Extrude Ragu

For budding Creators The following is just some pointers for creators:- The process to make a PBR material in blender is the same as creating a blinn phong material. Any tutorial on texturing and UV mapping will get you there. Most people make baby's first material with the donut tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmrAv8TSAao The main difference is at the end, instead of having to do some arcane SL channel packing ritual, you can just bake the standard items: Diffuse, Roughness, Normal (And perhaps Metallic if your material has metalness). You can upload those images to SL and create the material in-world, but for a higher quality material it's best to pack them into a gltf file (You get lossless normal maps this way). Blender can do it, or I made a drag and drop tool to make it easier for everybody. If you're looking to create materials you can re-use on different objects, I recommend using GrabDoc which can be used to bake a material you designed on a 2d mesh square. More advanced: I started making a tutorial recently about making trim sheets which describes using GrabDoc , but it's still a bit of a mess, sorry! There are also some blender addons that can restore some of the functionality of Substance Painter to Blender. For example I use an addon called Ravage to do layer based texturing workflow. PBR Painter is also popular but I have not tried it. For average Joe Most people shouldn't need to learn to create materials. Creators will be putting PBR materials on the MP, many of which will be free as there are whole libraries of CC0 materials already out there on the internet. You'd purchase whatever materials you need off the MP, and drag them onto your object from your inventory. If there is a material you need but isn't there, you could look for pre-made PBR materials off websites like https://www.cgbookcase.com/ https://polyhaven.com/textures https://freepbr.com/ And then chuck them through my packer to get a material to upload

Disagree, because you perceive complexity from that of an existing resident who has come to expect how certain things should work. For example, a new user won't need to concern themselves with old texturing methods, the same way new users today don't learn how to make sculpts. When viewed as a new way to texture, dragging PBR materials with inventory previews onto a build is easier than using textures, where one has to know about technicalities such as normal and specular maps to make anything that looks nice. Creating PBR materials is an easier process to learn than creating Blinn-Phong Materials.

5th Category - People who want SL to have a future. Many of the existing user base might be content with the SL they know. But such people are only thinking about themselves and do not see the wider picture, because they are consumers. The truth is the SL they know won't hang around too long if it does not modernize. SL is 20 years old now, and it's players even older. Hate to say the morbid part out loud, but people don't live forever, and servers cost money and time to run.

Ah, that is packed correctly, my bad. Yes the packer does pack white when no metallic texture is used, but the metallic factor should have been automatically set to 0 when you uploaded it.

Ah, no, I mean with a pre-PBR viewer, since the newer PBR viewer also enhances blinn-phong. You can still use ALM etc

If you're so confident you can recreate the materials in the scene with these, show us. Don't forget to use the old forward renderer. Show the materials outdoors and indoors also, and I'll happily do the same.

OK then, recreate that scene in Blinn Phong. I dare you 😉

I uploaded some more materials to beta grid just because

The ORM texture looks to be packed wrong. (Red) Occlusion (Green) Roughness (Blue) Metalness Blue channel should be basically 0 here (because leather isn't metal at all), so the texture shouldn't have that blue tint, likewise should be more pinkish red as occlusion channel should be a value close to 1 (white) Here's an example of a leather texture I've packed:- Note the color of the ORM map is more like a bright pink. Also, if your leather texture came with a Glossiness map, instead of a roughness map, you need to invert it, because roughness is the inverse of glossiness. What that looks like applied to a mesh in-world

I like how I specifically mention the entire project is to see how they could implement it without spoiling things for low end hardware and everyone can't help themselves but to doompost that they're trying to kill low end hardware. It's like people just can't help themselves. I'll waste my time somewhere else

Hence, I mentioned the texture LOD work 😉

In general I expect that PBR materials will by and large look better than blinn-phong most of the time. Metals are a big part of the PBR improvements but in general any surface with environment reflection will benefit from having proper environment maps. Materials like leather suede etc will render much nicer. The lossless normal maps that were part of the PBR work will also be great for surfaces with finer undulations. Of course, the untrained eye won't be able to spot such differences in non metallic textures so easy until the content has really permeated the market. As Chic mentioned, the use of material assets in the inventory is going to make it very easy for noobs to create things that look nicer, since pre-made materials can be shared and I know that there are people already going to work putting up lots of CC0 materials on the MP for people to play with for free. Another reason PBR materials will end up looking better is because they follow a standard format that creative applications generally export to because they're used in modern games. It might not sound like that makes a difference, until you realize that a huge % of Blinn-phong stuff uploaded to SL is simply not uploaded correctly, because most creators take the labels "Diffuse Texture","Normal Map","Specular" at face value and do not realize for example that the Alpha channel in their Normal Map is specular exponent, or the Alpha Channel in their Specular map controls environment reflection. This simple SecondLife quirk leads to missing data and uglier materials and makes creating less accessible as it requires arcane knowledge of SecondLife that most residents simply don't have. Also coming down the pipes is PBR terrain support. Seriously, teleport to the mainland and look at the floor. You can see the pixels. LL is also currently exploring the possibility of 2K material support, but they want to make sure texture LOD's work so it will still work on old hardware.

The reason I am calm is because I've tested the viewer for myself, contributed towards the bug reports, spent time on the discord talking to the developers. Also I create and develop my own sim, and experience similar doom posting whenever I start to make big changes. Be it redecorating an island, making a town plan, using mesh, using AI, everything has gotten guess what? doomposting. But what happens? 3-6 months after its had time to bed in and everyone can't live without whatever I made. Dave and his team are very talented and passionate people who love games and graphics technology. They're working hard and they do good work. There's passionate creators talking on the internal discord every day banging away at each little flaw day in day out. As for whether it got let out of the gates too early - I work in software, that's just how these things go. You have to eventually get it out into the wild to start to find the real issues that go unnoticed in testing. All I can suggest is to people is to have a bit of faith and file bug reports when you find things that look like bugs.

Man every time I check these topics people just can't help themselves but to start with the doom-posting. Maybe the forum isn't so good for peoples health

World of Dolls and Angry Anonymous Sexcraft

Had fun adventure~ https://www.flickr.com/photos/147479869@N04/albums/72177720313664402/

I'd simply call it Worlds We're so many things to so many different people

I have autoplay disabled in my browser, so there is just a permanently disembodied arm lol

Chicken and the egg situation. If there are crossfades, it's more worthwhile to be more careful with lods since the payoff will be greater than without crossfades.

-- Personal thoughts -- People's expectations of virtual worlds go up every year thanks to other platforms and the progression of technology. We're never going to use up all of the abandoned land on the original mainland - The quantity is there, but the quality is absolutely not. Land developed ~20 years ago does not meet peoples expectations in 2024. There is insufficient political willpower to impose a covenant on the original mainland or enforce it - Trying to change the original mainland is therefor IMO a fools game. Premium land is popular because the surroundings around ones home don't suck, but premium land is slowly turning the perception of SecondLife into a retirement community due to the fact it is whole islands of nothing but homes with absolutely nothing to see or do. If everyone moves to premium homes, exploration in SecondLife can be pronounced dead, because there is absolutely nothing to see or do in premium land. A demand that is going completely uncovered is land for business. There are arguably zero attractive places to set up a shop in SecondLife that aren't private regions. -- At the same time -- If we do a whole new continent, it's going to take a very long time to populate, as most residents have somewhere they go now. Although the quality will inevitably attract new residents, it would be a very long slog to fill a new continent. We're not exactly in a boom period. -- So what do? -- My opinion is land improvement should be a multi-pronged approach, involving the de-boring-isation of premium land, and rather than create a whole new continent, make much smaller, higher quality development areas. -- de-boring-isation of premium land -- There is zero reason to walk out of your premium home very far as it stands. I propose converting some of the linden homes (Say, 1 or 2 per region) to business premium land. This could be a small shop, a club, a park etc. . LL would provide the buildings in keeping with the expectations of premium residents. The covenant will be strict about lag, noise and external signage so as to not annoy neighbors. When neighbors complain, LL should more often than not side with residents than shop owners, to make it clear that business is 'guest' in this land. Shop owners could optionally choose to provide car/bicycle parking/rez to encourage exploration. It would count towards land tier, which would simultaneously help fill up the smaller premium plots and also help LL sell more pl00s subscriptions. Additionally, street names and wayfinding signage shall be added to premium land, to help stop the whole place making you feel like a dementia patient who accidentally walked out of your care home. -- Smaller, high quality development areas -- Rather than make a whole huge continent that will take forever to populate I'd make much smaller, more concentrated new land developments in the style OP suggests with loose-but-not-no restrictions. Perhaps do these developments either side of the existing premium land so as to sandwich the more boring area with more interesting stuff either side, which should also get people out of their homes exploring more, bumping into each other and making the place actually have some life. By keeping the development small, we ensure that at any given time it is bustling, we only expand it as it gets full. I ran out of energy to keep fleshing out this plan around here but it's a starting point

Just realised I skim read and missed that you actually mentioned the metallic factor yourself. Whoops But yeah, it's set automatically, no need to fiddle

The material will actually display correctly in-world. GLTF Materials have an additional variable called `metallic factor` which is separate to the image and controls how much the image is used. When the slot is left empty, gltf packer automatically sets this value to zero so your material will display correctly in-world. However, just in case you did want it to be metallic. It does actually set the channel in the image to white, which allows you to edit the material in-world and set the metallic factor to 1 to use it.

The AO/Rough/Metal is a pre-packed image (aka. An ORM Map) - You wouldn't use this with GLTF Packer (You wouldn't pack something that has already been packed!) In this case, you'd put AO in the occlusion slot, and Roughness in the Roughness slot. You'd leave Metallic empty. Only metallic materials come with a metalness map usually, which is why one isn't shown on the page.

What I think would be nice is if the texture uploader would look at the average color of a texture and if it's close enough to 'normal map blue' upload it lossless