LL Reaches Out on PBR

[KanryDrago]

24 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

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.

The point I have been making all along, degradation of viewer fps for little difference in how things look.

[Flea Yatsenko]

8 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

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.

Some AO only uses angles or distances between triangles to calculate how strong the shadow should be without regards to any light in the scene at all.

I think the fake shadow AO is what most people have a problem with. I.E. a corner of a room with a shadow, or a table floating a little above the floor can leave the fake AO shadows people don't like because the shadow stays after you remove the table.

PBR and the upgraded lighting with reflection probes should mean you don't bake that type of AO into builds anymore, but we'll see what happens.

[Flea Yatsenko]

7 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

The point I have been making all along, degradation of viewer fps for little difference in how things look.

The whole point of viewing non-PBR content in a PBR viewer is to make it look the same. PBR gives creators a lot of new tools and functionality to make things look better. PBR is only going to look better when creators take advantage of the new features.

If LL "upgraded" your existing AV, clothing, homes, etc people would be at least ten time angrier than losing some FPS for something that looks the same.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

The point I have been making all along, degradation of viewer fps for little difference in how things look.

It does make some differences: on shiny or metallic objects, for instance. And reflection probes (which are, unfortunately, the one part of this that the users themselves are often going to have to produce) make a very real visual difference, and mostly a good one.

Of course, these visual enhancements aren't going to matter to a great many people, so for them, you're right, this may seem like a lot of pain in exchange for little of value.

The counter argument to that is that the shift to PBR, deferred rendering, and a glTF standard for texturing will mean, in the future, enhancements that are potentially much more dramatic, such as glTF scenes.

Basically, this is about SL staying at least relatively "current" with technologies so that it can continue to move forward, rather than remaining stuck as we were with limited avenues for improvement. The nice thing about that is that it demonstrates that LL isn't simply going to stand pat and milk the platform until it falls apart: they are thinking about the future.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 minute ago, KanryDrago said:

The point I have been making all along, degradation of viewer fps for little difference in how things look.

Even if LLs implementation of PBR had been flawless it still wouldn't have made a huge difference to the way SL looked right away, or in the near future.  Creating realistic looking environments isn't about making dramatic and instantly noticeable changes, it's about the cumulative effects of subtle details.

I have to agree that LL were mistaken to assume that the majority of residents would be capable of getting to grips with the complexity of probes and eeps or that most would even want to.  Even if PBR had been perfect on first release I doubt SLs visual appeal would be overly impacted by it in the near future.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

4 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Some AO only uses angles or distances between triangles to calculate how strong the shadow should be without regards to any light in the scene at all.

I think the fake shadow AO is what most people have a problem with. I.E. a corner of a room with a shadow, or a table floating a little above the floor can leave the fake AO shadows people don't like because the shadow stays after you remove the table.

PBR and the upgraded lighting with reflection probes should mean you don't bake that type of AO into builds anymore, but we'll see what happens.

But surely only if you have "shadows" enabled in your viewer? I can see how an occlusion map might produce dynamic shadow effects in, for instance, a creased garment, but it's surely not going to project a shadow onto the floor under a chair.

[Porky Gorky]

8 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

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?

All my PBR is already made, I create the BP version to match it. Sometimes I can take the AO from the PBR material and just layer it on the diffuse for the BP and it looks fine. Sometimes when the shadows need to be more directional, on a brick wall for example I will use Substance painter and input my PBR normal and height maps as fake high poly models and bake the directional AO. So it depends on the material. 

The occlusion will look different when both BP and PBR are compared in SL though. If you are using static lighting indoors you could easily match the AO on both versions by putting your lights in the right place. Outdoors the AO will only match a few times a day when the sun is in the right place.

[Gabriele Graves]

Wow, catching up on this thread.  People really like scratching at wounds don't they.

I wonder how we will view this point in time in a few years from now.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

43 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

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.

I think you may be misinterpreting that slightly. Its not that the people here (for the most part) think like that. We are pre-empting what we think the majority will do/think. Like the "all in" creators you mention. The forum folk here have generally been around at least for a while and have seen previous disasters so were all a bit jaded at this point I guess.

For my part at least, my recent foray back into the forums is to learn as much as I can about PBR, including when it is appropriate to use them and when not. Most people (I know) dont have much of a clue about this sort of thing at the moment. 

I guess the main concern in all this that most people have is that the majority of users are going to be extremely confused by this for quite some time. Most SL users do not use the forums and rely on info given to them when they purchase an item or in the items marketplace description.

Edited August 27 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

All my PBR is already made, I create the BP version to match it. Sometimes I can take the AO from the PBR material and just layer it on the diffuse for the BP and it looks fine. Sometimes when the shadows need to be more directional, on a brick wall for example I will use Substance painter and input my PBR normal and height maps as fake high poly models and bake the directional AO. So it depends on the material. 

The occlusion will look different when both BP and PBR are compared in SL though. If you are using static lighting indoors you could easily match the AO on both versions by putting your lights in the right place. Outdoors the AO will only match a few times a day when the sun is in the right place.

Complicated, but that all makes sense. If you're not making your materials for someone else's lighting setup -- that is to say, you're selling it to other people -- then you can't count on a static light source, or even know where it's coming from -- for instance, an overhead light vs. a table lamp.

What this does suggest, though, is that baking a PBR occlusion map into an Albedo texture in order to produce a sort of makeshift BP diffuse texture isn't going to work very well, at least often.

[Porky Gorky]

17 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Some AO only uses angles or distances between triangles to calculate how strong the shadow should be without regards to any light in the scene at all.

In most rendering engines i dont think polygons are really relevant when it comes to AO because we use normal maps. I think it is the direction and strength of the tangent normal that is used to calculate which areas need to be occluded. 

Edited August 27 by Porky Gorky

[Flea Yatsenko]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It does make some differences: on shiny or metallic objects, for instance. And reflection probes (which are, unfortunately, the one part of this that the users themselves are often going to have to produce) make a very real visual difference, and mostly a good one.

Of course, these visual enhancements aren't going to matter to a great many people, so for them, you're right, this may seem like a lot of pain in exchange for little of value.

The counter argument to that is that the shift to PBR, deferred rendering, and a glTF standard for texturing will mean, in the future, enhancements that are potentially much more dramatic, such as glTF scenes.

Basically, this is about SL staying at least relatively "current" with technologies so that it can continue to move forward, rather than remaining stuck as we were with limited avenues for improvement. The nice thing about that is that it demonstrates that LL isn't simply going to stand pat and milk the platform until it falls apart: they are thinking about the future.

OpenGL and Collada are both pretty much dead at this point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Development

Collada 1.5 is the latest release

https://www.khronos.org/collada/

It was released in 2008

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA#Versions

I don't think you are really understanding the scope of how out of date some of SL really is.

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But surely only if you have "shadows" enabled in your viewer? I can see how an occlusion map might produce dynamic shadow effects in, for instance, a creased garment, but it's surely not going to project a shadow onto the floor under a chair.

A basic example of PBR AO: a brick wall with shadows in the areas with grout

Baked AO from blender without using PBR: two planes are intersecting at a 90 degree angle so we're going to add shadows in the corner and I don't care if the scene is pitch black or it's being flooded by the sun at an angle that wouldn't have a shadow there.

And yeah, the PBR AO should be limited to that object. A shadow on the floor from a chair is the old way, when you'd bake the shadow into the diffuse texture by using a third party renderer like Blender Cycles. The PBR AO should not include the shadow from the chair while baked AO from a third party tool would include the shadow from the chair.

There's a few ways to do AO but a lot of it is just adding the shadow to the color map without regards to any lighting at all.

3 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

In most rendering engines i dont think polygons are really relevant when it comes to AO because we use normal maps. I think it is the direction and strength of the tangent normal that is used to calculate which areas need to be occluded. 

Even without normal maps you can get AO.

Just because I'm bored working on this repetitive builder's kit, two planes with nothing but AO nodes connected, notice the shadow under the cube and utter disregard for the bright red environment lighting.

This is the old school AO that makes fake shadows people hate. It's the equivalent of taking the white texture generated from this and multiplying it with the base color texture to add shadows. This is not the AO going into PBR. This is the old AO that went into builds that used baked lighting or a combination of a baked diffuse with materials. PBR makes this way of building completely deprecated, and completely wrong.

You are clearly doing something more advanced which is totally fine. But the people complaining about shadows being annoying when they go to move a chair or something, this is the situation they have problems with and if you are no longer baking like this, which you shouldn't be with PBR, it's irrelevant.

Substance painter bakes AO maps like this but it only uses it for calculating smart masks and effects and stuff.

[Luna Bliss]

17 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

For my part at least, my recent foray back into the forums is to learn as much as I can about PBR, including when it is appropriate to use them and when not. Most people (I know) dont have much of a clue about this sort of thing at the moment. 

I guess the main concern in all this that most people have is that the majority of users are going to be extremely confused by this for quite some time. Most SL users do not use the forums and rely on info given to them when they purchase an item or in the items marketplace description.

You might try taking some classes related to PBR @ Builder's Brewery...there's a lot!  Quite a helpful bunch, and always an eye toward optimizing content specifically to SL.

[WeFlossDaily]

8 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

You were on a Ryzen chip right? Might be worth watching for this Windows update:-

Thank you so much. I be Windows 10 still, though. Idk if I can update to 11. Mabey. And here they are already with a Ryzen 9 already.

We need more of this kind happening of help happening in these forums. I hope other follow your example. =]

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

I don't think you are really understanding the scope of how out of date some of SL really is.

Oh, I do in a general sense, yes. And, again, as I said, I think that LL's decision to modernize is a good sign about their intentions for the platform, if nothing else.

The question has to be, surely, how compatible newer technologies are with what SL was designed to do, and to what degree will it impact on the user base.

I'm a photographer, and one who actually makes her own backdrops (including, very often, textures and materials), so I'm very keen on the potential of the direction we're heading. But I do worry somewhat about the impact on the platform if we move too fast and leave too many people behind -- or if the proposed changes accelerate what is admittedly the long term trend of reducing the options for creativity within SL by those who wouldn't know a glTF node if it slapped them on the LeLutka cheek.

But forward I think we must go. Cautiously and intelligently. (And recent events have not affirmed my faith in LL's ability to manage change intelligently.)

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, WeFlossDaily said:

We need more of this kind happening of help happening in these forums. I hope other follow your example. =]

Extrude, who is also the author of the PBR materials packer most of us are now using, has never been anything other than helpful here.

(Except I know she doesn't like the name "Extrude," and I'm not sure offhand what she prefers to go by.)

[Porky Gorky]

20 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Even without normal maps you can get AO.

Ah I think we are talking at cross purposes. You are talking about shadowing from object occlusion, I am talking about AO from the ORM map. Both combined account for the occlusion/shadowing we see.

Edited August 27 by Porky Gorky

[KanryDrago]

21 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Oh, I do in a general sense, yes. And, again, as I said, I think that LL's decision to modernize is a good sign about their intentions for the platform, if nothing else.

The question has to be, surely, how compatible newer technologies are with what SL was designed to do, and to what degree will it impact on the user base.

I'm a photographer, and one who actually makes her own backdrops (including, very often, textures and materials), so I'm very keen on the potential of the direction we're heading. But I do worry somewhat about the impact on the platform if we move too fast and leave too many people behind -- or if the proposed changes accelerate what is admittedly the long term trend of reducing the options for creativity within SL by those who wouldn't know a glTF node if it slapped them on the LeLutka cheek.

But forward I think we must go. Cautiously and intelligently. (And recent events have not affirmed my faith in LL's ability to manage change intelligently.)

I think a lot of creators are excited by the possibilites that pbr gives them...possibly rightly. However I am not sure a lot of their customers are. Frankly and I will be frank I don't give a ***** what producers want...I am the one that pays them and if I dont want it I dont pay simple as that

[sirhc DeSantis]

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think in truth the pro-PBR crowd -- and in this context, that includes me -- doesn't really care if you use PBR or not. How your SL looks is between you, your computer, and your graphics card.

The people who concern me are not those who dislike the look of PBR, and don't want to use it. You be you! The ones I care about are those who are having a difficult time with low-end computers, and those who want it to look better, but don't know how to make that happen.

 

In reference to previous 'posts':
Well thank you for your concern . As Monarch of the 'potato people' (1) (3) that you so worry about I give you this.
I survived:
CodPiece (2)
M
Aristotle
Flexis
Sculpties
Being Sectioned (5)
Viewer wars 1
Viewer wars 2
Materials
CHUI

And the list goes on. So maybe I can live through this. (4)
Your performative concern is duly noted.

Sl is a place I do things - not look at things

(1) academics need links so - Red Dwarf here a ref to 'underpowered' (3) PCs
(2) added because always a need for (2) to ref (1)
(3) less than what You run
(4) What if i fell 15 stories
(5) knew you would look here

 

 

[sirhc DeSantis]

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think in truth the pro-PBR crowd -- and in this context, that includes me -- doesn't really care if you use PBR or not. How your SL looks is between you, your computer, and your graphics card.

The people who concern me are not those who dislike the look of PBR, and don't want to use it. You be you! The ones I care about are those who are having a difficult time with low-end computers, and those who want it to look better, but don't know how to make that happen.

 

In reference to previous 'posts':
Well thank you for your concern . As Monarch of the 'potato people' (1) (3) that you so worry about I give you this.
I survived:
CodPiece (2)
M
Aristotle
Flexis
Sculpties
Being Sectioned (5)
Viewer wars 1
Viewer wars 2
Materials
CHUI

And the list goes on. So maybe I can live through this. (4)
Your performative concern is duly noted.

Sl is a place I do things - not look at things

(1) academics need links so - Red Dwarf here a ref to 'underpowered' (3) PCs
(2) added because always a need for (2) to ref (1)
(3) less than what You run
(4) What if i fell 15 stories
(5) knew you would look here

 

 

[Porky Gorky]

9 minutes ago, KanryDrago said:

I think a lot of creators are excited by the possibilites that pbr gives them...possibly rightly. However I am not sure a lot of their customers are. Frankly and I will be frank I don't give a ***** what producers want...I am the one that pays them and if I dont want it I dont pay simple as that

IMHO, if you are a content creator and want access to sell to the full SL user base going forward your only option is to create 3 versions of every product.

1. PBR

2. BP

3. PBR/BP Hybrid.

[Luna Bliss]

6 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

IMHO, if you are a content creator and want access to sell to the full SL user base going forward your only option is to create 3 versions of every product.

1. PBR

2. BP

3. PBR/BP Hybrid.

Yeah I purchased some Japanese Anemone's the other day with those 3 options. Haven't inspected closely yet to see the differences as I was too annoyed since they poofed when standing fairly close to them, ruining my intended design that needs to be viewed from further away.  Some choice in LOD levels would have been nice, but all this is sure getting to be a lot of work for creators.

[Porky Gorky]

1 minute ago, Luna Bliss said:

but all this is sure getting to be a lot of work for creators.

Yup! And it's the only option if a creator wants to appeal to everyone.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

14 minutes ago, sirhc DeSantis said:

 

In reference to previous 'posts':
Well thank you for your concern . As Monarch of the 'potato people' (1) (3) that you so worry about I give you this.
I survived:
CodPiece (2)
M
Aristotle
Flexis
Sculpties
Being Sectioned (5)
Viewer wars 1
Viewer wars 2
Materials
CHUI

And the list goes on. So maybe I can live through this. (4)
Your performative concern is duly noted.

Sl is a place I do things - not look at things

(1) academics need links so - Red Dwarf here a ref to 'underpowered' (3) PCs
(2) added because always a need for (2) to ref (1)
(3) less than what You run
(4) What if i fell 15 stories
(5) knew you would look here

 

 

Not in triplicate???

/me frowns disapprovingly

[Scylla Rhiadra]

13 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

IMHO, if you are a content creator and want access to sell to the full SL user base going forward your only option is to create 3 versions of every product.

1. PBR

2. BP

3. PBR/BP Hybrid.

Surely if one is producing a PBR/BP hybrid, one doesn't need options 1 and 2?