Fluffy Sharkfin

For most textures, especially those with lots of straight edges and geometric shapes like bricks/tiles/fencing, you'll achieve far better results if you create your own height map and then generate a normal map from that. It can sometimes help to then generate a second normal map based on the luminance value of the diffuse, add it as a new layer and then use a mask to selectively add details from it to your hand made normal map but relying purely on a normal map derived from the luminance values of the base texture will rarely yield good or even acceptable results.

OR you can just hand paint your normal maps from scratch in Photoshop like this guy did... (and yes he apparently didn't even bother painting a height map and using a filter to convert it to a normal map but chose to create the entire normal map by hand) I personally wouldn't recommend it, if you're trying to drive yourself insane there are probably easier and less painful ways to do so.

When adding new features it makes sense to at least try and conform to industry standards, which are usually most prevalent in (and sometimes even defined by) the current most popular apps, which due to their popularity are almost always expensive (in other words, it's a coincidence not a conspiracy). In the case of both mesh and PBR neither feature is in any way "locked" to specific apps, any software that supports PBR can be used to generate materials for SL in the same way that any 3D app can be used to create mesh.

I doubt new users care who created the world any more than they care about the individual designers and developers responsible for creating whatever game they buy next, they're probably more concerned with how it looks. Substance Painter is great for game developers and production studios, especially where there's a need to maintain continuity while texturing a large number of assets, however you also need to learn to use Substance Designer (which is the app used to create materials/substances) otherwise you're limited to pre-existing materials available in the PBR library and essentially texturing becomes a matter of dragging and dropping presets, masking and layering and the tweaking of a seemingly endless number of sliders. I'd definitely recommend 3DCoat Textura to anyone wanting to work with PBR materials, especially if they want to do any hand painting and/or have experience with Photoshop since there are a lot of similarities between the two in terms of features and workflow (also at €95 for a full license, 6 x €20 payments for rent to own or €10 a month subscription the price is far more reasonable). There are other alternatives to Substance Painter so if 3D Coat doesn't appeal you could always try something like ArmorPaint or Quixel Mixer

Sadly, as much as I miss EQ Landmark, converting the entire virtual world of SL to voxels is unfeasible. Some type of "local voxel editor" that can bake the results into a set of auto-generated LOD models using algorithms like Marching Cubes or Surface Nets for organic models or simple cubes for hard surface modeling would be a slightly more realistic (but still equally unlikely) proposition.

Flexi-prims can be pretty effective for some stuff, but I wouldn't trade my favourite mesh hair for all the flexi-hair on the asset server! Anyway, since LI calculations don't impact attached objects it's not like the proposed changes would have allowed you to wear ten times as much flexi-hair.

Because I'm mean and I don't want people to have nice things! ...and also because flexi-prims have far more impact on performance than regular prims so allowing people to potentially rez 10x as many would be a really bad idea.

Sounds good (as long as it doesn't apply to any linkset containing flexi-prims). Making prims more useful and encouraging people to make better use of them may even improve the visual quality of SL since at least prims don't devolve into random floating triangles at lower LODs. I still say that if LL really want to revitalize in-world creativity they should be looking into implementing voxels for both building and terraforming... ...but since that's never going to happen I guess I'd take cheaper prims as a consolation prize.

Yeah... I was kidding! Reflection probes will be automatically placed in the region by default so essentially your avatar should always be in range of a reflection probe which is why, as Jenna pointed out above, wearable reflection probes aren't needed.

Outrageous! LL should double the attachment points so that we can wear a probe for each attachment! What if I were standing with one foot in one room and the other foot in another room while holding my hands out of a window and sticking my head in the refrigerator, if I can't have a probe for every shiny thing I'm wearing it's going to ruin "muh immershunz"! 😭

You're right in principle but the problem is that evidence can be easily fabricated. We're at a point where even RL images, audio and video can be easily generated and it would take a digital forensics expert to spot any discrepancy and, by comparison, faking "SL evidence" like chat logs and screenshots, etc. is childsplay. When presented with two conflicting sets of evidence and no way to ascertain the validity of any of it (short of LL getting involved and officially verifying the contents of chat logs, etc. which will never happen) the verdict will undoubtedly rest on which of the two parties garners more sympathy, in other words it will be a popularity contest with no prize for the winner and a witch hunt for the runner up.

I must admit I'm curious to see how LL would word the TOS amendment if they adopted this idea. What's a polite and non-controversial way of saying "By distributing any of your creations in Second Life you are automatically agreeing to provide ongoing support in perpetuity and failure to do so in a timely manner may result in the loss of any rights you may have to any intellectual property hosted on the platform."? 🤔 I'm also curious as to what the general reaction from SL content creators would be, I suspect it would make for a lively few days on the forums!

I'm sorry if I seem a little unwavering in my stance but I just don't see how a creator no longer being around should somehow grant their customers more rights than they were granted when they originally bought the product(s). That would be the equivalent of me saying that because I paid Autodesk $800 for a commercial license for Sketchbook Designer shortly before they discontinued it and announced there would be no further updates or support they should provide me with the full source code and allow me to do whatever I like with it. The reality is that the software still works and I can continue to use it for as long as I have an operating system which supports it, I have the same rights regarding use of the software that I had when I purchased it, just as I would have if they'd continued supporting the product. I will admit that my perspective regarding this issue is quite likely skewed by the fact that I'm relatively well-versed in both scripting and 3D modelling (along with most other forms of SL content creation) to the extent that if I really want something badly enough and can't find it for sale then I'm probably capable of creating it myself, so perhaps when content occasionally disappears along with its creator the loss of the content impacts me far less than the loss of its creator.

There's a huge difference between creating something derived from another persons work and outright declaring that another persons work no longer belongs to them and is instead public property. Even in a derivative work the creator can only claim ownership of the additions, changes and new material that they added while ownership of all the original material is retained by the original creator. As for sparking innovation and creativity I'd argue that's more likely to happen if a creator removes popular products from the marketplace leaving an unfilled niche than if those products were made available to everyone for free. Anyway, regardless of whether you try to frame it as wanting to "democratize creativity and/or content" or just whiny content creators crying about "muh copyright" the fact remains that there is no moral grey area when it comes to taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners permission... it's theft, it's wrong and, if that isn't enough of a deterrent for you, it's also illegal!

Cloth simulations look very impressive when running smoothly however put 10 or 20 avatars all using cloth physics together in the same area and your frame rates would most likely be so low that you probably wouldn't even be able to tell that the cloth was moving at all.

Perhaps, but the part where artists work was taken without the artists consent and repurposed in a way which the artist never intended or agreed to seems pretty similar to this idea of claiming a creators work as public property simply because they aren't able to object.

It's interesting how quickly this question about intellectual property rights has spiralled through the topic of whether those rights should be respected or not and into a discussion about whether theft is beneficial or detrimental to the SL economy. In a way it somewhat mirrors the current hot topic of AI art where a bunch of people thought to themselves "hey, there's a ton of cool content on the internet and nobody to stop us from taking it and doing whatever we like with it" and then started slinging around terms like "the democratization of art" to justify their actions when in reality those actions weren't so much motivated by a desire to enrich society and enable creativity as they were fuelled by an attitude of "We don't care who it belongs to, we want it so we should be allowed to have it!"

The benefit would be to the owner of the intellectual property in as much as nobody is stealing their property and distributing it without their consent. The notion that anyone other than the creator/owner of a piece of content should be entitled to a copy of that content simply because the original owner isn't around to protect their intellectual property seems like an excellent way to persuade the few remaining SL creators to delete their inventories and quit SL en masse.

Clearly adopting the same nomenclature as the RL metric system is a source of confusion for many due to the discrepancies between the scale of SL and RL. I propose LL solve this problem by immediately renaming the unit of measurement in SL to more appropriate terms like SLeters, SLentiSLeters and SLiloSLeters, that should clear up any misunderstandings (although we'll probably just end up with threads complaining about mispronunciations instead)!

@EliseAnne85 Perhaps an example will help to clear things up? First I generated a set of PBR maps in Filter Forge using this filter Barrel Generator PBR (I tweaked the roughness & metalness a little to better illustrate the effect) This is how the sphere looks with just the Albedo map If you add the other Surface Property maps (Roughness & Metalness) you can start to see the "shiny" effect on the metal as the light moves around the object if you then add the normal map you can also see the light reflecting off the added Surface Detail as the normal map alters the angle at which it's reflected So, an albedo map will contain all the colours present on a surface, whether those colours represent wood or metal or rust or freckles or strawberry pudding doesn't matter, the other properties such as how polished or rough it is or how much it reflects whats around it are all handled by the roughness and metalness maps.

Technically the "pattern" you're referring to is just a combination of colours so it's essentially the same thing. For example a leopards skin texture consists of a pale cream/yellow colour on the belly ranging to a browny orange colour on the back with black spots of varying strength on different parts of the body and limbs, so all of those colours would appear on the albedo map.

Nope, not even the most miniscule smidgeon of a highlight or shadow! If you're using PBR materials (which you absolutely should be by the time reflection probes are implemented) then your base colour/albedo map should contain no information other than the colour of the objects surface. Your roughness, metalness and ambient occlusion maps alongside the reflection probes and dynamic in-world lighting should be left to take care of all of the rest since it can generate all those highlights, shadows and reflections dynamically based on light and camera angle rather than having them painted onto a static texture. ETA: The above applies to more photorealistic objects, if you're aiming for a more stylized aesthetic then adding fake lighting is almost mandatory since SL doesn't have the custom shaders necessary to simulate the required "cartoony" effect.

Naturally mirrors are the first thing that springs to most peoples mind when they hear the term "reflection probes" but aside from the more obvious and visually striking uses like highly reflective surfaces reflection probes should also go a long way to increasing the overall visual quality of Second Life. Like materials they're another step away from the decades old practice of baking all your lighting and reflections, etc. into a single colour texture and slapping it on some polygons which, along with forward rendering and bad lighting, is one of the main reasons SL often looks so dated. Hopefully once they're introduced we'll finally be able to bid farewell to one of the few remaining excuses people still use for painting static reflections into their base textures because "shiny" won't equal "ugly" in SL anymore.

Essentially you place probes around your build (the viewer also places some default ones) and the probe automatically generates an environment map based on all the stuff within its boundaries (similar to how the 360 snapshot feature works but with a limited draw distance). Anything reflective within the area of a probe will use the environment map generated by that probe for its reflections.