LL Reaches Out on PBR

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Gabriele Graves said:

You DO know that this was also said when mesh was introduced and virtually every other past new thing, don't you

And many of those things did indeed drive people off, as we hear so very often from Oldbies...

There is a limit to how many people you can drive off, and how fast, before the system fails.

 

10-15 % of the users are likely to be in iGPU's, according to hardware surveys of 120 million Steam users. That's a potentially big damn loss.

 

[Toothless Draegonne]

15 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Mhmmm, FOUR texture maps is LESS than three, absolutely. You learned that at what kind of school, exactly?

 

When you can have emissive be a part of the material, rather than have to use the diffuse alpha channel as an emissive mask, and possibly double up with an onion layer, then yes, four is less than quite possibly six, plus extra geometry.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

6 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

When you can have emissive be a part of the material, rather than have to use the diffuse alpha channel as an emissive mask, and possibly double up with an onion layer, then yes, four is less than quite possibly six, plus extra geometry.

So, you were talking about a certain edge case, and not making a broad statement about all surfaces, everywhere, ever.

Right.

 

[Toothless Draegonne]

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So, the sum total of your pro-PBR argument is "LL should throw all their paying customers with integrated gpu's, who can't afford a new PC, under the bus, because too LAZY to use the copy/paste buttons in the texture tab of the edit floater"

Outstanding!

 

I'm not sure how you missed all the other times I've mentioned that there was some kind of regression between earlier betas and the release of PBR viewers to the public, but I'll say again that I have ran PBR viewers on iGPUs in a medium to high detail level. I was the first to point out in the Discord that you love to hate, that hardware like Steamdeck and Ally needs to be a supported use, even if you shouldn't expect to be able to run full ultra on those platforms.

If someone doesn't know how to disable reflections, mirrors, point lighting and shadows, to drop their graphical settings down to something that their PC can handle, limiting textures to 512px if necessary, then no amount of sticking with less efficient and objectively worse rendering pipelines is going to help.

[Toothless Draegonne]

7 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

So, you were talking about a certain edge case, and not making a broad statement about all surfaces, everywhere, ever.

Right.

 

If you don't need to use the emissive map in a material, you don't use the emissive map in the material. It is then a material with three textures, not four, and three is the same as three.

[Porky Gorky]

35 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Realistically, there should be NO static reflection probes, everyone should ONLY see the reflections from their own personal built in probe, reflecting what's around THERM on their screen.

But that would lag like wading chest deep in a swimming pool filled with molasses, in winter time.

So that's why one CAN'T wear reflection probes.

I wore a reflection probe and wandered around in my reflective gimp suit, it seemed to constantly recalculate the reflections with very notable latency issues, the reflections were rarely ever accurate and I found I either got caught in a recalculating flux loop, or it was showing accurate reflections of the things i’d walked past 10 seconds ago.

Edited August 28 by Porky Gorky

[BilliJo Aldrin]

18 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Conservatives who hate change (not talking political stuff here).

Can't live with 'em, can't live with 'em.

change for the sake of change is never a good thing

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

I was the first to point out in the Discord that you love to hate

Reel your damn neck in.

I haven't said a bloody thing about any discord, anywhere, ever, I don't use discord, I haven't read any discords, you appear to have me confused with some other enemy you pulled from your over-active imagination.

 

6 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

I'm not sure how you missed all the other times I've mentioned that there was some kind of regression between earlier betas and the release of PBR viewers to the public

Depends where you were saying it, if it was on a discord, or a reddit, or on Slumverse or any other system I don't use, then I was bound to miss it.

 

8 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

some kind of regression between earlier betas and the release of PBR viewers to the public, but I'll say again that I have ran PBR viewers on iGPUs in a medium to high detail level

So, "PBR worked FINE for ME when it was exclusive, it's just BAD now that the plebs are allowed to use it". I can imagine why I might not have paid a lot of attention to that kind of post.

 

10 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

less efficient and objectively worse rendering pipelines

PBR is not "objectively" less efficient or worse. In fact, PBR has it's efficiency problems, such as reflection probes. All those probes, asking your gpu to render 360 degree images to use as reflection maps, instead of efficiently loading a pre-made image file, and there's a good chance, seeing as LL's PBR is a rip from Sansar, which was a rip from Useless Engine Kit Type B, that those reflection map images are in HDR Horizontal Cross format, so 50% of the VRAM they take up, is wasted anyway.

 

Heads up. PBR wasn't invented to be "more efficient" than other pipelines. It was invented to give an acceptable hardware based non ray traced FAKE ray-traced effect at game engine speeds. NOT to be a "more efficient pipeline"

 

10 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

If you don't need to use the emissive map in a material, you don't use the emissive map in the material. It is then a material with three textures, not four, and three is the same as three.

Ah so when not in your chosen edge case, it in fact uses the same number of textures and is NOT more efficient at all. JUST different.

 

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

7 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

I wore a reflection probe and wandered around in my reflective gimp suit, it seemed to constantly recalculate the reflections with very notable latency issues, the reflections were rarely ever accurate and I found I either got caught in a recalculating flux loop, or it was showing accurate reflections of the things i’d walked past 10 seconds ago.

Of course, because it's going to lag like wading in molasses in winter time.

But theoretically, one's personal view should have reflections from one's personal position...

Realistically...

 

So, all that "We must haz teh PBR because it r mor REELISM" is basically tech-illiterate bunkum.

I sort of appreciate the irony of how UNREALISTIC PBR systems can be.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

20 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

in my reflective gimp suit

Pics or I dont believe you.

[Gabriele Graves]

55 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

And many of those things did indeed drive people off, as we hear so very often from Oldbies...

There is a limit to how many people you can drive off, and how fast, before the system fails.

 

10-15 % of the users are likely to be in iGPU's, according to hardware surveys of 120 million Steam users. That's a potentially big damn loss.

 

But, but none of that matters because:

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

"Remember when SL was a thing, before they broke the crap out of it, and drove off 10% of the user base, and stopped making a profit, and closed down?"

 

Clearly, SL is no longer a thing, stopped making a profit and closed down.

Oh wait...

[Luna Bliss]

32 minutes ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

19 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Conservatives who hate change (not talking political stuff here).

Can't live with 'em, can't live with 'em.

change for the sake of change is never a good thing

Quite often though it's a matter of the one resisting change not being able to understand why the change is beneficial.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

Clearly, SL is no longer a thing, stopped making a profit and closed down.

Oh wait...

You asked "how will we remember in years to come" not "how is it now".

 

[Toothless Draegonne]

33 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

ciency problems, such as reflection probes. All those probes, asking your gpu to render 360 degree images to use as reflection maps, instead of efficiently loading a pre-made image file, and there's a good chance, seeing as LL's PBR is a rip from Sansar, which was a rip from Useless Engine Kit Type B, that those reflection map images are in HDR Horizontal Cross format, so 50% of the VRAM they take up, is wasted anyway.

Use static probes and the probe only has to bake the image once. You don't need to use probes everywhere. Especially in wide-open areas at ground level, you can just rely on the autoprobe. Probes can be spherical or cubical. Spherical probes as far as I'm aware are cylinder-mapped, like sky-spheres. I couldn't tell you exactly how the cube maps for cubical probes are stored, but I would be surprised if it's just a straight-up horizontal cross.

And again if you are VRAM-constrained, turn your reflections down or off. Use compressed textures. Use 512px max textures if you really must. These are all things you can do to run modern viewers on old machines, and have always been the things that matter much more than "turn ALM off" in prior viewers.

Edited August 28 by Toothless Draegonne

[Gabriele Graves]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

You asked "how will we remember in years to come" not "how is it now".

 

Fair enough, I did.  You got me.

Someone will eventually be right anyway.  Maybe this time...

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

but I would be surprised if it's just a straight-up horizontal cross.

I wouldn't, HDR Horizontal Cross is fairly standard in PBR style rendering engines.

2 minutes ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Spherical probes as far as I'm aware are cylinder-mapped

That sounds quite bad, I'd have at least hoped for HDR Lat-Long format, just using a cylindrical mapping makes the probes so unrealistic, you might as well not have the bloody things.

 

[HeathcliffMontague]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

PBR causes performance loss.

 

 

It does for a lot of folks. Not only folks on old office Dells, as so many here like to say, but folks on medium setups with mid GPUs as well. Setups that actually, usually, handle  AAA games at least OK. It also makes stuff look better, in many cases. It's a very mixed bag. But why so many refuse to acknowledge the former is beyond me. 

[Marianne Little]

 @Charlotte Bartlett It sounds like a mad amount of work, I can not imagine doing all this. But what I worry about is what you say here:

Glass, Metals, Leathers, Bricks if you don't create a proper SL version of the PBR material that interacts well with the SL environment you get that "plastic coated" look. You have to adjust channels to damper appropriately and each material has to be adjusted to be SL appropriate.  With some such as Glass there may be even more needed to create the material in secondary workflow.  

All glory to you for working so hard, I could not have done it, and I bet very, very few creators can spend so much time on this.

How many creators will adjust PBR instead of using one of the full permission PBR textures given away for free on the Marketplace? Textures that are not adjusted for use in SL?

I have used the EEP for PBR included in a building pack, and also other EEP recommended here. It made the moss items look less distasteful, but still too "plastic coated". It helped, but I do not think EEP can correct the shiny look, if the PBR material is not adjusted for SL.

I have no technical expertise, I am only a consumer. I will log into SL and see it looking good. But I do not want creators work themself to the bone, to make SL look good for me. For heavens sake, could not PBR be more creator friendly? Instead of all the creators having to adjust and experiment, why could not the enviroment in SL interact better with PBR from the start?

[Theresa Tennyson]

9 minutes ago, Marianne Little said:

Instead of all the creators having to adjust and experiment, why could not the enviroment in SL interact better with PBR from the start?

If you deleted everything made without PBR it would be easy.

But that wouldn't be a popular move.

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

25 minutes ago, HeathcliffMontague said:

It does for a lot of folks. Not only folks on old office Dells, as so many here like to say, but folks on medium setups with mid GPUs as well. Setups that actually, usually, handle  AAA games at least OK. It also makes stuff look better, in many cases. It's a very mixed bag. But why so many refuse to acknowledge the former is beyond me. 

While I would not say I get performance loss per se, I notice that freecam "stutters" a lot when you move it around. I get bad texture thrashing (which we established in another thread is most likey "intended behaviour") I get solid FPS but my 3090 constantly sounds like its about to levitate my PC off the desk and I dont have to put the heating on in my computer room anymore.

And my PC eats everything but the newest AAA games for breakfast. Max settings all the way, all day. The only thing that seems to stress it out is SL.

Edited August 28 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Frionil Fang]

3 hours ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Spherical probes as far as I'm aware are cylinder-mapped, like sky-spheres. I couldn't tell you exactly how the cube maps for cubical probes are stored, but I would be surprised if it's just a straight-up horizontal cross.

3 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

I wouldn't, HDR Horizontal Cross is fairly standard in PBR style rendering engines.

Out of academic interest, I tried to figure out the viewer code with my semi-decent grasp on C++. I'm not a viewer dev so anyone smarter can check and correct me if I'm wrong:

All reflection probes use the OpenGL cubemap textures (6x square faces), default probe resolution is 128x128 in RGB16F format (16-bit floating point, for 6 bytes per pixel; the floating point format will allow HDR) with several smaller versions for distance viewing, giving about 0.75 MB of texture memory per cube map if my calculations were correct. They are rendered into a 1024x1024 buffer for an additional 6 MB of memory use though(* see correction blow) and then supersampled down when finished: there appears to be only one probe update operation going on at any given time using that same buffer, barring the nearest realtime dynamic/mirror probes which seem to get extra slots. Mirror probes have much beefier resolution, which is why they're so expensive.

3 hours ago, Toothless Draegonne said:

Use static probes and the probe only has to bake the image once.

I feel "static" is a slight misnomer here, static probes are updated all the time, just at a very leisurely pace. Easy to see by plopping a mirror sphere down under a sky with moving clouds, with only static reflections enabled: the clouds will update in the reflection, just at a very choppy rate (and due to autoprobes updating one at a time, different pieces of the clouds will update at different times). What makes them not "dynamic" is that they don't render avatars, avatar-controlled objects or particles. Edit: didn't quite figure out what exactly counts as avatar controlled: a physics object is not avatar controlled even if dragged by an avatar, but animesh seems to count, and probably vehicles being driven?

Second edit: I misread, the temporary buffer used for rendering looks to be 4x dimensions so 512x512, not 1024x1024. That means 1/4th the memory for that buffer, too.

Edited August 28 by Frionil Fang

[Flea Yatsenko]

7 hours ago, Marianne Little said:

A big furniture maker, Fancy Decor, offer both PBR with fallback textures, and non-PBR in the latest releases. Same for Kraftwork, regular textures + PBR.

This is a lot of work, so my guess is that the creator think it is worth supporting both versions. I think the creators keep an eye on the customer base, and found out that stop making non-PBR textured versions would lower the sales so much that the additional work is worth it.

I saw both Fancy Decor versions in the demo area for the event. (It was Fameshed, and I believe it is ended) And it was better glass in the glass tables, and a bit better effect in the metal details. But if it was a difference in the fabric on sofa and chairs, I could not see it. The sequin pillows had a tiny bit of better shine in the PBR pillows. It is not something you notice, unless you know that one version is PBR and really want to look for a difference.

Fancy Decor textures has always been amazing, so the non-PBR glass still look better than most glass furniture.  Do people really care if the glass table has reflection or not? Is the reflection worth it? As it is now, "dry" textures, like textiles, has no difference of minimal difference.

I love the Fancy Decor style and I have no problems with a PBR viewer like Alchemy or SL viewer. I run them easy and it is no heating or lower performance. I like the PBR glass table, and will use it.

What I find silly and annoying, is if I have to use reflection probes, and reflection probes inside reflection probes, to make PBR landscaping look better. I wonder why I need to add reflection probes to improve the look. It should be LL's job to give us an enviroment for PBR, not us to work making PBR look much better than Blinn-Phong.

I spent a lot of time learning to use mesh bodies and mesh heads, because the difference between the default avatar and mesh avatar is like night and day. So it is worth spending time learning. It was worth it to buy hundreds and thousands of mesh clothes and accessories, because it is looking so much better than texture clothes with sculpt addons.

PBR does not improve so much of the visuals in SL as mesh avatars do. So the amount of time I will use on fiddling with probes is much lower than what I want to use on things that have a real wow! effect.

 

It makes absolute sense to continue to support non-PBR viewers. If LL doesn't get PBR working on lower end hardware, I can almost promise you there's going to be at least attempts to get non-PBR working in TPVs. Those types of people aren't going to have materials on, so there's no point in going blinn-phong, they just need diffuse or base color.

Reflection probes came with the PBR update but you can definitely add them to existing non-PBR builds to make them look better and use in world lighting properly. It's entirely optional but it can make things look a lot better in some situations. It's a very safe bet to see most places won't use PBR or reflection probes for a while, unless they are higher end builds that can benefit, like sci-fi sims.

[HeathcliffMontague]

1 hour ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

While I would not say I get performance loss per se, I notice that freecam "stutters" a lot when you move it around. I get bad texture thrashing (which we established in another thread is most likey "intended behaviour") I get solid FPS but my 3090 constantly sounds like its about to levitate my PC off the desk and I dont have to put the heating on in my computer room anymore.

And my PC eats everything but the newest AAA games for breakfast. Max settings all the way, all day. The only thing that seems to stress it out is SL.

Yeah, I do just fine as well. But sometimes getting flashbacks from my military days trying to sleep pretty close to F16s taking off

[Porky Gorky]

1 hour ago, Marianne Little said:

why could not the enviroment in SL interact better with PBR from the start?

It beggars belief that PBR got past the proposal stage on a platform where users control the lighting and the majority of those users probably don’t even know what PBR stands for, let alone understand the principles, in order to create acceptable lighting environments. 

I assume the default PBR environment is the result of a compromise to not break the appearance of existing content. I think they compromised too hard though resulting in a default environment that is not physically accurate and so not fit for purpose.

It’s great that Charlotte is customizing her PBR for SL. If her competitors don’t do the same then hopefully the extra effort will pay off, both financially and for the reputation of the brand.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Porky Gorky said:

It beggars belief

Is this a portmanteau of "begs belief" and "buggers"?  Cool, if so!!!