ChinRey
-
Posts
8,379 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Knowledge Base
Posts posted by ChinRey
-
-
13 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:
The Creative Commons PRB materials site I noted above doesn't include an Albedo or base colour map, but it does have something called "Diffuse." I'm assuming, because these are PBR textures, that this is just what they've chosen to call it.
Slightly, but not completely, off topic: To understand this, it's important to realise that PBR is not a standard. It's a concept with a lot of different implementation. This is why there is so much confusion about the names of various maps.
The Khronos Group is trying to establish a standard for it now, based on Unity's old PBR system. But there are still lots of other variants around and there will probably always be, partly because some won't change, partly because glTF PBR is a very simplified take on the concept and may not be advanced enough for many uses.
10 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:If you let a viewer/server do the 2048 to 1024 resize, the quality will suck. Do the resize your self BEFORE uploading texture maps.
The SL software very often does a better job scaling from 2048 to 1024 than the most common scaling algorithms used by various image eitors. It's a bit of a hit or miss though and if you really, really, really want to make the most of each pixel and are willing to spend some time and effort on it, head over to the beta grid and try different scaling methods (including the one built into the SL software) and see what works best.
-
2
-
-
1 hour ago, animats said:
Ouch. I seem to have upset some people. Sorry.
Well, it gave us an opportunity to point out that there are actually SL builders who take LOD and the other technical aspects of 3D modelling seriously.
1 hour ago, animats said:My point here is that LOD transitions in SL tend not to be invisible. There's a lot of flickering in the distance in SL
As far as I know, the flickering is caused by the draw distance. It happens when an object is right at the limit.
1 hour ago, animats said:I'm looking at how to fix that. Most game LOD systems do a cross-fade, rather than a cut, on an LOD switch. SL viewers do not cross-fade, but they could. I'm looking at whether it's worth the trouble to implement.
That would be really useful. I think I spend more time minimizing the "jumps" between the LOD models than I do reducing their tri counts. It's more about normals than geometry btw. You get those surfaces that suddenly brighten up or darken when the LOD models are swapped. It's dead easy for a model like the tree in Animat's pictures but very often it's a serious headache.
This is also arguably the biggest flaw with auto-generated LOD models; neither GLOD nor MeshOptimizer seem to take normal vectors into account at all. (Pro tip btw: Using custom normals to transfer normal data from the main model often often helps. Not always - sometimes it even makes matters worse - but often enough it's well worth adding the trick to your arsenal.)
I'm not sure if there's that much point if it's only implemented by one third party viewer though.
There are two more advanced solutions than cross-fading, tesselation and morphing with defined paths between the LOD levels. Those would require drastic changes both to the server and client software and even to the content creation work flow so they are not realistic options. I think there are a few AAA games that use tesselation but not many and as for morphing, I'm not sure if the technique has even been invented yet. Maybe I should patent it?
-
1
-
1
-
-
3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:
I find it somewhat offending that you always make it sound that all SL content creators are all kinda dumb people, when in fact there are plenty of us who do proper LODs since the introduction of mesh in 2011.
It's a bit hard to comment since the trees in the picture aren't here anymore but judging by the picture this looks similar to some of my 1 L$ budget trees, apart from the blur and a slightly different texture that is.
In any case, all my trees have better LOD than this and so do Alex Bader's and Teresa Matfield's just to mention two others. Animats knows this perfectly well so I'm not sure what he's trying to say here.
-
11 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:
The Jira I have put in is titled "Normal map compression artifacts ruin highly reflective smooth surfaces".
Oh, I see. Yes, the problem with high reflectivity and normal maps is well enough known.
-
45 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:
With PBR materials, the lossy normal map is very perceptible, so they made the gltf uploader upload lossless normal maps.
I haven't noticed such issues in any of the PBR materials I've made so far but I haven't done that many tests and it's all been brick, stone and wood textures that don't need that kind of precision. So I can hardly claim to know everything about it (yet). It does make sense then. Of course, if you want max optimization for performance, the way to do it is to try upload the maps separately first and switch to uploading a complete material if that doesn't work out but I wouldn't hold it against anybody if they're unwilling to make that effort for a fairly minor performance gain.
Btw, I assume I'm not the only one to realize that this means we now can upload any texture or surface map with lossless compression. Just put it in the normal map slot of a glTF material and off you go.
-
3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:
That's the case and I'm guilty for it being a thing now. 😇
It's not my problem, I'm uploading so many textures these days I had to switch to Premium Plus anyway but you're saying that
- If you want to convert an old style texture to glTF PBR you are supposed to reupload everything and
- If you have a dozen or more color variants of a texture you are supposed to upload separate duplicates of the normal and metallic/roughness maps for each.
There's gonna be a helluva lot of duplicate assets to store, download, cache and render this way.
Of course, there's a fairly straightforward workaround for #2 but how many are going to use it or even known about it?
38 minutes ago, Candide LeMay said:It makes perfect sense to only use lossless compression for normal maps when you import gltf.
Yes and no. If LL is implementing true mip-mapping, it may well be time to retire the lossless compression. But if so, why only for normal maps? It makes just as much sense to switch to lossless compression for textures and diffuse/albedo and roughness maps.
-
1
-
8 hours ago, Cube Republic said:
Don't do this, it will compress your normal map.
Are you saying normal maps use lossless compression if and only if they are imported as part of a PBR material? There's no mention of that in the documentation and it makes no sense. Where do you have that information from?
-
1
-
-
You can always upload the maps you actually need separately and assemble them into a PBR material inworld. That makes sense for materials that don't need Metallic-Roughness maps at least and let's face it, many materials don't. But I thought there was no additional fee for the emissive map. Am I wrong?
-
1
-
-
42 minutes ago, MuffinUnsane said:
I've tried using websites to shrink them as well as going 'slow' and decreasing size little by little.
"Going slow" is the worst thing you can do. The rule is to scale once as the final step in the creation process.
35 minutes ago, MuffinUnsane said:Is there something I'm missing?
You might be missing paint.net. Paint.net is a free mid range image editor and it's the only image editor I know of that supports the fant scaling algorithm. Fant is usually the algorithm that gives the best result for textures. But min you, I say usually. There is no rule without exceptions and this one has a lot of them. Ideally you want to try as many different algorithms as possible and see which works the best.
It will also help if you can crop the texture down to a product of the target resolution (for 256: 512, 768, 1024, 1280, 1536 etc.) before you scale although that's not always possible of course.
-
1
-
1
-
-
5 hours ago, Aquila Kytori said:
Perhaps @ChinRey could explain why this is ? )
No, I can't. There's no mention of it in either of the HAVOK manuals and it doesn't seem to make any sense. What I do know is that it's all about ray tracing. SL uses ray tracing to locate the surface an object is to be rezzed on and mesh surfaces you can't rez are also not detectable with the llCastRay() function (thanks to @animats for figuring that out). It's not as simple as those objects being "invisible" to ray tracing though. If it was, the item would just have been rezzed on the next object on the path. This is what happens if you point straight down at the surface but if you rez at an angle (which we usually do of course) it won't detect the next surface along the path either. It looks as if a faulty mesh deflects the ray tracing path somehow.
5 hours ago, Aquila Kytori said:And BTW, I didn't have any problems rezzing on the floor of the room which used the Analyzed physics version and had its Convert to Hulls method set to Surface
I guess because it was such a simple object.
Or it may be because of the way the hulls were generated. Try to make a hull manually from a simple cube. If the cube you use is solid with all six sides, it will work fine even with hull method set to surface. If it has one open side, it won't.
-
1
-
-
9 hours ago, Ina Fairport said:
Today I only could rezz basic prims. When I rezzed a radio, the radio just disappeared and came back in my inv after a relog and I can''t rezz mesh furniture.
Aww, sorry to hear that. All isn't lost though, you can always rez the furniture outside the house and drag in place. It's inconvenient but it works.
-
4 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:
Is it as easy to explain as it is to fix? I'm rather curious.
There have been several explanations posted here over the years but finding older post on the SL forums is a nightmare. I managed to locate this though:
https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/409912-rezzing-things-on-mesh-floors/
It's not the best explanation but hopefully it will do as a start at least.
-
1
-
1
-
-
23 hours ago, Ina Fairport said:
Edit : Creator offers help
That's nice to hear. I hope they figure it out and let us know if they need some advice.
This is a well known problem and it's caused by an undocumented quirk in SL's physic engine. It's fairly easy to fix once you know how to do it but it can't be done in-world, the mesh has to be reuploaded with a cirrected physics model.
-
Yes, that's not a bad site. Not all of the items there are low poly though, no matter what they claim. The trees in particular are *extremely* high poly and not recommended for a dynamic environment at all. Sweet Home 3D is an open source interior design program so the models there were never intended to be used in a live virtual reality.
Also, check the licenses, there are several different ones there.
-
1
-
1
-
-
3 hours ago, Micaiyahwen said:
Thank you Animats for the explanation. Unfortunately, I know nothing about Photoshop or GIMP. Every time I try to work with it, I just don't have the patience and end up being frustrated.
If you're using a Windows computer, try paint.net instead. It's so much easier to use than Gimp and Photoshop and although it isn't nearly as advanced as them it has almost all the features you need to make textures for Second Life. I make all kinds of textures and I can't even remember last time I had to fire up Gimp to use some obscure fuction paint.net lacked. Make two layers, add the template to one and create your texture in the other one. Once you're finished, hide or delete the template layer and save the end result as PNG, 24 bit for regular textures, 32 bit for alpha ones.
-
I've had this bottle of Chardonnay for almost a year now. Time to enjoy it before it's too late. And some suitable music:
(Some song facts for those who just have to know: The Swallow was written by Richard Farrini who recorded it with his wife, Mimi Farrini (Joan Baez' sister and a grossly underrated singer and guitarist). Joan Baez was supposed to include it on her first electric folk rock album but that album never happened because Farrini, hwo was the producer, passed away only 29 years old. This recording is from a 1995 Joan Baez concert with Mimi Farrini as a guest artist.)
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, Conifer Dada said:
At one time there were a lot more disused mainland plots that still belonged to residents. Quite often these plots were left open build, so they soon filled up with junk rezzed by passers by. There were one or two plots like this near where I lived. To stop them filling up with junk, I made linked objects consisting of enough cubes to use up the land allowance, shrunk them to quite a small size and made them invisible. The landowner, if they ever returned, could delete the objects.
Oh yes, that's standard procedure if you live near an open and onmonitored parcel. At least it is if you want to enjoy your land in Second Life.
One of my neighbors got rather mad at me when she turned up after a few months and saw her land filled up with lots of invisible phantom prims. But she mellowed down a bit when I showed her a pic of how it looked before I added them and after she got hit herself by a massive griefer attack from another unprotected plot, we became best friends.
-
1
-
-
There was a time when threre were random griefing attacks with those self replicating, noisy, blinking, particle spewing objects somewhere in SL almost every day. The worst one was when somebody was stupid enough to rez a "gift" they received from somebody they didn't know at the Union Passage sandbox. It spread out across all of the Blake Sea and the estates around it. If I remember right, about 70 sims were down for a whole day or more. The girefer objcet was bright red and big enough to show up on the map so the map of the area was crammed fulled of red dots for days until it was updated.
Towards the end of that griefer period I managed to catch one of the offenders in the act trying to place some griefer thingy on my land. She had posted some rather incriminating photos and text in her profile so I was able to do some investigating. It turned out there were some people trying to rekindle the "griefer wars" of ye olde tymes and one of the groups - the one who pretended to be the "Protectors of Second Life Against the Filthy Griefers" had this initiation rite for new members that included the candidate finidng some spot in SL to grief. To be fair, the attacks that group initiated were scripted to only last an hour or two but it's still a rather weird thing to do if you want to portray yourself as the "nice guys".
-
5
-
-
1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:
Does that work if the item is no-mod, as others replied?
I was wondering about that too but I'm too lazy to check. Does anybody know?
-
6 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:
If I read the message correctly, will the script probably be named ".channel"? If so, perhaps that is the script to reset.
I wouldn't bother with hunting down the script in a case like this. Firestorm has this nifty function that resets all scripts in a linkset in one go.
-
1
-
1
-
-
1 hour ago, Szandren said:
I have tried detaching/re-attaching my body, clearing my cache, relogging, and nothing seems to help.
1 hour ago, Szandren said:Just a quick update - I tried using another viewer (Black Dragon) to see if it was a viewer issue, but apparently not.
Scripts are run by the server so none of these standard fixes will work.
A stack-heap-collision error means that the script has run out of memory and is trying to use the same memory blocks for code and for data. I suppose I don't have to explain why that is a bad idea.
If the body is modifiable you can try to reset the script. There may be a lot of old garbage that that has accumulated over time and resetting will fix that.
It's more likely there's something wrong with the script though. Either your copy has been corrupted or it has a bug. Try a fresh copy of the body first - if you don't have a backup, get a redelivery. If that doesn't help, contact the seller.
-
2
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:
Video 1 - Low Poly Rocks - Quick & Easy - Detailed Version
This is a great video and I worked with this but bevel has a tendency to add ngons that need to be converted to tris and quads I think. Is this correct?
That's an interesting method. Yes, you'll have to triangulate before you export and you also have to remember to use smooth normals but it's not a bad way to create irregular shapes like rocks.
2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:Video 2 - Making realistic rocks in Blender 2.9+ using Blender rock generator addon
This looks pretty cool but the size of the mesh is very large so this would probably not work in Second Life.
Wow, that's a lot of polys! You can always decimate the shape of course but you'd have to do it very heavily so the first method is probably the one of them that is the easiest to use.
There are several other ways to make rocks. I usually start with a relatively high poly sphere (maybe around 500-1000 vertices), resize it along one or two axises, randomize the vertice locations and use limited dissolve and manual vertice delete to reshape and reduce the complexity down to a sensible level.
Which method you choose doesnt' really matter as long as you can get a shape and a tri count you're happy with. With a good texture it's quite possible to make very good looking rock with a tri count less than 50 and even as low as 20.
2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:Option 1 - add rocks around the opening.
...Option 2 - build geometry around the opening directly.
Option 3 - do both.
Add some very simple geometry around the opening as a base and pile a few simple rock onto it for additional details.
2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:1.) Is there a way to find the where the origin is for an objects that you want to link in Second Life? I have just "used" the same origin for all the linked objects based on the original mesh model.
The origin of an object in Second Life is right in the middle of the bounding box, that is right in the middle between the outermost vertices along each axis. I don't know of an easy way to find it in Blender and I too woul love to learn fit here is one.
2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:2.) Sometimes seem to not look right because of the lighting. Is there a way to a way to turn that off? I think I can change it by the view to eliminate shadows by switching to a different view.
That solution won't survive exporting. What you need to do is triangulate everything before you export. You can't really trust the automatic functions for irregular shapes like this unless you really know what you're doing.
Also, merge or delete vertices that are too close to each other or crate too sharp angles.
2 hours ago, IvyTechEngineer said:3.) Is there a way to add an object on a face? Object get added at the origin.
Not sure what you mean: in Blender or in SL?
-
1
-
-
3 hours ago, Naiman Broome said:
Any ideas?
Apparently not. There are still some working tools for creating sculpts but they tend to be very idiomatic both when it comes to how they work and what shapes they can produce. I can try and compile a list of them (that's something I should have done anyway) but there probably won't be any that suits yuour needs.
-
1
-
-
20 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:
This isn't going to change. What "I" would like to see is the ability to change the LOD settings INWORLD as we had in Cloud Party. Then if we had some smallish item we loved with faulty LODs, WE could make the changes -- most likely paying a premium of some kind for the choice.
It's not just Cloud Party. As far as I know, all reasonably modern game/virtual world engines have that feature. As for the "price" to pay, include the swap distances in the land impact calculation so if you increase them you also increase the LI.
Keeping the fixed swap distances from the prim system was one of the two biggest mistakes LL made when they developed mesh (and also one of the biggest mistakes when they created sculpts) and I don't understand how they missed something as obvious as that.
You can of course get better results by tweaking the uploader settings than you can by using the default values but it will never be optimal and tweaking those settings takes time too and will probably require more test uploads so I'm not convinced it's actually faster in the long run.
One more illustration then. This is the roof for the same house as the pair of rooms from my previous post. I haven't finished UV mapping it yet so I'm not going to upload it, just show pics from Blender and from the uploader window:
With default settings in the uploader I get 1.364 LI which is a little bit too high but not too bad:
However, look at the medium model:
46 tris and still clearly not good enough. Mesh Optimizer isn't actually able to create a medium LOD model at all for this mesh. I have to go all the way up to no reduction at all, giving me a whopping 186 tris and 10.913 LI!!!
"Good" (not really) old GLOD actually does a better job(!) but it still can't get it lower than 93 tris and 5.733 LI:
As for the low and lowest models, they don't matter much for a mesh as big as this (17x11.5x5.5 m) but GLOD can do a fairly decent job and reduce them down to 24 tris. Mesh Optimizer still can't handle this mesh at all. It needs 179 tris for the low and lowest models and a reduction as minute as that is not worth bothering with.
Properly optimised the tri counts for the LOD models would have been 32, 12 and 12 respectively and the LI would be somewhere between 0.8 and 1.1. The uploader can't even get close to that without serious LOD butchery.
It is of course a little bit different for furniture, simple indoors objects that don't need to be seen from a distance. For such items you can afford to waste a lot of tris on the LOD models and still keep the LI down to 1 and no amount of optimisation can get the LI lower than that.
-
1
-
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr
VERY NOOB QUESTION: Nomenclature for PBR Component Files
in Building and Texturing Forum
Posted
There are still a lot of aspects of "full PBR" that are missing and for good reason.
For those not too familiar with the concept, the idea with Physical Based Rendering is that instead of simply reproducing the colors across a surface, we try to simulate all the physical factors that cause those colors. But there are so many such factors and they interact with each other in so many weird and wonderful ways. If we were to take PBR all the way, we would have to measure render lag in frames per year, not frames per second. Some people wouldn't be happy about that so we have to compromise a little bit to make it work.