glTF Roadmap?

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Question to anyone who knows . . .

Does the Occlusion map (applied as part of the ORM map) in SL's implementation of PBR respond to non-directional lighting (point lights), or just directional lighting (i.e., projectors)? Or to environmental ambient occlusion? To straight-up environmental ambient lighting (i.e., not cast directly by the sun or moon)?

[Nagachief Darkstone]

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Question to anyone who knows . . .

Does the Occlusion map (applied as part of the ORM map) in SL's implementation of PBR respond to non-directional lighting (point lights), or just directional lighting (i.e., projectors)? Or to environmental ambient occlusion? To straight-up environmental ambient lighting (i.e., not cast directly by the sun or moon)?

Occlusion data (and the SSAO version of it) only applies to pixels not directly lit by sun/moon or local lights. I believe this is specified in the glTF 2.0 documentation, though it's generally how renderers treat ambient occlusion.

[Frionil Fang]

1 hour ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Does the Occlusion map (applied as part of the ORM map) in SL's implementation of PBR respond to non-directional lighting (point lights), or just directional lighting (i.e., projectors)?

 

1 hour ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Occlusion data (and the SSAO version of it) only applies to pixels not directly lit by sun/moon or local lights.

Yup, for a visual comparison aid, here's a set of 4 perfectly smooth white spheres. The red light is a spotlight, green light is a point light, blue light is the sun. The ones on the left are metal, ones on the right are not; ones on the bottom have a cyan texture as the ORM map (i.e. occlusion is 0 everywhere, completely occluded). The ones that are fully occluded ignore the reflection probes completely and only show the light gleams, and a completely occluded metal despite being white has very little to reflect so the bottom left appears black.

Edited September 10 by Frionil Fang

[Raven Huntsman]

On 9/7/2024 at 3:24 PM, Nalates Urriah said:

SL has morphing for the system avatar. It did not get adapted to work with with "fitted mesh" add-ons.

For freedom of creation by end users morphing bodies and faces is way restrictive compared to what we have. One can only use 0-100% of whatever the designer included and other parts relate to the morph in restricted ways. I think morphing would also increase the data transfer load. The system AV morphs were built into the viewers, so one download by everyone when they installed the viewer.

I doubt we would ever see vertex animation in SL. LL was very emphatic about not allowing mesh flipping, quick swapping between meshs to fake animation.

I think you're referring to the avatar shape mechanic? I don't believe that uses any kind of vertex animation tech as far as I'm aware. All of the existing "shape" related features use bone scaling. With the adoption of GLTF brings a lot more creatively useful features like vertex animation/blendshapes.

Now, if you know how blendshapes work, you are effectively packaging a clone of the objects geometry for each shape you have. This would definitely balloon mesh sizes/import size/storage costs etc. However the benefit of this tech is immeasurable to the creativity and development of mesh content.
It would completely eliminate the need for the quick swapping of meshes you mentioned but also the creation of said meshes which would bring sizes down a tiny bit to compensate.

I'm hoping that LL gives it some serious consideration and like with everything they implement, it would likely come with some SL specific limitations like for example only a small number of blendshapes allowed per mesh/object. To be honest, it's such a game changing feature, even allowing a single blendshape to be imported with a mesh would be huge.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

6 hours ago, Raven Huntsman said:

I think you're referring to the avatar shape mechanic?

The morphs of the system avatar aren't related to avatar shape, they're used for the system avatar facial expressions.