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IvanBenjammin

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Posts posted by IvanBenjammin

  1. Interesting, and puzzling.  The only land I have is my rented homestead, and I can't mess with the terrain there without destroying my store. I wonder if terrain generated from a heightmap vs. one that's sculpted has any impact? The number of textures being blended?

    My guess is that its a performance drain because it has to be dynamic. If anyone with the rights can edit it, and those edits need to be propagated to everyone else, it can't be stored on server in the same way that mesh is. Is it constantly fetching/updating data, and therefore causing a bottleneck?

    I'm so over the fact that residents need to reverse-engineer SL to work these things out...

  2. 17 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

    Let's face it, SL is an ugly, outdated looking virtual world without the Advance Lighting Module enabled and the proper materials. Considering most users have this disabled due to using old computers, creators will use baked textures so their products can look nice for people who have it off. It's true, some people overdo the baked AO, but IMO it looks better than a flat seamless texture with no additional details added.

    Seamless textures work great on large buildings, especially if you add another mesh layer on top of the floors/walls with baked AO.

    However when it comes to smaller objects such as general decor and furniture, I believe baked is the way to go. Older video games did the same due to limitations.

    I'm hoping the Advanced Lighting Module becomes the norm someday soon.

    Its not going to become the norm if the majority of creators continue to produce non-ALM content. :) 

    Older video games used to layer up textures inside their materials, as well as vertex color shading - two things we can't do in SL.

  3. 17 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    When current gen games use 2K and 4K textures, it's frequently as a combined texture for multiple in-world surfaces, or for closeup textures which are used in very limited cases where the overall amount of texture data is reduced.

    Yes, textures get reused as much as possible. But, its about texel density, like was said before, and 10/cm is common (that's 1024 per metre, or 1 per mm). MIP-mapping will take lower resolution versions, depending on the situation. A door might have multiple 2K textures (when accounting for normal/gloss etc), but unless you're right up next to it, only a fraction of that resolution is actually getting computed by the renderer.

    17 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    In first person shooters, the version of a weapon you hold is a much more detailed version of the in-world or third-person version of that same weapon. In Fallout, the pip-boy model you stare at to interact with menus is a much more detailed version of the pip-boy than the one seen on the third person character model.

     

    17 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    For cutscene events, games will sometimes place you in an instanced version of the game map with parts of the world you cannot see in the cut scene entirely cut out so they're not taking up memory, to make room for higher res textures and more detailed models.

    It's typically the same textures, just different MIP levels and mesh LODs being rendered - There's no sense doubling up on what's being stored in RAM. You're correct regarding cutscenes, though usually its the same location in the game space,  just overriding the normal rules of which MIPs and LODs to compute. In linear games, they're often used to purge assets from the previous environment and preload the next.

    MIP-Mapping is used in SL, too, but it's not as efficient because of the downloading/caching issues you mentioned. SL also hamstrings itself with its unrestricted camera. Generally speaking, the more restricted the camera, the easier the job for the artist(s).

    Sorry to be "that guy" and reply point-by-point. I'll concede that its not completely irrelevant what modern games can do, but so many of the tricks and efficiencies can't be used or don't apply to SL, and the potential bottlenecks are different.

    Here, the rules are pretty simple: use texture space efficiently, reuse textures as much as possible, avoid alpha blending as much as possible. Those rules hold true for game development, but there are a bunch more "yes with an if, no with a but..." caveats. 

    • Like 1
  4. On ‎4‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 7:01 PM, Nutria2016 said:

    I'm wondering, modern computers have advanced a lot through these past 10 years. Is it really bad if someone exclusively uses 1k textures for objects such as furniture and decor? In fact, most games today have moved on to 2k textures.

     

    On ‎4‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 8:02 PM, ChinRey said:

    Yes, it is really bad and - ummm... looking at the banner in your signature .... you can not honestly market your items as "High Quality" if that's the way you do it. In 3D modelling for dynamic environments high quality is always all about resource management. Making something that looks great in Second Life is easy. Making something that looks great in Second Life without lagging down everybody's computers - that's the challenge.

    If professionally made games use 2lk - or even 1k - textures, it will only be a few ones for special upfront feature details and, of course, also for several low res images combined into a single file.

    Even more important, a computer game will only use a tiny fraction of the number of textures you typically get in SL. In a crowded SL scene it's not unrealistic to have several thousand textures that need to be loaded at the same time. In a game it's much less than a hundred.

    Well...Current gen games use 2K and 4K textures all the time - its all about texel density as Arton says. You might have several hundred maps in an environment when you account for diffuse/normal/gloss/AO channels. 

    But what current-gen games can do is completely irrelevant to SL :)

     

  5. Isn't SL restricted to 512mb VRAM, or has that changed?

    Also, on the subject of GTA 5: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/  What's going on "behind the scenes" is nothing short of mind-blowing. Goes to show what average PC hardware can do, when fed the right way. 

    Oh, the topic. Yes, Advanced lighting always. I'll make everyone a jellybean before I give up my normal maps.

    • Like 1
  6. SL Materials are all about fakery - they don't simulate realistic light reflectivity, so the best you can hope for in any situation is something that looks mostly correct in most circumstances. 

    So yes, you'll be able to fake it with the right maps, in the right lighting conditions. I would recommend laying hands on some real velvet you can personally examine under different lighting and angles.

  7. 9 hours ago, entity0x said:

    I appreciate your anecdotal opinions as responses, but in general, review sites utilizing star ratings are usually 5 star or 1 star reviews.

    It's either extreme, just go look up some statistics on the internet, and why star ratings are fallacious and pointless, and why many companies including Facebook and YouTube no longer, or do not continue to use such systems.

    Example: 5 star ratings systems are useless

    As for my own 'anecdotal' experience which forms my personal opinion, most ratings I get on products are either 5 star or 1 star as well, with a dash of (5 stars - "i didn't like the color so take away 1 point") style reviews that do nothing to help improve or critique products.

    In the end though, any rating system is pointless if the reviewer doesn't provide context or constructive feedback as to how to improve the product.

    Well, if its on the internet, it must be true :)

    I agree that the review system is flawed, however I would like to suggest that its not the place for constructive feedback and critique. A consumer's role is to buy your product, not give advice on how to improve it. If they do give good feedback, consider it a bonus. 

    • Like 1
  8. I don't export animation, so I can't help with specifics, but in your export options, look for something that swaps axes. Maya's 'up' axis is Y, whereas SL uses Z.

  9. 15 hours ago, anna2358 said:

    I wouldn't call Photoshop  a 'best practice'.  It's got a dominant market position all right, and lots of people don't know anything else - why would you even try anything else when you have shelled out all that loot for an Adobe product?   Adobe is one of those anti-trust oligopoly companies, like Apple and Microsoft, that some of us wouldn't pay a bent nickel to.

    Hey, fair enough - use whatever tools work for you.

  10. 15 hours ago, Klytyna said:

    Experience in games modding and 3d work over the last couple or 3 decades tells me there are very few "standards" in the games industry.

    I've worked with tga's in old games like neverwinter nights (which isnt fussy about compressed vs uncompressed until you start on character portraits, when it throws a wobbler. The IDTech 3 game engine, was also a tga based system, but happily swallows png's as well, its internal shader system even makes virtual tga's at load/run time. However claiming that tga is a 'standard' seems to miss out all those games that settled on .dds format (why anyone would use dds i cannot imagine, especially dds dxt1 which has a lossy compression standard WORSE than the default jpeg settings in Photosnob) or jpg's or custom formats of their own devising. Even second life it's sell, breaks the 'standard' since as far as I remember, it's internal file format is jpeg2000.
     

    TGA is "standard" in the same way that photoshop is "standard". It's not universal, just best practice. Also, we're not talking about internal formats here, we're talking about the format that you, the artist saves your work as. The point of TGA is that its lossless - you want to avoid at all costs feeding a lossy compressed image into a different compression algorithm.

    I repeat, I'm not here to tell you how to work. If you want to use PNGs, fine. If you want to use jpgs, fine. This whole "debate" started because you expressed a negative opinion for a widely used image format - an opinion that apparently stems from the limitations of your tools. Personally, I've never had issue with unwanted compression in my TGAs (I didn't even know that was a thing...), but maybe that's because I use photoshop... 9_9

    • Like 1
  11. 3 hours ago, Klytyna said:

     

    Trust me when you've spent hours trying to get a tga image to work in some application only to discover that the damn thing only works with UN compressed tga, and the 2d image butchery app provided only saves as compressed tga, you'll feel the pain. I'm also interested to hear who you think sets the standard image format for 3d graphics. PNG's are just as common and often more useful, especially for online work. Point is that people get hung up on a certain 'officially unofficial preferred format' that they don't stop to think what format best suits the intended use. Hence "solid stone wall" textures that come with a 'blank' (show all) alpha layer, which in sl automatically makes them 'alpha blend' when applied to a surface, and creates alpha glitch and additional gpu based client lag as the rendering engine tries to figure pixel by damn pixel if you can see whats behind the solid wall, for no damn reason at all other then somebody got all hung up on using a 'pro file format' that they read about in a forum post, and didn't bother to check the damn save options before exporting from their copy of Adumby Photosnob 2d Image Butcher.
     

    Wow, you really don't like photoshop, huh? :D 

    All the problems you describe are user error and/or application limitations, not the fault of the image format. TGA is standard across the game industry because its uncompressed and lossless. It can then be compressed as needed when game files get 'cooked'. PNG is fine if it does what you want - I'm not here to tell you how to work - but they're awkward to work with if you need an alpha channel for something other than transparency. I'm currently working with Unity, and its shader system has inputs for Diffuse/Albedo, 'Metalness' and Gloss (plus other things). If I'm doing a surface that needs to be glossy but isn't metallic, I can use the Diffuse alpha channel for gloss and avoid using another separate map.

  12. 1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

    Targas? Hahahaha... Seriously? tga is a pain to use, the whole thing with compressed vs uncompressed tga's, and never mind the cases where applications claim to make one version but actually make the other.

    Png is a good solid format, but it's biggest problerm is that it supports not only multiple channle configurations (rgb vs rgba) but multiple bit depths, and many image editing or image using applications don't support the whole range of png options.

    As for 'compression artifacts' in images, that does largely depend on the compression level used, 20 odd years have taught me the people who whine loudest about how 'pixelated' jpg's are, are usually those who never learned to change from Adumby Photosnop's default 20% compression.

    Oddly, about 10-12 years back, 3D World magazine did an article about people not knowing the differences between and /or limitations of image formats. They did two copies of a 3k x 3k image, one as a high quality/low compression jpg, the other as the then popular choice of tech illiterate format snobs, TIF. They showed both images on a screen to the format snobs and discovered that... the snobs couldn't tell the damn difference without looking at the filename extension.
     

    TGA is the standard for 3d graphics. What exactly makes them so painful to use?

    Compression artifacts are definitely something to be aware of, and how severe they are is going to depend as much on the image as the compression level.

    TIF is wasted on textures, I agree, but you're definitely going to the notice the difference in print between a compressed JPG and TIF.

    • Like 3
  13. You're preaching to the choir :)

    22 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    Now before you say this goes against maintaining freedom of expression I'm going to cut you off and point out that is flat out false. Rather it would have forced content creators to be more efficient.

    Either performance simply is not a serious issue for LL or...well, it would be insane but the only other explanation is that performance is a priority for LL, one which they have struggled with and thrown obscene amounts of money and manpower at, all while going far out of their way to avoid learning how 3D rendering actually works.

    I'm going to go ahead and say it anyway - it would have limited freedom of expression from their point of view. I don't understand the logic, and agree with you that forcing creators to be more efficient is a good thing, the philosophy of LL seems to have been: "Let them create whatever, and suffer the consequences." I think they're realising at this point that its gone too far, and are scrambling to adjust priorities.

    There's also the fact that the developers who wrote the original engine, as well as those who bolted on mesh functionality are long gone from the company (as far as I know, anyway), so no, they don't entirely understand the monster they've created.

    Otherwise, someone would have removed that idiotic 512mb VRAM lock...

  14. 20 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    I'm just pointing out that people tend to greatly exaggerate what is needed for an effective visual feature in SL. You see it a lot.

    If you're doing pre-rendered full motion video, then yes you want reflections in mirrors to be full resolution, but for a game-like environment like SL? You can work with much lower resolution and still have the effect add to the experience. LL won't do mirrors because if they do they want them to be full resolution and look great on curved surfaces etcetera, and all with no performance hit. So instead of giving us a fantastic feature that can't measure up to their unreasonable expectations, they give us nothing.

    Even in the latest generation of games, true mirrored surfaces with dynamic reflections are used very sparingly, and these are engines that are light years ahead of the tech that SL is built on. I think LL won't do mirrors because they're aware of the potential abuse and performance cost of such a feature. Not necessarily intentional abuse, just the kind that amateur creators will do. Yes, they can add functionality to limit that, but it seems to me that they're in a constant struggle to improve performance, improve visuals and maintain the freedom of expression that keeps the core SL users here.

  15. 10 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    I still don't agree. While I think it would be good to give people the ability to adjust the resolution used in mirror reflections, I believe most people would be satisfied with a resolution at or even lower than the resolution used in water reflections. Remember, we're talking SL here, not a Pixar production. A feature doesn't need to be movie quality to be an effective and engaging addition.

    Ok :) I would certainly like better reflections for making water inside objects and improving metallic materials, but a far more efficient way to do that is with cube mapping. We have cube maps ('environment' reflection), but the ability to define/customize them would be a much better use of resources. These could be something you import, or baked from your environment.

    Not sure why you bring up Pixar? Film rendering has almost nothing in common with realtime rendering, and I was never suggesting that it would need to be 'film' quality to be effective.

    5 hours ago, Ghost Warblood said:

    the highest water reflection resolution based on black dragon viewer's settings is 2048, 768 on "normal" which is supposedly the LL viewer's ultra.

    the water resolution based on black dragon viewer's settings are as followed (from lowest to highest): 256,512,768,1024,1536,2048 BUT for any other viewer I'd imagined it be something like 128,256,512,768,1024 (anything around 128-256 kinda looks pixelly)

     

     @IvanBenjammin anything higher than 2048 would be pointless in terms of SL graphics.

    I only use the LL viewer, so I didn't realise other viewers could customize the reflection res. Good to know, thanks.

  16. 13 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

    I have to disagree with Ivan that mirrors would need to be higher resolution and definitely include avatars. The amount of detail rendered in mirrors could be controlled precisely how it is done with water, omitting characters (or rendering them in the same way avatar imposters are rendered) as necessary and reflections could be done at lower resolution than the primary scene render and still be effective. Most videogames with mirror effects use lower resolutions for  reflections, as a low resolution reflection can still be far more effective than no reflection at all in the right circumstances.

    Oh, yes. I didn't mean higher resolution than the primary render (that would make no sense whatsoever), but higher resolution than the water reflections. Sorry for the confusion :)

  17. Reflective surfaces like water use a secondary camera to render the scene from the water's "point-of-view". This gets output as a texture which is applied to the water surface, then distorted with a normal map. So effectively rendering every frame twice; This can be done with little performance cost in the case of water because its rendering at a lower resolution and omitting avatars, with less (if any) anti-aliasing and post processing.

    Mirrors would be fundamentally the same, but at a much bigger performance cost. They would need to be higher resolution, and include avatars. If the viewer already struggles with decent frame rates in busy regions, imagine the performance if it was having to render each of those frames n+1 times (where n = number of mirrors).

    • Like 2

  18. Melita Magic wrote:


    Gunner Grun wrote:

    Did you try and get a hold of the merchant first to see if there was a fix for whatever you didn't like or did you just leave a bad review without contacting them.

    The customer has absolutely no obligation to the merchant.

    Why do some merchants feel otherwise? That is a rhetorical question. There is no defensible reason a merchant should order a customer to contact them prior to leaving a review, let alone break TOS and harass them for leaving a review.

    No one is ordering you to do anything. No merchant in this thread (or anywhere else I've seen on these forums) has suggested that harassment and abuse is an acceptable response to a negative review.

    Sometimes, a customer doesn't actually understand how to use a product, for any number of reasons. Sometimes, merchants make genuine mistakes when listing products - they're not trying to scam you, they just messed up.

    Presumably, you paid the merchant for something you wanted. If your expectations are not met for whatever reason, surely its worth contacting them? Its not an obligation, its self-interest.

     

    • Like 1

  19. melaniehaughton wrote:

      I am sure that there are several of us who have purchased an item off Marketplace and have not been satisfied for whatever reason.   We then decide to make a negative review of that product.  

         However, on occasions some of us have received abusive IMs from that vendor over the review.

         Perhaps I am being naive, but surely it is the vendor's responsibility to either assist the customer or make an effort to improve their product rather than attack the customer.  In other words...  After Sales Service!

    Its your responsibility to ask for assistance. I'm certainly not condoning abusive behavior, but every merchant who has been doing this long enough will have received a bad review from a customer who didn't read instructions, had no patience, didn't ask for assistance, or all of the above. Sometimes those reviews are abusive.

    Most people wouldn't want a merchant contacting them to make sure they're happy, some might even consider that harassment. All we can reasonably do is make ourselves available for customers to contact us.

    • Thanks 1

  20. ChinRey wrote:


    I just wish we had good, user friendly in-world mesh building tools specially made for the special quirks of SL mesh. But that's not going to happen of course.

     Hmm. The quirks of SL mesh are a symptom of the less-than-perfect integration of mesh uploading. I could write a list as long as my arm of improvements they could make to their system that would improve accessibility to amateurs, but that's going off-topic.

    There is definitely a social element to building in-world for many people. Most of my sales come from what I think of as 'mesh lego' kits, where I try to give the user as much freedom as possible in assembly. Its a lot of work, multiplied by those 'quirks', but its always a thrill to go to a customer's sim and see what they've built with my components.

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