LL Reaches Out on PBR

[Porky Gorky]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

18 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I'd say that's a pretty good fulfillment of their original objectives with the PBR release.

Zero out of Three. You think that is LL doing "pretty good", makes me wonder what your definition of "utter fustercluck" would be.

PBR is usable and does deliver physically accurate reflections when used under the correct conditions. So I do think LL achieved partial fulfillment with the initial rollout. It’s obviously fraught with problems but it does work.

[KanryDrago]

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

 

Ah, 36 BILLION US$ worth of unrestrained Futureness Cultism, with PBR no doubt.

There's a lesson SL could learn there.

Overpriced Futureness Cultism KILLS platforms.

Futureness resulted in Sansar just saying. Now I have a VR headset and use it all the time....Sansar was a firm WTF is this ***** as was the meta implementation

Edited August 27 by KanryDrago

[Luna Bliss]

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

7 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Likely they listened to feedback from the Firestorm group though,

Doubtful, witnesses have reported that the Bloatsorm groups and discords have been pushing a "shut up there are no problems" agenda for most of the last 10 months.

My alt is in the Firestorm support group and they've never pushed what you're saying. They've always been extremely helpful.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, KanryDrago said:

Futureness resulted in Sansar just saying.

another waste of time effort and money on the inane belief that overpriced Futureness would bring in an utterly mythical  "vast untapped new market".

The same fatally flawed pipe dream behind SL-PBR.

"If we totally scr*w it up, they will come!"

 

[Luna Bliss]

4 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

7 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

 

Ah, 36 BILLION US$ worth of unrestrained Futureness Cultism, with PBR no doubt.

There's a lesson SL could learn there.

Overpriced Futureness Cultism KILLS platforms.

Futureness resulted in Sansar just saying. Now I have a VR headset and use it all the time....Sansar was a firm WTF is this ***** as was the meta implementation

IKR, look what moving on from Ruth did!  And mesh!  All that horrible futureness stuffs!!

[Zalificent Corvinus]

Just now, Luna Bliss said:

My alt is in the Firestorm support group and they've never pushed what you're saying. They've always been extremely helpful.

So you're calling other posters in this thread "liars"?

I wonder what @Scylla Rhiadra would think of your claim.

 

[KanryDrago]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

another waste of time effort and money on the inane belief that overpriced Futureness would bring in an utterly mythical  "vast untapped new market".

The same fatally flawed pipe dream behind SL-PBR.

"If we totally scr*w it up, they will come!"

 

Not all futureness is bad, just LL seems to choose bad ideas too often

[Luna Bliss]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

2 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

My alt is in the Firestorm support group and they've never pushed what you're saying. They've always been extremely helpful.

So you're calling other posters in this thread "liars"?

I wonder what @Scylla Rhiadra would think of your claim.

I'm only claiming what I've experienced, and I don't recall anyone mentioning what they've encountered with Firestorm support.

I don't really care what your boss, Scylla Rhiadra, thinks.  But I bet she wishes she hadn't joined forces with those who only want to tear SL down.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

IKR, look what moving on from Ruth did!  And mesh!  All that horrible futureness stuffs!!

You forgot Pathfinding.

A piece of Futureness that enabled Kama City's very own Patron Saint of Futureness, St Laggyrugs the Vain Glorious, to single handedly decrease script performance on an entire mainland region by 30 % simply by placing to lag-bot animesh greeter NPC's in the middle of the carpark at their semi abandoned biker cafe.

LL's track record on Futureness, is far from great.

 

[Luna Bliss]

25 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

30 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

IKR, look what moving on from Ruth did!  And mesh!  All that horrible futureness stuffs!!

You forgot Pathfinding.

A piece of Futureness that enabled Kama City's very own Patron Saint of Futureness, St Laggyrugs the Vain Glorious, to single handedly decrease script performance on an entire mainland region by 30 % simply by placing to lag-bot animesh greeter NPC's in the middle of the carpark at their semi abandoned biker cafe.

LL's track record on Futureness, is far from great.

I look at their track record and see both successes and failures, but I'm willing to try the next thing. I'm glad they're doing SOMEthing and I sure as hell wouldn't know what should be done as the population dwindles.

But you look at the track record and seem to think any failure or incomplete implementation means PBR will automatically be so as well.

Your position is just not logical as we don't know for sure what will happen, and the past indicates both failure and success so it could go either way.

[Rowan Amore]

42 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So you're calling other posters in this thread "liars"?

I wonder what @Scylla Rhiadra would think of your claim.

 

There's a difference between the Firestorm support group (general support) and the Tester group.   The tester group was getting all the feedback as those not in the tester group didn't have access to the PBR alphas and betas.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

43 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So you're calling other posters in this thread "liars"?

I wonder what @Scylla Rhiadra would think of your claim.

 

/me shrugs

I can't speak to what others have experienced in that group, but on numerous occasions I experienced or witnessed the kind of push back that I've described -- and ended up in IMs with a few people about it. I'm pretty sure @BriannaLovey was there for some of these at least. So was at least one other person on these forums who actually contributed to the push back by declaring that the SL forums were a "clique" of whiners and complainers.

That kind of thing is a lot less frequent now, because the focus of the test group is now mostly on WebRTC, and people upset about PBR are being referred to the main FS group chat. I suspect too that there's less now that many people know they have options (as for instance not updating) that they didn't have before.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I suspect a lot of people on FS will not be updating until their experience of SL has been sufficiently degraded by the growth of PBR that it seems necessary to do so. At the same time, we'll hopefully be seeing these promised performance improvements soonish, so maybe a lot of the churn and turmoil will subside as some discover that the PBR enabled versions of FS are now tolerable.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

I have seen......mixed behaviour in the firestorm support and testing channels. Testing seems to be more for the grownups, but like any group of people who gather on the internet, its going to depend on who is online when you ask your question as to the quality of responses that you will get. Every mod I have dealt with seemed nice enough.

I get the feeling that for at least a year or two, PBR will mostly be the preserve of small skyboxes and a few showcase worlds. I am sure there are going to be a few people who are prepared to go all-in, but its going to take time for enough content to become available on the marketplace for it to become feasible to landscape and fill an entire sim or homestead/large parcel.

Edited August 27 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Scylla Rhiadra]

18 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I have seen......mixed behaviour in the firestorm support and testing channels. Testing seems to be more for the grownups, but like any group of people who gather on the internet, its going to depend on who is online when you ask your question as to the quality of responses that you will get. Every mod I have dealt with seemed nice enough.

Absolutely.

I have two good friends in FS support, one of whom is actually a mod for the tester group. They are both sweethearts, and they do what they do because they want to help people.

The less helpful ones of which I spoke were mostly not official FS people (although one, who insisted that performance on the then-Beta version of the PBR viewer was not an issue "unless I had stats to back up" my contention that many people were having trouble was).

Your mileage would definitely vary according to who was participating in the group at any given moment.

19 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I get the feeling that for at least a year or two, PBR will mostly be the preserve of small skyboxes and a few showcase worlds. I am sure there are going to be a few people who are prepared to go all-in, but its going to take time for enough content to become available on the marketplace for it to become feasible to landscape and fill an entire sim or homestead/large parcel.

Definitely true. The sheer amount of content using Blinn-Phong out there will mean that the conversion to PBR is going to take some time. Most content creators are not updating old content (or at least not offering free upgrades), and people aren't going to suddenly pitch everything they've got out using BP materials. It'll be a slow and gradual process of replacing individual bits and pieces.

I suspect that anyone choosing to stay on a pre-PBR viewer is going to be just fine for at least a year or more. The one unknown is the conversion of terrain textures to 2k PBR. And even in that case, I think it'll take a long time for that to happen to the Mainland (if LL gets around to upgrading the Mainland at all, which I'm still sceptical about).

Edited August 27 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Luna Bliss]

22 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I get the feeling that for at least a year or two, PBR will mostly be the preserve of small skyboxes and a few showcase worlds. I am sure there are going to be a few people who are prepared to go all-in, but its going to take time for enough content to become available on the marketplace for it to become feasible to landscape and fill an entire sim or homestead/large parcel.

Yeah that makes sense. I get that feeling too. Big changes take awhile to manifest fully...

[Porky Gorky]

15 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I get the feeling that for at least a year or two, PBR will mostly be the preserve of small skyboxes and a few showcase worlds. I am sure there are going to be a few people who are prepared to go all-in, but its going to take time for enough content to become available on the marketplace for it to become feasible to landscape and fill an entire sim or homestead/large parcel.

I would suggest that PBR usage is more widespread than you realise and not everyone is sat around waiting for content creators to build new PBR content. I sell PBR materials and take any opportunity I can get to elicit feedback from customers, with the first question I ask being, what are you using this PBR material for? A common usage is that people are just updating existing content with PBR, literally one surface at a time. They try a few materials out on a surface, see what works best and seem to be having fun updating their old houses. There is also some frustration with people replacing diffuse textures with PBR materials on cut prims without understanding the implications etc, but on the whole the feedback is positive.

[Extrude Ragu]

6 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

one, who insisted that performance on the then-Beta version of the PBR viewer was not an issue "unless I had stats to back up"

Obsession with having stats to back things up... I suspect I know who you are talking about... Not sure I am allowed to name names on the forum otherwise I'd say it outright. They're a talented a programmer but cat herding I think they should probably leave to their support members to put it kindly...

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Extrude Ragu said:

Obsession with having stats to back things up... I suspect I know who you are talking about... Not sure I am allowed to name names on the forum otherwise I'd say it outright. They're a talented a programmer but cat herding I think they should probably leave to their support members to put it kindly...

Fortunately, none of this matters nearly so much anymore, given the developments of the last couple of weeks. I'm not at all interested in naming and shaming individuals.

I'm really hopeful that the next updates to the LL and FS viewers make all of this irrelevant and academic, because they render those viewers far more accessible to everyone.

Fingers crossed.

[Luna Bliss]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So you're calling other posters in this thread "liars"?

I wonder what @Scylla Rhiadra would think of your claim.

 

/me shrugs

Just to be clear, I never called ANYone on the forum a liar.  I've only reported my own experience...and with what I've experienced with my alt in the Firestorm groups the Firestorm team has been helpful and did not condemn anyone who had trouble adjusting to PBR.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

23 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I would suggest that PBR usage is more widespread than you realise and not everyone is sat around waiting for content creators to build new PBR content. I sell PBR materials and take any opportunity I can get to elicit feedback from customers, with the first question I ask being, what are you using this PBR material for? A common usage is that people are just updating existing content with PBR, literally one surface at a time. They try a few materials out on a surface, see what works best and seem to be having fun updating their old houses. There is also some frustration with people replacing diffuse textures with PBR materials on cut prims without understanding the implications etc, but on the whole the feedback is positive.

I dont doubt that, that is exactly what I set out to do recently too! I gave up on the grass/terrain textures, because as it stands, I don't like anything that is for sale (that I have found) or that I can create myself, and as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I just don't see the need for it in that specific context. Old BP looks great and does the job nicely enough. But that does not mean I am giving up entirely and entirely happy to be wowed by a creator who proves me wrong.

But even if people are updating "one texture at a time", that process will still take a while. I look around my homestead and there must be a few hundred textures here at least.

Many no mod items.

Many items with baked AO that would look extremely goofy with a seamless PBR texture slapped on them, and dont have the UV mapping to support a seamless texture anyway.

Items that COULD be retextured if they were bundled with their AO maps, but they aren't.

There are lots of potential roadblocks to retexturing things.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I just don't see the need for it in that specific context. Old BP looks great and does the job nicely enough.

This. I think that for most things, there is no very discernible difference between BP and PBR materials.

The one technical aspect of this I don't understand is the difference between baking an occlusion map into a diffuse texture, and packing it in the ARM map for PBR. Poorly baked shadows are a pain (especially in buildings and other structures), but I don't understand how putting them in the ARM map makes a visible difference to baking them.

Anyway, I am in no rush to replace older BP textures, for two reasons. One is that there are still a lot of people who want be able to see PBR, and the other is that I really don't think in most things it makes a visual difference.

[Porky Gorky]

1 minute ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I dont doubt that, that is exactly what I set out to do recently too! I gave up on the grass/terrain textures, because as it stands, I don't like anything that is for sale (that I have found) or that I can create myself, and as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I just don't see the need for it in that specific context. Old BP looks great and does the job nicely enough. But that does not mean I am giving up entirely and entirely happy to be wowed by a creator who proves me wrong.

This is my experience too. I create a BP version of every PBR material and they are compared side by side so I can match the BP to the PBR the best I can. For non reflective materials, sometimes the BP version looks better, specifically grass, terrain, concrete, sometimes bricks..the list goes on. There seems to be a mindset, at least on this forum, of being all in on PBR or all out. The best approach, at least aesthetically, is to use both BP and PBR together as each has its strength and weakness depending on the type of surface. I am not sure how marketable this approach will be for the “all in” PBR content creators though.

[Porky Gorky]

7 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The one technical aspect of this I don't understand is the difference between baking an occlusion map into a diffuse texture, and packing it in the ARM map for PBR. Poorly baked shadows are a pain (especially in buildings and other structures), but I don't understand how putting them in the ARM map makes a visible difference to baking them.

When baking AO onto a diffuse map, the shadowing is generated by a static light source that is pointing in a specific direction. Once viewed in SL, that baked AO is then static and looks the same regardless of the direction of the light source in SL. This results in the appearance of unrealistic shadowing.

With PBR and packing the AO into the ORM map you get a more dynamic use of AO. The level of AO you see is determined by both the direction of the tangent normal and the direction of the light source in relation to the surface.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

19 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The one technical aspect of this I don't understand is the difference between baking an occlusion map into a diffuse texture, and packing it in the ARM map for PBR.

Assuming that they work as they do in most other engines the idea is that their effect is based on the amount of direct lighting that's applied to the surface (in the same way that you would get ambient occlusion in the corners of a room but that occlusion wouldn't be visible if you shone a torch on the area).

ETA: Yeah, what Porky said!

Edited August 27 by Fluffy Sharkfin

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

With PBR and packing the AO into the ORM map you get a more dynamic use of AO. The level of AO you see is determined by both the direction of the tangent normal and the direction of the light source in relation to the surface.

Thank you! This is sort of what I'd thought, but needed to hear it verbalized in a straight-forward way.

Which means, surely, that an occlusion map for BP is going to look rather different than one for PBR, as they have very different functions?

16 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

For non reflective materials, sometimes the BP version looks better, specifically grass, terrain, concrete, sometimes bricks..the list goes on.

Very much this. My experiments with, for instance, bricks in both BP and PBR suggested that BP actually looked better, even under a modified PBR-friendly EEP.