Arduenn Schwartzman

I appreciate all of the replies and they mostly seem to address why Midday looks so black (TL;DR: technical reasons). This is by no means meant as an attack on PBR or Environments or SL. I totally agree that at least from the creators' side it's easier to work with than the old materials. And in many case it's prettier. It has its ups and downs and I'm not against it at all. I want to stress that the circumstances in which I created the first two pictures were pretty simple. It didn't require jumping through hoops: I rezzed a shool house (a single room, 10 x 12 m, with 10 windows in it). I made a plywood box, slightly larger than the house, and turned it into a reflection probe by just checking the reflection probe button and selecting the rectangular option. Nothing else. My graphics settings were as recommended by the viewer (it had shadows on). The main question is still only half addressed. Why is Midday darker than Midnight? Granted, Midday under these circumstances is quite dark, because of the various programming design decisions, (lack of) light sources and math and stuff. But then, by extension, shouldn't Midnight even be darker? But it isn't. Again, probably because of technical reasons. But the buck stops at a concious decision stemming from someone's brain... (apparently) to have a Midnight that's lighter than a Midday, under conditions that are pretty standard, (to my knowledge) easy to reproduce and easy for other people to encounter in a similar fashion. So there's some possibilities: No one knew. This phenomenon just emerged by accident, after a series of developments and I happened to be the first one to notice. I find this hard to believe. I expect at least some other people to sit in a room in SL and toggle between Midday and Midnight and think: hmm, that's odd. Others already noticed too but didn't care too much, because there's plenty of solutions, Enviromnent settings to choose from, light sources to ad, to make it better. Easy fix and life goes on. This is the pragmatic approach, and for most things in life is to be applauded. These people are better than me. Someone did notice and actually did care and made an extra Midday, 'Midday (Legacy)', which seems to me brand new and not legacy at all. But maybe I'm wrong and it's Midday that's new. Nonetheless, if you go back to the first five pictures in this thread, four out of five Environment settings are consistent with each other: Midnight, Sunrise, Midday (Legacy), and Sunset. Maybe then the naming in the menu was just inconsistent and all these four all should have the label (Legacy). Or maybe Midday (Legacy) should be called Midday, and the other Midday should be called Midday (No Ambiance). In the end, this 'No Ambiance' Midday sits there prominently in the menu bar at the top of our screens, for some reason. It's weird and it's unintuitive and ugly as sin and confusing to me and I wonder why it even exists.

[Snip - wrong thread]

That's not true. In the first two pictures: I made a really simple probe and I set to Midday. I did not touch the Ambiance. Stop misinterpreting/misrepreseting things here and twisting my words. For me you're going on ignore. Bye.

So, how does Midday work then, and why is it not an abomination? Why did I not step into dog poo until yesterday, while dogs have been pooping on the streets for millenia? Until Midday is gone from the menu? Where in this entire threat and I giving 'the work' so little chance?

Ok, let me rephrase the question then: why does an abomination as Midday have such a prominent place in the top menu bar?

Aren't you confusing creators with consumers here? Cosumers aren't trying to create anything, just rez stuff. And you can count on it that many have no clue what an environment even is, let alone going to the trouble of asking land owners to change it, potentially to no avail. Point in case: just teleport around to some decently-visited sims. How many times did you have to adjust your environment because the shared environments were outright horrible? (I'm just permanently using my own.) Just talking about the past decade and a half here. I'm not againt PBR at all. I'm just pointing out some really weird stuff here that should obviously be addressed/improved. I'm also for not having to ask consumers to do, a, b, c to z in order to make my product look good. If, as a newb, I saw five environments in the menu, Sunrise, Midday, Midday Legacy, Sunset, Midnight, my first pick would be Midday, because it's the lightest (one would expect) and Legacy sounds like some old sh**. Only to discover that these words in the menu do not mean what I think they mean.

(Yes, yes, that's not Aztecs, but Incas, you nitpickers.)

That's asking a lot of consumers for whom everything should look at least decent out of the box.

That's completely the opposite to what I thought ambiance was. Zero ambiance = only light from the light sources, full ambiance, also all the light from 'everything else' (sky, walls, etc - some whatever image rendering trickery). Like in these cases for EEP and projection:

This is with the reflection probe not crossing the walls (and a silver sphere added for more shiny):

Yes

So, yet again, up is down and 'legacy'' is 'newly invented'?

And just to add to the confusion with another 'left is right' example, here are two snapshots taken with the building's reflection probe set to Ambiance 0 and 1. Why is Ambiance 1 darker than Ambiance 0? (This is in my own fancyschmancy EEP environment with the ambient color set to really bright, btw.)

Just to make the picture a little more complete, here are also the Sunrise, Midday (Legacy), and Sunset versions:

George Orwell wrote in his 1948 novel 1984: "War is piece, freedom is slavery, ingnorance is strength. I get some very 'ignorance is strength' vibes about environmental settings. Using the latest official SL viewer with everything shiny and reflective, shadows enabled, the whole shebang [edit] and the classroom has a dedicated reflection probe, why the bleep is Midday darker than Midnight?

Wut, are you browsing in Lynx on a VT100 terminal?

Folks, 99% of your bad frame rates is because you surround yourselves with oodles of unoptimized mesh made by (mostly) self-taught content creators. Our world, our imaginations, remember? Because of this, frame rates in SL will always be at the edge of the tolerable, no matter how good or bad the tech is. It's a law of nature. Also, PBR(-like) rendering with reflections has been around since the Playstation 2 in the very early 2000s. It's 'ouwe meuk', as we say in Dutch. Don't blame PBR, blame society.

Yes please. Much needed, to allow detection of projectiles that are rezzed by vehicles that are not owned by the driver/shooter. Since on_rez has a delay of 2 seconds now, projectiles currently don't have the time to rename themselves or otherwise adopt a unique source identifier other than the owner.

Simply showing and hiding faces that have a PBR material set to them is kinda insane. You need to apply ten different parameters (eleven including the link number) to just show or hide a piece of mesh: list uGetClawAlphaParams(integer Face,float Alpha){ return [ PRIM_GLTF_BASE_COLOR,Face,CLAWS, <1,1,0>,<0,0,0>,0,<1,1,1>,Alpha, PRIM_GLTF_ALPHA_MODE_MASK,.5,FALSE ]; }

It's both. I used both baked specular maps and Blinn-Phong specular maps. This is not what everyone does, just me and only a few other creators that I know of. It's a matter of taste. I tend to think it just gives the object a little bit more depth and dynamic color range. I have even been experimenting with this while making PBR materials. There's a slight hint of baked speculars in the baseColor maps there too, but in the example in the video much less profoundly than in the Blinn-Phong version.

Pop quiz: can you tell which is the old materials (Blinn-Phong) and which is the new (PBR)?

PBR materials do not differ a lot from Blinn-Phong ('classic') materials at all. The differences are very subtle. With all respect for the skillfully-made video and the expert decorations, they do not showcase disctinct PBR features. The footage could have easily been mistaken for one made with an old viewer, showing old materials The video mostly shows wet cobblestones 'reflecting' very diffuse, monochromatic red, white, and blue point lights. This can all be achieved with classic materials and an older viewer just as well. The biggest change is the viewer (and the server making reflection probes). Making PBR materials as opposed to classic materials, on the other hand, is somewhat overrated. PBR materials offer separation of roughness metallic and emission mapping, but that's really all. I estimate you can make 90% of all objects in SL look the same with Blinn-Phong materials as you can with PBR materials. In most cases, all your old 'classic' Blinn-Phong items will reflect details just as nicely in de new PBR world. My real fear #1. PBR can look great, PBR can look crappy. It depends more than ever on the surroundings. There's a real danger that people will think objects with PBR materials look crappy and put the blame on PBR tech in general, or because the creator textured it badly, whereas the real reason may very well be their own bad environment. My real fear #2. Streaming cost. PBR materials double the amount of texture data that needs to be transfered from the asset servers to your computer (triple, if you include backwards-compatible classic texturing). Right now, if I cam around further away from and then back nearby my avatar again, I see the viewer 'forget' a lot of textures from nearby objects, as if they aren't properly chached on my local drive. Maybe that's just a bug that will be addressed in future updates. For now, for me, PBR means lot of waiting while staring at blurry objects. That's not to say I don't welcome our new PBR overlord. I'm in the middle of a PBR workflow transition myself right now and I love all this shiny new stuff.

Is everyone in IM?

Peak genealogy has been reached. The only names that matter have already been released: UwU, Pancake, Waffle. It is inevitable that everything from here will go downhill.

1. You're going to miss out on a lot of gifts with potentially some good ones. I haven't seen any gift box that actually displays its content on a preview picture on that box in my entire Second Life yet. 2. That indicates that there's too many gifts to handle in SL, so each gift has become devaluated due to the sheer number. Kinda like the value of gold dropping if someone would stumble upon a gold vein the size of an asteroid.