Extrude Ragu
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Posts posted by Extrude Ragu
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To be honest I think the whole out of band viewers using Albedo as a fall back is really paving the path to hell with good intentions.
What I mean is, for a TPV dev, sure, you get to tell everyone you're being all virtuous and supporting people on old hardware. But this is not just old hardware we're talking we're talking about here, this is ancient hardware. And actually this whole exercise is ultimately costing everyone money.
For example, LL is spending a lot of money on modernising SL and telling creators they can expect that viewers will render their content with a modern pipeline, and their content will always look at least a certain quality. By developing a viewer that intentionally breaks this promise, you undermine that promise and creators are less likely to invest in the platform. This costs money.
For people who don't know, Albedo is not diffuse, and it will look incorrect. Metals for example will generally show up as just the color black in an albedo map. There is no lighting data in an albedo map and so your textures will look flat and ugly if it is rendered as though it is diffuse. No creator worth their salt is going to want the average customer experience to be a product to look like that, so they would have to bake extra fallback textures, to support these legacy viewers that make PBR optional - This costs creators time and money, and ultimately makes the platform less appealing to create for.
LL also has a public image problem of being an ugly failed social experiment from the 2000's that is full of old people, and this sort of reinforces that idea because it's sending the message that we haven't moved on from that. People will see modern SL screenshots from these viewers, and assume SL never moved on and is now a retirement community. Even better, the screenshots will be uglier than the 2000's because at least in the 2000's the textures were designed for the rendering engine. This is terrible marketing that costs us new players
Supporting ancient hardware is expensive for SecondLife in general. Lets be clear here we're not asking people to install 4090's but simply have a computer made in the last ten years that was designed to do some basic gaming. At some point, other peoples thrift comes at SecondLife's expense. We should support old hardware yes, but also recognize the cost involved in supporting ancient hardware.
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I usually have a good time whilst playing SecondLife
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The best thing to do is just engage with the people you have a good time with, and disengage with the people you don't.
The forum is another can of worms though...
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I've seen people do this a lot of times, and it has never ended well.
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People you choose not to engage with stalking your profile and then trying to use your partner as a proxy to talk to you.
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Someone complained that PBR won't affect their body. I assume they meant lack of BOM support or perhaps they're using the default LL body.
Just wanted to point this out - The jira is filed by a linden and contains plans for bom support for PBR, so obviously they are thinking about it already but it would be its own project. So who knows, maybe it will come down the road.
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Search engines aren't even good at finding stuff anymore. I've noticed that Google, DuckDuckGo etc if you ask them an even slightly niche query, will instead give you results for something more commonly searched for, and absolutely refuse to give you any results that aren't A. a major news publisher (aka. a content farm) or B. an app posing as a website.
It used to be the case that you'd find results of people having discussions about niche topics on forums or some persons personal website, but now unless it's a big site it's not in the results. It's like unless it's big and corporate you're not allowed to see it.
Sometimes I resort to using Yandex, this russian search engine, just to get oldschool interesting results.
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1 hour ago, Mistress Morbid said:
Well, that's probably not going to make merchants happy, given how easy it is to steal models from Sketchfab thanks to their inspector.
Easy solution is just to make it opt in.
In the end, being a merchant is all about picking and choosing compromise. Increased security necessarily compromises convenience for customer in nearly all forms. In the end, life is risk/reward.
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I'm hearing the newer PBR build from firestorm has performance improvements and I don't doubt it will continue to receive them as PBR matures. Alchemy runs just as fast with PBR than it did without it for me.
I would encourage anyone shy to look inside their computer to give looking inside a second thought. Learning skills, being curious and stepping outside the daily routine is good for your brains neuroplasticity and sense of confidence if nothing else. Unplug it, take the screws off one day and have a look inside. You don't have to touch anything, just be curious about how your little box works. Just be warned, chances are, if you've never opened it before and it's an old machine, the insides will be coated in dust. Would be a good idea to clean it, the heat is likely slowing your computer down.
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Oh oh, in case it saves anyone 50bux
Substance Painter 2024 steam version is set to go up 50usd 1st Jan, so if you were thinking of getting it nows the time
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35 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Any of these not involve Blender? I can create a normal and spectral map without Blender now.
This is a serious question: I would like to create PBR for the commercial full-perm mesh I buy in-world. Blender is not going to help with that, nor do I want to learn it just to texture items.
Handpainting in an image editor
I mean at its core, if you are handpainting, the easiest thing to do would be to trace over your base color image on a couple of new layers.
The first layer would be your roughness. You can think of this like how rough a material would feel in your hand. You'd paint towards white (1) when the surface is very rough feeling, and towards (0) when the surface is very smooth like polished marble, or of course somewhere in between for fabrics and whatnot. You could use local textures and experiment to get the feel of it.
Metalness is equally a black and white image, in general things are either metal or they aren't, so it's pretty easy to know where to paint black and where to paint white.
Once you'd done your handpaintings you'd just export those black and white layers as their own images to use.
If you already know how to make a normal map - You're pretty much there. You'd chuck your color image, and your painted roughness/metalness, normal map into my packer and that's it
For dedicated tools
I thiiiink Quixel Mixer works standalone without 3d modelling https://quixel.com/mixer
If it needs a 3d model honestly I can literally just give you a mesh square to paint on lol
https://www.materialmaker.org/ Material Maker is another one
There are also AI tools knocking about that attempt to create PBR materials from images
Bed time for me. Happy new year
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36 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:
I know it's very easy, or said to be, to create PBR materials with Substance Painter, but are there any tutorials about how to it with free tools like Gimp and/or Blender that you can recommend?
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://polyhaven.com/textures
And then chuck them through my packer to get a material to upload
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3 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:
SL will last longer if they were to reduce the learning curve rather than increase it as this obviously does. It is not that some of us are happy the way it is but that it would have been more expedient and fruitful had they spent some time on reducing the complexity of what it takes people to buy, dress, build and communicate inworld rather then focusing on eye candy that only a small minority can see and benefit from.
Between this PBR and EEP they have spent years on development for things that the majority couldn't give a rats ass about and that with their attendant learning curves to benefit from, would rather they had just left well enough alone.
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.
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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.
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4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
Yeah. I don't know what I'm doing wrong here though.
Here are the maps that the download from the online site gives me, along with how I'm inputting them into the GLTF Packer: "Diffuse" > Base Color, "AO" > Occlusion, "Rough" > Roughness, Metallic left empty, "Normal" > "Normal," and Emission left empty.
And here are the three maps I'm getting (aside from the actual GLTF file):
I'm not understanding where the blue in the ORM is coming from. Any sense of what I'm doing wrong here? It's not coming from the Normal file, is it? Should I not be adding that???
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.
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59 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:
And that's where you recveal your true colours.
I said that the non shiny, matte finish pbr samples you showed could be matched with Blinn-Phong, thats ALM Materials, not "the old forward render" flat matte 2003 style., like for like, a diffuse map, and a normal map, and grey scale speculars., which SL has had for 9 years.
Ah, no, I mean with a pre-PBR viewer, since the newer PBR viewer also enhances blinn-phong. You can still use ALM etc
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4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:
Go here, you'll find a whole bunch of 1024 res materials packs, with diffuse, normal maps and specular maps, that do wood, stone, and brick just as well as those PBR's you used.
https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/169036
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.
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5 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:
Nice...
Shame that NONE of them are doing anything you couldn't have done just as easily with Blinn-Phong, excapt the blueish grey metal in the last pic in the 2nd post, and that could be faked in B-P with a manually set spec tint colour.
Sorry, NO "PBR Wow!" there.
OK then, recreate that scene in Blinn Phong. I dare you 😉
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I uploaded some more materials to beta grid just because
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42 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
I just dived onto the SL viewer to take these. This is using a CC PBR leather texture I uploaded, and applied to a simple prim sphere, under the new Midday setting.
First is with a "low" metallic setting. You can see where I set it off to the left.
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
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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
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Just now, Henri Beauchamp said:
This is totally a bad idea !
Creators are already using 1024x1024 textures where a 256x256 would suffice, and now they want 2048x2048 or even 4096x4906 ?...
This would totally kill SL for everyone but people with 16GB or more VRAM and 64GB or more RAM !
Hence, I mentioned the texture LOD work 😉
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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.
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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.
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Firestorm PBR Alpha viewer
in Second Life Viewer
Posted
She's saying that some creators would be tempted to put a diffuse map in their PBR material instead of albedo, because their customers can turn PBR off in certain viewers and will just see whatever populates the albedo slot.
So in other words it's actually only the people using a PBR viewer, who would see the pollution.