a huge need to move them to some museum space, inasmuch as that's kinda what they are already, but maybe I'm wrong.

[Porky Gorky]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

So, kind of like how "Prim Builds" are a thing of the past,

I sold 4 prim builds today, Maybe my old brand has gone full circle and become retro cool? The prim build market definitely isn't dead though.

Edited August 6 by Porky Gorky

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

I sold 4 prim builds today, Maybe my old brand has gone full circle and become retro cool? The prim build market definitely isn't dead though.

Personally, if a build is something I'm looking for (funhouses, haunted houses, multi-scene), I don't care if it is prim or mesh. 🙂

 

[Porky Gorky]

20 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Personally, if a build is something I'm looking for (funhouses, haunted houses, multi-scene), I don't care if it is prim or mesh

I have been considering building a fully prim PBR house just to see how good I could make it look. It’s been 12 years since I built any prim builds in SL. I bet I could build the best gosh darn prim PBR house this world has ever seen!

 

Edit: Just realized there are probably very few if any prim PBR houses in this world, so it was actually a weak proclamation. Note to self, make more impactful proclamations in future.

Edited August 6 by Porky Gorky

[Sammy Huntsman]

No, that is a lot of builds needing to be updated. Which would take them years. Now the more plausible thing to do, is to keep those builds as they are and to do their newer builds utilizing PBR. 

[Orwar]

11 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Edit: Just realized there are probably zero prim PBR houses in this world, so it was actually a weak proclamation. Note to self, make more impactful proclamations in future.

   My home is partial mesh, but mostly prims (floors, walls, and ceilings are all prims - mesh detail for doors/windows/skirting). Been slapping PBR on it since the weekend, still a work in progress but .. Progressing.

[Porky Gorky]

9 minutes ago, Orwar said:

 My home is partial mesh, but mostly prims (floors, walls, and ceilings are all prims - mesh detail for doors/windows/skirting). Been slapping PBR on it since the weekend, still a work in progress but .. Progressing.

That’s cool! I’ve been selling PBR materials on another account for months now and I am assuming that the majority of customers are just slapping the PBR onto their existing prim and mesh surfaces which is great. I really like the idea that people are sprucing up their old builds with new PBR materials and I wholly encourage in-world building and decorating.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

I've been playing with PBR materials for a while now, and I'm honestly not convinced that, in the majority of cases (i.e., where roughness, metalicness, and emissiveness are not very important), it really makes a very noticeable difference.

For some wood and perhaps brick textures, it might be a subtle improvement? But for a plaster or wall papered wall . . . well, not that I can see.

What might make a long term difference is if the adoption of PBR means that more creators are actually using normal and roughness maps. But I don't see the point of replacing the textures on most of what I own.

[JeromFranzic]

45 minutes ago, Sammy Huntsman said:

No, that is a lot of builds needing to be updated. Which would take them years. Now the more plausible thing to do, is to keep those builds as they are and to do their newer builds utilizing PBR. 

Exactly. New Residents would benefit from seeing the progress and changes of SL by experiencing the original builds as they are. I love seeing the older stuff that still exists. I've existed in SL a bit over three years and I don't think I've seen all the old builds yet... as in anything before what, the Prehistoric Non Mesh Era?

(ETA, doesn't help that I also have four accounts in Open Sim, and I've taken some of my SL alts with me over there lol)

Edited August 6 by JeromFranzic
noygdb

[Porky Gorky]

24 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

've been playing with PBR materials for a while now, and I'm honestly not convinced that, in the majority of cases (i.e., where roughness, metalicness, and emissiveness are not very important), it really makes a very noticeable difference.

For some wood and perhaps brick textures, it might be a subtle improvement? But for a plaster or wall papered wall . . . well, not that I can see.

This is my experience too. I have processed many hundreds of PBR materials for SL now. I provide a Blinn-Phong version of each PBR material too. With the goal of matching the BP to the PBR, I have 2 plains set up next to each other with the PBR seamlessly tiling into the BP.  For non metallic materials I notice the difference when the roughness value reaches about 0.7.on the PBR (with 0 being black and fully reflective and 1 being white and non reflective). For nearly all non metallic materials with a roughness value above 0.7 it is hard to discern the difference between PBR and BP.

Edit to add: Blinn-Phong sometimes looks better than the PBR IMO, especially for materials used on horizontal surfaces outdoors, like the ground for example.

 

Edited August 6 by Porky Gorky

[Orwar]

17 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

For some wood and perhaps brick textures, it might be a subtle improvement? But for a plaster or wall papered wall . . . well, not that I can see.

   I grabbed a PBR plaster texture off the MP just to try it, and .. I like it a lot. Now, that could be that the normal and diffuse are just better than the previous plaster texture I used to have, it's very subtle (I mean, plastered walls are that!), but I feel as if the light plays a lot nicer on it, especially when angled so that it shades into the creases of the plaster. It's not a surface that uses any metallness or smoothness, but Ambient Occlusion .. Yes. I think that's what's making the shadows feel more .. Shadow-y (and just having shadows cast by a flat geometry at itself at all feels really cool!). 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

13 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

For non metallic materials I notice the difference when the roughness value reaches about 0.7.on the PBR (with 0 being black and fully reflective and 1 being white and non reflective). For nearly all non metallic materials with a roughness value above 0.7 it is hard to discern the difference between PBR and BP.

Thanks, you've provided a more precise numerical measure for my rather vague insight!