[Why I Don't Like PBR]

Obviously the skirt example here particularly sucks for you as a user especially if the item is no mod. It looks like the creator has set a blanket 'Environment' value under the specular setting, which is what is causing the vasoline slime type effect you describe.

Still, it surprises me that you say this doesn't show up as much in the Firestorm viewer, as usually this effect would also show up there with such a setting. I'd be interested to see what the specular settings of the skirt are. It could be that you've actually managed to uncover a bug, because I really would expect them to more or less render close to the same.

Speaking as a creator, I know it doesn't fix your existing skirt, but I reckon it would be possible to make an awesome sequin skirt under PBR, because you could use the normal map/combined with AO channel to do individual sequins, combined with metallic you'd be able to make something that naturally sparkles as you move around

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yes, the wood texture on the left is a PBR material, and so doesn't show in a non-PBR viewer. So I used the default texture for the one on the right. The point, to some degree, is to show that blueish sheen on a PBR material while using a PBR-enabled viewer.

A wood material wouldn't normally reflect blue light so strongly, even outdoors. I think the wood material might not be packed correctly, just judging by the way it is reflecting so much light. It looks like either roughness channel is incorrect or somehow it has been set slightly metallic.

If you take a screenshot of the edit material dialog, I can probably tell you at a glance if the material is configured correctly and might be able to spot any mistakes that might have occurred.

9 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The skirt and blouse use Blinn-Phong materials. (For what's it worth, it's a very new product from a popular and reputable clothing maker.)

What I find interesting about the skirt being blinn-phong, is that I'd expect the non-pbr viewer to also show a reflection as even blinn phong does environment reflections, just very badly. It looks like reflections might just be plain off in the non-pbr viewer screenshot? Try putting it in the ultra preset?

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

In your screenshots, The non-PBR one is showing a plywood cube, and the PBR one is showing a wood different material. Is this a PBR Material on the background on the left screenshot?

Same question for the skirt - Is this a PBR material?

 

 

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

 

General problem with adding basically any feature to Second Life

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

16 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

As for the ”fixed” mid-day settings by LL (yes, the one with broken, static clouds too)

Yeah, that is one thing that I do actually have a gripe with, LL seems to have deluded itself that this is OK and the answer is NO.

Then again, I'm not so fond of the current cloud system we have in SL either. It's always been a bit 'meh', feel like SL could use better.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

1 minute ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

We keep being told we "must have PBR to be compliant with industry standard creation tools like Substance Painter".

 

If it doesn't look any better, and was only done to benefit SP users, and causes problems for loads of non SP users and non creators, and is obviously no where near ready for release, maybe it should be kicked back to the alpha grid kerb for another couple or three years.

Blender has all the necessary tools to be industry compliant and achieve WYSIWYG with SL. There are instructions on which settings to check match up in the wiki. I haven't had issues authoring materials in Blender.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

also FWIW it's possible to purchase substance painter and own it perpetually via Steam.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Question to anyone who knows -- to what degree are the settings for reflection probes, especially ambient lighting, "reachable" via LSL scripting?

How "doable" would it be to produce a HUD that includes a simple and intuitive way to fine-tune reflection probes, or change them according to the overall EEP?

@Qie Niangao? @Henri Beauchamp? @Extrude Ragu? Anyone?

The properties are all exposed to LSL.

See https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

15 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

who can afford to RENT a copy of Substance Painter

skill issue, I made many of my existing pbr trims with blender alone

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

It'll be interesting to see what makes 'round two'. Me and a friend applied but nada, so either they got a lot of applications and we're out of luck or they stopped for a lack of enough applications. Hm 🤔

[Baby making body parts?]

On 2/27/2024 at 4:05 AM, Kalegthepsionicist said:

you dont need genital LoL

you click the hud and sprayyy from far and dang

prim baby born

you just need alpha daddy hid from same store , 😂

ah yes the 'spray and pray' impregnation tactic 🤔

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

3 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

If clicking a button is too hard, if using the cursor keys is too hard, they really don't belong here.

In a world where people are actively damaging their attention span on TikTok and engaging in pointless culture wars on Twitter and YouTube, getting those people unhooked from those platforms and learning to enjoy old fashioned computers, socializing and creating in the virtual world will probably do them some good.

If they've gotten as far as registering and logging in, that's a good sign they wanted to at least try it. Maybe they've never played a video game before, or grown up on an iPad.

I think as long as they're willing to learn, give them the tools to learn. Otherwise, where else will they learn? Some other game?

[Forum needs a garbage section.]

An off topic section would be useful for keeping the on-topic sections on topic. People need a space to blabber.

Of course the noisiest threads would be culture war/rage bait/politics. Not sure we want those, probably better discussed in-world where fires don't spread too fast when people say stupid things lol

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

Yes well whilst you work on saving the world by making everyone your 'be smarter' serum, I'm going to trust that the lead firestorm developer and one of the top engineers at LL knew what they were talking about. Actually I've personally experienced the results of their work as I take yearbook photos for my sim yearly and the FPS difference after the work had been completed was night and day.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

Quote

Perhaps more significant for performance (though this is very tentative and it remains to be seen in practice) is news from Runitai Linden at yesterday's content creator user group meeting, that he is hoping to have some changes that directly address a large part of the problem that heavily sliced mesh bodies cause. My other blogs explain the concept of "batching" and drawcalls, Runitai's changes will (hopefully) bring improved batching to rigged mesh, cutting down the number of draw calls required. This is very early days and Runitai cautioned that the changes make many shortcuts and assumptions that may not survive contact with the real world. 

https://beqsother.blogspot.com/2021/11/i-dont-wanna-mesh-with-nobody.html

 

Quote

Here's a quick appraisal of the typical perspective on lag. The high-level summary is that most of these are valid observations and identify some form of inefficiency. Whether they contribute to FPS loss is another question, and until we get rid of the massive issue around draw calls, their effect is moot.

https://beqsother.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-crowds-cause-lag-why-you-are-to.html

 

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

I hate to sound like a smartass but pls like all the viewer developers were talking about this for ages in the internal discord, in the viewer meetings. Ask Beq Janus yourself. What comes up again and again and again? draw calls. It's not some boogeyman that people just made up.

The mesh data gets sent to your GPU in chunks, every draw call gets sent as a seperate message. The time it takes to send that message is usually longer than the time it takes to process it. Why is that? The gpu is incredibly fast at processing triangles, but the bottle neck is not the gpu, it's sending data to the gpu in tiny chunks. Usually those chunks are each of the faces in a mesh.

Think of it similar to copying 100 tiny files to copying and pasting one big file. The big file always copies faster.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

1 hour ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Alpha cuts on a mesh body for example, with only 8 faces permitted per link, a mesh body using alpha cuts causes lag. It's not draw calls, people who basically don't know what they are talking about, or just don't pay attention keep saying "blah blah blah draw calls, lets use 4k texture atlases".

🤦‍♂️

Alpha cuts cause lag because they result in additional draw calls. Remember how before PBR, there was this great big performance improvement update work that went on? It was in response to all the bodies with ridiculous number of alpha cuts. What did the work involve, it involved detecting which unique faces shared the same material information, then batching them into a single draw call! That was the entire optimisation that sped everything up, removing a bunch of additional draw calls.

That was literally the whole point.

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

23 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

The Community Exhibits are a Work in Progress. I like that they give sim owners a chance to showcase their regions to new users, but they do require some work to create. It would be harder for LL to showcase communities within SL because communities are not single, consistent entities, but rather conglomerates of many diverse sims, groups and views.

One way to show more communities to a new user would be the rather boring but efficient use of teleport boards, with pictures of different sims. I'm not suggesting replacing the showcase diases, just adding teleport boards for those who don't want to create a whole display. Teleport boards are low Land Impact, easy to create, and easy to use. They would also remove the step of taking the user out of SL to the website, just to teleport them back into a region within SL.

Just a general community noticeboard would be nice, like those found in town centers.

I wonder if there is an API for the destination guide? It'd be cool to have something to display the destination guide or parts of it in-world.

 

 

 

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

Just now, Drayke Newall said:

I would dare say that would go against the conditions LL have with the Motown sponsor due to copyright of songs DJ's play without getting the license to play them.

Probably. Ironic that the music industry is what kills the success of a music venue sponsored by the music industry.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

I think that newbie creators/content farm types spamming up the grid with laggy content is not a new problem. Worth solving, sure. New problem? not really.

In theory if a creator uploaded a 2k texture and slapped it on their cube, your computer would only download say a 1k version of it until you zoomed way in, that's how I'm told it will work. I'm also told that a viewer dev would be free to set an arbitrary max resolution to download so in theory this won't actually change anything for people on low end hardware. I don't know or claim to know that it actually does/will work, I'm just relaying what I've been told.

 

 

 

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

9 hours ago, Drayke Newall said:

I am sure the Motown region can be used by Linden Lab for other things other than just adding a temp attach hud for US residents only to play music.

I said it before when it first opened in these forums that the easiest way for it to be populated at least some of the time and to help user retention etc. is for each new resident from that week be sent an invite to attend a 'welcome concert party' event at the end of the week offering music, fun, freebies, etc.

The last I checked there are a lot of DJ's on SL that like to play live music. letting resident DJ's and entertainers book the venue would give it some life.

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

A lot of creators don't know how to effectively use trim sheets. Actually, this is something I didn't learn about as a novice creator for a very long time. Second Life has a bit of an education issue. Ironically, what ultimately 'taught' me was when Second Life got its internal discord and creators had somewhere to talk and learn from each other there.

Also, because the Second Life renderer up until recently sucked balls at reflections, creators couldn't use trim sheets because of the need to bake lighting information which PBR removes. If we can get people to learn how to use trim sheets, we up texel density massively.

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

And of course, somebody will say "but... but... 1 massive texture for everything means one draw calls, not 8" despite the fact that draw calls are NOT the big lag maker in SL

This I don't agree on - Draw calls are a big lag maker in Second Life. Especially when it comes to mesh bodies. Beq Janus the lead firestorm developer made several blog posts with detailed information/research about this.

Performance with 2k textures is obviously a concern. I have bought it up myself. The answer I usually get is that because images in Second Life are JPEG2000 encoded, they will use the discard level feature to basically do texture LOD's and you'd rarely have the full resolution texture in memory. Whether this really works is yet to be seen, I just hope they're right..

 

[Why I Don't Like PBR]

2 minutes ago, Porky Gorky said:

Are LL actually planning to introduce 2k textures or are you just wishful thinking? I think I remember right at the start of SL that we could import 2k textures but LL put a stop to that  for obvious reasons.

They have been experimenting with it. There's a test viewer and stress testing currently going on on the beta grid.

It is also on their public roadmap ( https://feedback.secondlife.com )

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

37 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Why?  Because one of the very first questions a lot of people ask is, "How do I get money in this game?".  You don't like the Buy Lindens kiosk and you don't like the games.  What do you suggest we answer them?  

I normally tell them to take some time and learn a bit first to see if plan on staying.  They soon realize, however, that running around in a Senra avatar is detrimental to socializing in a lot of places so they want to upgrade their avatar at the very least.  They can't usually get an SL job so they're left with...games of some kind or buying Ls.

To be clear I do think that it's for newbies, I was just trying to make the point that it wouldn't be there in the newbie area if it wasn't for newbies

[Nobody goes to the Community Exhibition in WelcomeHub.]

1 hour ago, Jaylinbridges said:

This is not a game for sensitive newbies scared by a popup.

If it is not intended for newbies, why put it in the welcome area then?

Have you ever watched someone who doesn't use computers very often and how they tend to react when a wall of text pops up, they will always look for a way out, assume something is trying to give them a computer virus etc. Most don't read the text.

I'm not saying that newbies are 'scared' in the child who needs comforting sense, I'm saying they're scared in the 'will this steal my credit card information?' sense. These are often people with lower technical literacy, or English is not their first language. There's no reason the teleport portal couldn't just work, there are other portals in the welcome hub that do just work and LL has the power to make that happen.

I've already watched several newbies try to go through that portal, fail and walk away.