Biggay Koray

I literally started learning opengl just a few months ago. To put something in perspective, just to render a single triangle in opengl takes maybe 100 lines of code. To render a triangle in vulkan usually takes 500+ lines of code. So nooo.

Just a mild poke. https://i.gyazo.com/75df3048684a095ab5d2b6a8eb3957d3.mp4 https://i.gyazo.com/462d2db1effc304b09b0adfc9614ed5b.mp4 I have been reading about image based lighting and split sum approximations used for certain lighting models. I managed to add Second Life's pre integrated indirect lighting to my reflectance model. As a side note, this whole project has kind of ballooned, and I have been working on my own fork of Firestorm. Currently my goal is to gut anything pre opengl 4.0 and move towards a more modern pipeline, current testing has shown promising results. I really would like to add some sort of a global illumination system back in, like bouncy light and the baked gi lightmaps that second life had years ago. However, I am intrigued by the results of screen space directional occlusion to achieve radiosity. Additionally, ive been working on trying to sort out and modernize the shaders using layout qualifiers to make them more deterministic, full optimization passes utilizing fused multiply add functions, and I have gutted anything that looks for fixed function checks at the moment. Im hoping to fix up the way the current transformation matrices are handled because oh man is it god awful.

This. I didn't even know what to think when I saw them doing shiny fragment calculation in their vertex shaders. Additionally, the Lindens also seem insistent on supporting 16 year old hardware and are still doing opengl checks for below 3.0 in llgl.cpp. Even their hardware query for vram, opengl version, and device driver stuff is still handled like its 2002. Plus there are snippets of code for ATI compatibility floating around, its ludicrous their gpus haven't existed for 15 years. Frankly, if people are running 15 year old gpus, they likely are not the ones spending money on the game. Linden Labs needs to get a grip and up the min opengl spec to at least to 3.3 or 4. As a side note, I've seen your work in firestorm. Nice.

It seems to be. I just think the way its explained is a bit technical for the layman lol. I really wish they would add some pictures of how to implement the extra alpha channels in photoshop or something using the color channels, as that would probably help a lot of people. One of my jobs when I was working at a tech company was doing technical writing and documentation, and man oh man, they need to hire some interns or something at Linden Labs and just get them to document stuff. Hint hint, im available Linden Labs, as long as the pay is decent for part time work!

Firstly, the UE4 devs looked at the Disney BRDF but nowhere did they implement it, and I can provide proof of such in the form of the Siggraph paper that they wrote about the subject. That said, while the Disney BRDF is more commonly used overall, it is used in a lot more applications like visualization and real time rendering out side of games. In regard to the industry standard comment, I was speaking with respect to modern game engines, as Second Life is a game not a 3D modelling rendering engine being run on an expensive workstation card. You will find that implementing subsurface scattering, anisotropy, clearcoat, and sheen which the UE4 devs completely passed up on, is overkill for most games and what they end up with is something closer to the aforementioned Cook Torrance. Moreover, if you want to look at Guerilla Games, Frostbite, and yes Unity you will find many using something a lot like Cook Torrance there too. I can provide papers on the subject if you would like. As a tid bit, my borked environmental reflections using some jury rigged image based lighting is actually modified from the stuff talked about in the Unreal Paper, and my other goto for resources have been LearnOpenGL, Realtime Rendering Fourth Edition, Physically Based Shader Development in Unity, and Physically Based Rendering from Theory to Implementation.

So, hello everyone. I have been mucking around with Second Life lighting's model, and I thought I would share some of my results. Current Iteration of Cook Torrance Physically Based BRDF Video of it in Action PBR rock texture straight from some website with scan data into sl. Video of an older Revision My goal has been slowly working towards unraveling the demon that is the rendering engine and attempting to improve what we get out of this beast. Currently, I find it very difficult to produce good looking metals and glass in Second Life due to the abysmal environmental reflections. Additionally, I have noticed that many people do not exploit the additional specular exponent/gloss map that may be encoded in the normal map's alpha channel, so part of my motivation was to raise awareness with this project and really push the limits of what Second Life can do. I have been primarily recoding and modifying the shaders found in the appsettings folder of the client and have managed to port over the lighting model used in spotlights, point lights, and environment lighting to use cook torrance, since it is one of the industry's defacto standards nowadays. At the moment, I am still trudging through learning opengl but my current goals are to add support for screen space reflections, screen space directional occlusion; and recycle the diffuse alpha layer when not used for emissive masking or transparency, to add support for displacement maps used for parallax occlusion mapping. For those curious about how this is all implemented: Diffuse is being used for albedo. Specular Alpha/Environmental Reflection intensity is being used for metallic. Normal Alpha/Specular Exponent/Glossiness is being inverted and being used as roughness for the cook torrence brdf. Spec RGB is being mixed with the specular output of the brdf to preserve specular tinting. As of currently, I have not noticed any broken content from these shader changes. Additionally, I have ditched a significant amount of branching statements in my version of the shaders so there is a mild performance uplift.

I am reinvigorated from sleeping and am ready to spit some fire about this here rendering engine. Alright first point there. We already have a deferred lighting engine kind of sort of with advanced lighting. Full bright or shadeless can work in deferred lighting systems just *****ing fine, and already does with advanced lighting on, which as previously stated, is a franken hybrid deferred system. Nearly every major game engine has been doing this just fine for years - see unlit shaders in Unreal and Unity or light path shadeless materials in Blender. Traditionally, full bright materials are usually considered "emissive" without lighting other objects and appear unshaded. This can either be done via a light path check using a ray and the current camera position before shaders are calculated, or if you want to get really lazy, by making the object emissive like a standard glow object and cranking down the funky bias and fuzzy glow effect around it. If you want to get really basic, have a default fallback shader that is unlit and just applies a uniform amount of light to every pixel that is visible in the current frame on a full bright object. All of this could be implemented without breaking the current full bright content in the game and likely is to some degree already - would need to look at the source some more. Again, this is one of the reasons why fully deferred systems can be highly advantageous as they can be very scalable, as after your geometry fetch, the amount of shaders and data you need to fetch and move can be highly attenuated and threaded accordingly. Don't give me this argument that people are too dumb to figure out how to light a scene. If I can explain to a biology major who has never worked with lighting nodes before, let alone a game engine, what, when, and how lighting nodes are used in UE4, the same can apply to Second Life. A big reason Second Life's lighting and scene setup is so horrible is due to the painful user experience and bad practices that comes from using and interacting with the game. People simply don't know what to learn or don't fully comprehend the effects of their actions, and as much as I love Torley and his cheerful videos, this game needs much better documentation, I think the UE4 dev docs would be a good place to start for inspiration. Additionally, a stronger emphasis should be placed on rewarding good content creation practices and explaining in world content creation and manipulation in as many ways as possible - not all people coming to this game are highly technical or possess computer savvy backgrounds and they need context. (Don't get me *****ing started on coders or engineers who cant write instructions for regular human beings or add some *****ing pictures. The amount of amazing CS students and engineers I have met that cant make a pitch to a VC or explain their ***** to a regular layman is maddening. The budding cognitive scientist in me is screaming embrace multi aptness and elegance.) Pfew, alright backwards compatibility and sculpts. Dont give me this horse *****. It is costing their company more money with server and bandwidth upkeep costs. Change land impact and innovate a little. Hell, you are in god damn California, grab some interns and pay them in pizzas or something or grab some bored 80s hot shots that were fired over their age. (I literally got a job at a quantum computing lab once by breaking into it and walking into the directors office and asking for a position, and then my mother began dying, I was stressed as ***** at school, and then I tried to kill myself - have some courage. If someone tells you its impossible or has too many got yous ask them why and keep asking them why?) Here's some ideas: Do some data mining and get a sense of how complex and texture heavy something should be with respect to its size in the game world. (Both from a hardware and a desired fidelity standpoint.) Punish or "encourage" content creators to attempt to adhere to this. (Favoured advertisement and promotion, reduced land impact, or some exclusive features or bells and whistles) Look into some kind of dynamic cache management that along with the current mipmapping techniques, can generate and store lower res stuff locally and pull it first so the engine has to work a little less. Geometry Instancing! (Not sure if this exists already but this could be huge for sim surrounds and highly tileable and repeating geometry) Embrace heterogeneous computing. This game is data heavy and dynamic as hell. Some form of virtual memory system or the ability to swap ***** more efficiently back and forth between the cpu or gpu or use both to varying degrees can make a big difference. If I were to make a case for Vulkan, this would be one of the big reasons as opencl and opencl like mixed computing can be done much more readily within it. Depending on load, whats going on in the sim, and hardware availability, preference could be given to whatever processor is fastest and most appropriate for the task or is available. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SOME BETTER POST PROCESSING, THROW SOME SHARPENING FILTERS OR SOMETHING IN THERE OR A FEW LIGHT WEIGHT AND SCALABLE IMAGE PROCESSING HEURISTICS (If people can click a button to make something look sharper or better, they will likely do that over adding more geometry or adding more resolution to their textures, especially if they are punished for doing so.) Better and more procedural content. Take a look at what nodes can do in UE4 or Substance Designer. (This can extend beyond textures and can be combined with ***** like geometry instancing.)

PBR could be doable but I would really really emphasize they move to a fully fledged deferred rendering engine and ditch the legacy crap. Also openGL is hardly dead, and though vulkan would be a huge improvement, they would likely have to up the min system spec considerably and porting from opengl to Vulkan is not trivial. The last time i peeked over the rendering code, they were still using a ton of early ass opengl crap that they extended with gl arb calls to maintain backwards compatibility. Also to clarify, PBR materials are more than just adding more texture channels as part of the shaders are reworked to handle energy preservation approximations which factors into specular hightlights, fresnel, IOR, etc. Additionally, it looks like this was started or kind of attempted with the way parts of the environmental shading system and time of day was implemented, at least if I'm understanding things correctly. The other thing to take into account, is that one need not be limited by the texture channels strictly provided by conventional PBR workflows, and you can implement stuff like parallax occlusion mapping, subsurface scattering, etc. Almost all modern day triple A game engines use custom spun PBR rendering engines with extra perks thrown in like fancy subsurface scattering for skin and translucency or parallax and height info for fancy depth details. An example of PBR workflow taken to 11 in UE4 without ray tracing. Blender PBR realtime engine. General Rant Time About the Engine A big gripe of mine is how a lot of assets are handled which seem to encourage poor content design practices and likely cost LL a good chunk of change. From a data storage and streaming standpoint, they are punishing players for using a ton of geometry which is relatively inexpensive even by today's standards compared to no penalty for plastering 1k texture maps over everything. Then they turn around and make geometry mandatory that usually entails some extra either colour data or preassigned textures which players seldom remove. This makes me shake my head for several reasons when compared to a modern day graphics engines or something that handles lots of streamed data - those being: 1. PNG's are typically on the order of magnitude of several megabytes for 1k maps compared to a few dozen kilobytes for meshes, yet people are punished with land impact based primarily on geometry count rather than VRAM usage. This is puzzling to me since it ends up being more expensive for LL, and can result in people going full retard and producing content with preferably lower resolution meshes, though not always, that can still end up having ridiculously sized textures on them. (Yes modern GPUs have more vram on them, but I will get back to this.) 2. With the above point in mind, LL partially encourages this behavior by having a single UV channel which results in people prebaking lighting into their diffuse textures that they want to look pretty so they use huge resolutions. To avoid this, modern engines use tillable, procedural, and conventional texture solutions in the first UV channel and then a secondary UV channel for lower resolution lightmapped data when its needed. Though you increase the texture calls by using this approach, you are still streaming and loading less data into the gpu, and if people get clever with their light mapping techniques or texture tiling methods, you can still optimize down some of the additional texture calls. 3. Alright getting to VRam usage and people with thicc boi HBM and GGDR6 video cards. Yes, modern day GPUs can handle more textures, however by having to stream or decompress all these damn things, especially if you are sim hopping or people are loading in, you are introducing a bottleneck into the render pipeline. The textures first have to be downloaded, decompressed, and then sent to the graphics processor. That is a lot of god damn waiting and intermediary steps, and the juicier your textures are, the more time you are going to end up having to wait. Additionally, there has to be some kind of scheduling or polling system that checks or notifies the client when there is new content to load which also slows crap down. Now before all the smart asses with fast internet connections attack me, I will clarify that every draw call, every intermediary step, and every texture that has to load is going to have an impact on frame time, and render engines really dont give a rat's ass if you have gigabit internet when they need to go and fetch something, because every millisecond or fraction of a millisecond counts. - Dont believe me? Go load up Rage and go see how mega textures turned out in their first incarnation, and now imagine that for a more dynamic environment. 4. We need to move to a fully deferred lighting engine and ditch this legacy ***** once and for all. There is so much prebaked bull***** in this game that tries to emulate richer and more complex lighting environments and it drives me god damn crazy because everybody wants to combine that ***** into 1k diffuse maps or alphas all over the place. What does a deferred lighting system do? Well it allows you to have ass loads more lighting sources, especially static ones which could totally be implemented along with the dynamic ones, that get calculated after your geometry data is loaded for the shaders. This allows you to basically only care about what geometry is on screen and only do the lighting calculations necessary for what you as the player would actually see, and the engine can ignore all that other bull***** - from what I could understand about the current engine, SL kind of does this already but its half baked. This would also dramatically reduce dev time because you wouldn't have to be maintaining more or less two render engines. 5. LL needs to not be afraid of *****ing breaking some functionality. Day and night cycle and environmental effects? ***** it. Focus on one god damn thing and do it well. Looking at this code is insane. I have sat down with notebooks and *****ing dependency chart graphing tools, and I still cant fully figure out this *****ing mess from where it starts or ends. Get us a stripped down client with just a simple skybox, some geometry, and some textures to put on your geometry. Build up your engine from there. 6. Get rid of sculpts and figure out a way to convert the preexisting ones to mesh. If someone has managed to convert prims which I suspect are some freaky BSP thing to mesh, then there should be a way to retroactively convert all those sculpt maps to mesh - go grab Moy or something. It will save you storage on your servers and reduce the amount of insanity that the client has to handle. You could then merge all that crap into the current existing system that handles conventional mesh and streamline the engine a bit. - Less ***** to maintain and worry about and easier to improve. 7. Decals and nodes. Now, I can see why lighting and particles are connected to objects in world for obvious reasons like script control, dynamic stuff, etc. However, especially in the case of lighting, having this be the only option is *****ing dumb. Lets break down what it takes for a player to place a static light in a scene: Hmm I want a light source here. I need to res an object: which contains positional data, likely colour and texture data because I'm lazy or have no idea what I'm doing, and data specifying who it belongs to and permissions. Note* We have several vectors and possibly megabytes worth of array data here for something that might not even be visible. - This is god damn insane. I now need to choose what kind of light I will have, be it projector or standard, and all of the properties. More vectors and and a potential array. Now I ask, if the person owns the sim or has some kind of elevated land editing permission, why do they need to waste so much damn data for a static object? All they need is position, permissions and ownership, and properties of the light source. Same god damn thing applies for particle effects or decals which are usually implemented as alphas on prims that waste unnecessary geometry and texture calls. LL could save so much additional processing, bandwidth, and boost performance a great deal by implementing some kind of empties or node system for crap like this. This could also have the added benefit for things like reflection map capture sources or cube maps down the line, as well as simple in world scripts and sensors that dont need geometry. I am going to stop here because I have stomach flu or something, and I need to rest, but I could continue. Disclaimer I am not an expert and have limited graphics programming experience. In fact, I am a huge nooby, and my *****ing C is rusty as *****. However, I may have had the pleasure of working for a certain company involved heavily in games and graphics for a year very very recently and perhaps witnessed how development, testing, and optimization worked for applications ranging from games to 3D suites to self driving cars. Although, I commend Linden Labs for the amazing work they have done and how amazing this crazy ass game is, the rendering system needs some serious love. Really map the thing out. - Figure out how it works Cut down as much unnecessary crap as possible and streamline. - Make your life easier Begin building from there. - Start fixing and improving it. (Side grumbles about possible opencl or gpu accelerated particles and multi threading)

The same content creators that fill their products full of unnecessarily large textures, geometry, and bloated scripts in a game that penalizes people more for geometry count rather than texture data which is orders of magnitude more expensive to store and stream? The same content creators that all rehash work by either Linden Labs or give up and say that the rendering engine is too big and scary and the code too obfuscated? Anyways, you can get ray tracing working with Second Life its just a bit of a pain in the ass and is limited to depth buffer/screen space effects for the moment, at least with ReShade. https://i.gyazo.com/c918495088980042e9de2c70fe974c19.mp4 https://i.gyazo.com/ae671903e97e5ca0a3fabbe5598a936c.mp4 https://i.gyazo.com/f3a1a73bdd075bd7df8b48b80e97263c.mp4 https://i.gyazo.com/418304ccea6490f3988578e0fdd5018e.mp4 I was exploring the idea of allowing for overriding of the dynamically generated cubemap that windlight settings create that is later sampled by the environmental reflection engine in SL. Managed to ***** up the sampling and texture scaling on it so it ended up pulling from garbage areas of memory. My plan of attack was going to revolve around using stbimage and shunting in a custom cubemap for the environmental reflections. I had to give up due to work and school *****. Id imagine it could be possible to sample fullperm textures or uuid's from ingame and then somehow feed that into the engine as well. A kind of cludgy cube map or reflection capture node or something. https://i.gyazo.com/c1a78312b6e96e5f9e4a59827806192c.mp4

Its bin resolved it was just a stupid exporter issue guys and thanks for being tolerant and im sorry for blowing up on here. http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/content-creation/67825-multi-material-mesh-help.html a guy from slu figured it out for me.

already tried this

Thanks for the words of encouragement im not usually this much of an **bleep**. Its just really irritating when you have a really nice model all done and ready and then you cant even figure out how to get the material face id thingy working and are losing hope fast. Ive basicly spent the last 3 days trying to figured this crap out so im sorry everyone for screaming at you and getting rather grouchy.

Heres a bit of clarification of my understanding Ordered in steps 1. Model your object 2. select your object face id's 3. make uvmaps 4.use uvmap templates to design textures for you object 5, once done your textures open them up in the material tool using a blank material and load them up using a bitmap in the diffuse layer 6. Use a multi- subobject material and load in the textures you made for it from the other 2 materials and match them accordlingly to your face id presets and apply to object 7.export by going to file and export as .DAE file format 8.upload into second life and wonder why i cant select just one face instead of the entire thing?

<library_materials> <material id="_02 - Default" name="_02 - Default"> <instance_effect url="#_02 - Default-fx"/> </material> <material id="_03 - Default" name="_03 - Default"> <instance_effect url="#_03 - Default-fx"/> </material> </library_materials> Is basicly what mines coming up with. Furthermore can someone explain to me whether or not i should be using the multi subobject material method or just materials set onto faces?

ive already tried the multi subobject approach even on a plain cube it wont work for me.

just the generic one found in max using the fbx plugin. On top of that all i was asking was for walkthrough of what to do once your done your model. I understand how to model just fine what im not understanding is the material system and the uv mapping system and how to get second life to detect material faces.

Sorry im in a really bad mood and im really frustrated here. I apologize for mouthing off earlier its just I am really confused and pissed off why this isnt working. If possible can anyone give me a step by step with pictures or a video? It would be really apreciated and im sure im not the only one having problems with this.

I was pissed last night and I still am but this is my problem. I need to to be able to have an object in second life made from mesh that has faces that are selectable. Real god damn simple right? I apply the materials to the faces of the object and export it as dae format and I don't give a damn about textures anymore but when I go to load it into second life THE OBJECT STILL HAS ONLY ONE SELECTABLE FACE. What the hell is going on? Now I've had a person send me a dae from blender that has selectable faces in second life. Now when I load that crap into autodesk and I don't do anything to it except export it as an object named something else then the original but the same thing thing happens and I am left with an object with only one selectable face. Now I have tried everything here, I have read nearly every god damn tutorial for this crap, I've practically slayed a god damn dragon here and I cannot get this crap running. Now one more thing if your going to go all grammar nazi on me you can shove those god damn similes, apostrophes, exclamation marks, euphemisms, capitalized letters, metaphors, hyphens, commas, periods, semicolons, and question marks up where it the sun don't shine.

So in other words there is no way to upload all the texture data in the.dae file without chopping it out and doing it separately? What the hell do people do with organic models then? That have like 2000 polygons? Do uw maps at all work coming from 3ds max?

Ok I am seriously frustrated, confused and lost with this. I have a decent low poly of a pedastal that i want to upload with textures but I cannot not seem to figure out how to do this. I have tried to apply the material selection in 3ds max using bitmap and diffuse layers. Now an important note I would like to state here is that I have tried multi sub object materials with id's and i have tried manually selecting each polygon and applying the right material to it but when I go to export it and load it into second life IT HAS NO FREAKING TEXTURES. My goal here is simple I want to upload a mesh into second life with textures from 3ds max but have faces that can still be retextured in game by someone else should they choose to. All help apreciated. Im running 3ds max 2012 service pack 2 and the most recent version of the fbx plugin.