Fluffy Sharkfin
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Posts posted by Fluffy Sharkfin
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On 9/24/2022 at 3:08 AM, Bree Giffen said:
I just read this article and it reminded me of this thread. I looks like this is the answer to the 2nd question by @Vanessa Amethyst on AI being used for 3D creation.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/09/23/3d-generative-ai-research-virtual-worlds/
I was reading an article about GET3D a few days ago and, while the results may seem a little crude and unoptimized at the moment, I think this could eventually be a game changer for developers of virtual worlds.
I've always said that one of the main stumbling blocks for any platform attempting to compete with SL has been the initial lack of content but if AI is capable of populating these virtual worlds with an unlimited variety of characters and objects then that hurdle will no longer exist and SLs main advantage over its competitors will disappear along with it.
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1 hour ago, Brightstar7777 said:
is capitalism really what the Metaverse is supposed to be about?
Well, capitalism may not have a place in the utopian best-case-scenario of a Metaverse to which you're referring, but according to Neal Stephenson (the guy who coined the phrase "metaverse" in the 1992 novel Snow Crash) it seems that he envisioned capitalism being as rampant there as it is in RL...
QuoteAnyone with enough money could modify an avatar to look like whatever or whoever, but most people just rent standard avatars ("Brandy" and "Clint" being popular off-the-shelf models for women and men).
He even refers to the social stigma associated with wearing off-the-shelf avatars and using low end equipment on a few occasions, referring to those who use pay-terminals as "black-and-whites"...
QuoteBesides, if this guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be, to judge from the image quality -- it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he is, except not as well.
Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them.”
1 hour ago, Brightstar7777 said:The irony is, back in those days, creation was easy in ASCII, but I had a void where there should have been an endless fountain of creativity. Now, I'm overcome that darkness, but creation and possibility seem harder than they were a generation or two ago. It's all been done and turned into a three-ring binder and barriers have been built where before it felt undivided.
If it's any consolation the sad truth is that once you've learned how to use all those creative tools then, rather than feeling your creativity is stymied by lack of expertise, it will instead be tempered (and perhaps even hampered) by the knowledge of what isn't possible and a deeper understanding of the vast amount of work involved in creating what is.
On a more positive note, there's no reason why your particular brand of ASCII-based creativity can't live on inside the wider metaverse, since typing is still a thing (at least for now)!
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5 hours ago, kaufield007 said:
On my sim, I have a number of whales and dolphins swimming about. I also have some cute kiwi birds who wander about in the long grass.
Thing is that lately they have all taken to having little bursts of flight (whales and dolphins as well)
They sort of take off, fly way up in the sky, then vanish and re-appear where the started from.
Have done all the usual, reboots, clean installs, clearing cache.
Nothing makes a difference.
Any tips/ideas please?
Sounds peculiar! If the whales were falling rather than flying away (and were inexplicably accompanied by a bowl of petunias) then I'd say perhaps you'd discovered Douglas Adams Whale of Magrathea?
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4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
So, the one that is new here is Emissive?
Is there any change to the effect, or ways in which one can tweak, Normal and Specular (i.e., Metallic-Rougness)?
Or is it that this separates the last two, which are together now?
You're close but, as usual, it's a wee bit more complicated.
At the moment we can toggle between using the alpha channel in the main diffuse texture for either transparency or emissiveness (glow), so essentially we already have an 8-bit (greyscale) emissive map but it's being changed to a separate full colour texture.
They are including a new type of map, the Occlusion map, which will be in the red channel of the Metallic-Roughness map (which will actually be three separate greyscale textures combined into the red, green and blue channels of a single image).
The materials system we have now is basically the equivalent of a Specular PBR workflow while the new system will be a Metallic PBR workflow. You can find a fairly straightforward explanation of the differences between the two and a list of pros and cons for both in this blog post PBR Textures Metallic vs Specular Workflow but essentially this quote sums it up pretty well...
QuotePBR Specular Workflow uses a Specular Color map in conjunction with the Gloss Map for correct specularity. This has both a strong benefit and a significant disadvantage, especially in terms of game creation.
PBR Metallic workflows are memory friendly in nature and hence often more suitable for game development.
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5 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:
That's a lot of material to get through, no pun intended again.
What I've gotten so far is old normal maps will not work; we will need 4 maps now (some with names) I've never heard of, and something or other about Unreal Engine(?). Unreal engine? Wow!
I hope they will have classes to teach how to make the maps.
The PBR compatible maps they're implementing are pretty much industry standard at this point so will probably be easier to work with than the current SL materials for those using 3D software that supports PBR workflows.
The reference to Unreal Engine is only in regards to the upcoming support for the .gltf format, it's certainly not going to be a requirement for any aspect of creating content for SL.
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16 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:
Things have evolved quite a bit since the first CCUG, below are just a few summaries that focused on reflection probes a lot:
https://modemworld.me/2022/05/06/2022-ccug-meeting-week-18-summary-reflection-probes/
https://modemworld.me/2022/05/20/2022-ccug-meeting-week-20-summary-reflection-probes-update/
https://modemworld.me/2022/06/03/2022-ccug-meeting-week-22-summary-reflection-probes-update/
https://modemworld.me/2022/06/18/2022-ccug-meeting-week-24-summary-materials-alm/Thanks, I had a look through a few of the meeting notes and linked the blog post that had information relevant to impact on performance, but there's definitely a ton of additional information in subsequent posts that's worth reviewing.
I'm quite excited to see the old SL environment/reflection map getting replaced, hopefully it won't take long for people to start utilizing them once the feature is released.
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36 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
I'd imagine this is going to involve some heavy lifting for computers, though?
I haven't had a chance to try it yet but from what I read in some of the previous meeting notes here it sounds like the majority of the heavy lifting is dependent on the number of probes sampled.
QuoteCurrently only 8 maps are active at any one time. However, given sampling of just 8 maps for rendering can take up to 70% of an RTX 3080 GPU, this number is likely to be dropped to 4, unless a more targeted means of sampling for a given pixel can be determined.
I'd assume an additional consideration would be the rate at which probes are updated which according to the blog post is currently...
Quotewhenever the number of objects in them changes or the Day Cycle changes, although the update rate is no more than one probe per frame.
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@ral61 Whichever approach you take it's going to require a lot of work if you want something other than a completely static mesh object since it will need to be rigged. You may be better off trying to find an existing mesh head of approximately the right shape then adjusting it with the appearance sliders and creating a custom skin for it?
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Just now, Charlotte Bartlett said:
Also it is its own workflow optimizing mesh properly. It is not really documented for SL products. It took me a lot of help from forum users over the years to figure my custom workflow.
Retopology and creating LODs is certainly a tedious and frustrating art form, it's definitely one stage of the creative process in which I'd like to see AI implemented so I could just drop in a digital sculpt with a few million polygons and type in "make low poly model good now please thank you!" and go make a coffee instead!
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Just now, StarlanderGoods said:
Skybox and sky dome creators will have to figure out how to recreate light inside their builds, or find different means for privacy other than a huge simwide sphere that blocks all the light.
Between that and learning how to use reflection probes they're going to be pretty busy.
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Just now, Ardy Lay said:
So, what will the rest of us see when looking toward someone else's "local mesh"?
According to the article a flat plane for now but later on a proper placeholder object
QuoteThe current "Rez" tool, crates a surrogate prim that will appear to other users (and yourself after a relog) as a small flat panel. In a future update, I plan to have a more concrete and visible placeholder object and ideally a way to rez directly as an attachment too.
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1 hour ago, EliseAnne85 said:
SL was designed for amateurs to have fun almost 20 years ago. But shiny and full bright could use being put into increments and into the purchaser's control, imo.
When you say "shiny and full bright" are you referring to the old legacy shiny and fullbright settings or the newer materials based equivalent?
I think the point Qie and others are trying to make is that, while adding additional detail to a diffuse texture can be used (very effectively) to simulate depth and shininess on objects in certain circumstances, it can't replicate the effect created by using a normal map since it's still just a static diffuse colour texture whereas a normal map is literally bending light in realtime.
To illustrate here's a quick auto-retopo I did of a doodle/practice sculpt I was playing with (it's just under 2000 triangles, so about the same polycount as a sculpted prim and has a blank grey diffuse texture)...
and here is the same object with different lighting...
As you can see the placement and colour of any highlights and shadows on the surface of the object that are simulated by the normal map will change based on the direction and colour of the lighting under which it is viewed and that's just not something that can be achieved with a static diffuse map.
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7 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:
I think Ingrid is smart enough to figure out how to file an AR.
My guess is she tried to trow in a few fire crackers in this forum, that didn't crack that well.A question was asked and subsequently answered, the only reason this thread is 4 pages long is because some folks decided that they needed to express their opinions on something they didn't even see. Had nobody tried to offer their opinion on an incident they didn't witness or have any specific information about and had instead stayed on topic by answering the question asked in the OP then there would be no drama at all.
Honestly, the only drama in this thread has been created by those insisting that this thread is about inciting drama... and the reason these so-called "firecrackers" didn't crack that well is because they are a figment of your imagination!
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15 minutes ago, Rick Daylight said:
I don't think many creators even know they exist, seriously.
I've seen quite a few items where the specular colour map seems to just be a greyscale specularity map rather than a 32 bit texture, which would certainly explain why some objects can appear "blown out" at times since the purpose of the 32 bit specular map is that the first 24 bits (i.e. the RGB channels) modify the colour of the reflected light while the specular exponent is controlled by the 8 bit alpha channel (eta: of the normal map).
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1 minute ago, EliseAnne85 said:
That sounds like not such a horrible idea. However, with some of the textures I make I don't even need AML, as one texture looks like AML but it's only one texture. Bump and shiny are baked with the main texture all into one texture not three. If I am making progress with this, doesn't LL think others will as well? Trompe L'oiel, as I said, is something artists have been working with for centuries - making a 2D flat surface have 3D aspects to it but it's still one texture or one canvas as in the past but parts look or give the illusion of 3D. Three maps is a lot to work with. And, the bump and shiny together - meh. Shiny needs increments for each individual buyer of furniture in the modify, imo.
While baking lighting into a diffuse texture to simulate depth and reflection/specularity can yield exceptional results it just doesn't produce the same results as normal maps when viewed with dynamic lighting. I'll agree that the "shiny" part of the equation is lacking, although if the object your dealing with is modifiable you can usually tweak the specularity/environment settings to tone things down a little.
I suspect part of the problem is that some creators aren't utilizing the materials system to it's fullest by including the specular exponent and environment intensity maps in the alpha channel of the normal and specular maps (which can have a dramatic effect on the end results), however the much larger problem is SL's environment map is truly awful which is why they're also working on reflection probes in order to replace the default environment map with something that doesn't look like a background for a 1980s handheld video game.
As someone with a relatively low-end GPU I must admit it's going to be a rough transition if they remove the option to use forward rendering but personally, as a creator, I'm pretty happy about the decision since it will make a huge difference to the amount of work involved in creating things for SL if I didn't have to accommodate non-ALM users.
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11 minutes ago, Seicher Rae said:
I wish the OP had clearly stated IN the OP that the avatar in question was doing sexual things in public in a store. As the OP was written, my hackles went up a bit because all that was described was a "young" looking avatar being out and about. For once I decided to read the whole thread (or close to it) before responding. Oh. More information later. OK. Then, I don't understand the question of the OP. If you know it is a AR-able thing, you just... AR it. Was the the question about what button to push? (That was also answered.)
As far as pushing buttons go, as the OP was written it was sure to get a lot of folks going.
It certainly would have made this thread a lot simpler (and shorter) if the nature of the incident had been made clear from the outset, and I must admit I would have raised an eyebrow at the seemingly salacious nature of the OP were it not for the fact that I've "known" Ingrid for many years and although we've only ever spoken a few times in world (on my original avi) I've seen her participate on many iterations of these forums so I know that inflammatory posts and inciting chaos really aren't her style!
Honestly I don't think it's unreasonable to ask if there are any specific additional steps that need to be taken when reporting this type of incident, given the seriousness of the offense perhaps LL should be handling them a little differently?
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Just now, Love Zhaoying said:
I think it would help if n00bs understood their purchases do NOT have to look like a pile of sticks, even if they are NOT using the highest LOD setting. I can see people assuming if something looks like garbage, "that's just how Second Life is".
That's just the burden we bear for living in a world of entirely user-generated content, mesh may have amplified it a little but SL has always had to deal with the fallout from being the digital equivalent of a patchwork quilt being worked on by thousands of people all with wildly disparate visions and ideas.
I guess at most all a new user needs to know is the basics of how mesh works to explain why a sofa or table suddenly changes to some weird spikey abstract sculpture once you get more than a few meters away from it and that their options are to either avoid buying/using content that does that or tweak their settings which may have a detrimental effect on performance and their hardware.
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4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Like MOAP!
And TOS!
Anyway, dragging this thread kicking and screaming back on topic, a new user doesn't need to know all that much about LOD beyond what the acronym stands for, and that the term gets used (and misappropriated) for a variety of different things like the individual meshes of decreasing complexity that are used to create mesh objects in SL, the object complexity settings in the viewer and sometimes as a way to describe the "quality" of a particular mesh object.
Giving a newbie any more specific information would probably be a little overwhelming unless they're expressing an interest in creating mesh or are specifically asking about tweaking their object complexity settings (in which case just tell them to try it and see but maybe include a friendly warning that it may potentially cause a drop in frame rates and increased gpu usage).
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2 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Lard / Lord / LOD!
FIFY, we have to capitalize every letter, otherwise people may not realise just how important LOD is!
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3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Isn't LOD one of Superman's enemies, or is it the villain in the new Thor movie?
Yes! Both!! LOD is everything... in LOD we trust!
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29 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:
I blame it all on the new forum policy. What else is there to get indignant over except unimportant SL things? But hey, at least it basically stayed on topic (LOD) even if it veered off of the main question about what to tell noobs. I'd give it a C+.
To be fair, it didn't veer all that far, it just turned from a discussion on what to tell noobs about LODs into an argument about what not to tell them. 🤣
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1 minute ago, CaithLynnSayes said:
Ok, I didn't catch that one. Fair point. In that case you should AR said account(s) but in my defense, OP's initial post didn't mention anything that could indicate ***** of that nature.
My point also still stands though.
I think there's been so many threads of varying tone orbiting this topic over the years that everyone tends to get a little skittish whenever the subject is mentioned, so it's understandable that some people may jump to erroneous conclusions and assume the thread is just a continuation of past discourse.
As has been pointed out already the process of filing an AR for this type of incident is essentially the same as any other. Take screenshots, list names and times and any facts that are pertinent, that's pretty much all you need to do.
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21 minutes ago, CaithLynnSayes said:
Ok, hold the phone for just a hot second here. There is not a lot of context here. Other then OP saying they were in "a store" and "looked at a profile" of a short looking female avatar... What am i missing? Oh yeah, context.. What store was it? Was the avatar doing the pixel boom boom, was is dressed in a provocatieve manner?
1 hour ago, Ingrid Ingersoll said:Like I said the avatar looked like a pre teen or teen, I'll spare everyone the details of what they were doing.
The implication seems to be that what they were doing would be against TOS if said avatar is meant to be a representation of a pre-teen or young teen. Sharing the exact details of the incident or the location at which it occurred probably isn't necessary.
I think the OP is simply asking how to report such incidents, rather than asking for opinions on whether any rules were actually violated (after all that's for LL to decide, not us).
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17 minutes ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:
How the F did we get from a sensible discussion of LOD levels in objects, LOD settings in the viewer and how they interact to dramallama-ing about system capacity?
Simply put, even a complex explanation of LOD models in objects and LOD settings in the viewer would only take up about a half a page (a page at most if you allow for questions/dissenting opinions) but this thread is 4 pages long so folks have to do something to fill up all that extra space!
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Did AI fix art and when will we see it being used for Creation in secondlife.
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
I'm starting to reconsider my position on AI generated images not being art, these seem like very expressive pieces that appear to be a commentary on the average non-residents perception of SLs graphical capabilities.