Scylla Rhiadra

Had to google that, as I don't really do mixed drinks. Sounds ok, though? "Cosmopolitan" as in "worldly" and "open to different cultures and perspectives." And definitely NOT as in "Cosmopolitan the magazine." BTW, on topic sort of, are there issues with PBR and semi-transparent textures? Why do I think I've heard that? What would the contents of a martini glass with a Cosmopolitan Cocktail look like done in PBR? Could the glass be made reflective, while still semi-transparent?

Lea & Perrins goes with, and in, just about anything, but my real go-to is HP sauce, with which I'll happily douse just about anything. Gotta love tamarind. And yes! Agreed, lemon curd is best on toast. That's how I was taught to eat it, although it can be nice in other ways too.

I have inherited love for a great many foods from my mother and grandmother. HP sauce, and Lea and Perrins. Lemon curd. Fried kidneys. Trifle. It's ok, I'm a cosmopolitan girl! I draw the line at Marmite.

You WILL like PBR. You WILL like PBR. And until you do, here's a nonstop playlist of Katie Perry and JoJo Siwa.

Yes! And? "Satay may be served with a spicy peanut sauce dip, or peanut gravy, served with slices of lontong or ketupat (rice cakes), garnished with a sprinkle of bawang goreng (crisp fried shallot), and accompanied by acar (pickles) consisting of slivers of onions, carrots, and cucumbers in vinegar, salt, and sugar solution. Mutton satay is usually served with kecap manis instead of peanut sauce. Pork satay can be served in a pineapple-based satay sauce or cucumber relish."

OMG yes. Actually, peanut sauce with nearly anything Thai. I sometimes have it with Pad Thai. I ignore the puzzled look from my waiter. Back on topic though, wouldn't gleaming peanut sauce look GREAT as a PBR texture?

That's so sweet!!!! Congratulations!!! I'm officiating at a wedding upcoming in SL. They can really be lovely things.

Wow, for real????

Fortunately, or unfortunately, there still isn't a huge amount available. I'll continue with my policy of buying a PBR textured item if it has backup textures -- at least until I can be relatively confident that the overwhelming majority of people are using a PBR-enabled viewer. I don't want visitors to my parcel feeling excluded because the trees are all white, and I would like all my friends to be able to admire my array of absolutely stunning garments. Yes, which again is why they need to fix the lighting, or at least produce a standard library set of EEPs, so that there is some consistency. Granting, of course, that everyone will be using their own settings and EEPs anyway. I wonder, though, if any of those "workarounds" will result in innovations, in the same way that the use of mesh for avatar bodies was an unexpected innovation? (I'm still slightly horrified by the idea, suggested by someone a while ago, of producing individual reflection probes for separate pieces of furniture, to ensure it "looked good." I hope that isn't the "innovation" we see.) Ironically, of course, creating a probe actually isn't that much more difficult than clicking a button. Rez a cube or sphere, enable "Select Reflection Probes," edit the object, and voila! It just feels annoyingly difficult. Even the configuring of it, if you're not getting fancy, is just a matter of entering a value somewhere between 1 and 4 (in most cases). What is a pain in the butt is sizing it to fit, which is where your idea has real merit. But a mechanism such as you imagine would have to produce multiple reflection probes for the average house.

This is an argument, maybe, for not buying PBR-textured goods yet. Or indeed, perhaps, any items at all. God, I DO hope they tweak it. I'm really not having a lot of fun with the environmental lighting right now, unless I use a reflection probe. And that's not always feasible.

You're a very, very sick man. Seek help. Now.

Right. This is what I've heard from some people here -- that baked in shadows will no longer be necessary because the environmental light will do it instead, and more realistically and dynamically. And, honestly, I've been a bit sceptical about this, because I spend a LOT of time producing shadows in my pics, and frequently the environmental light, or even a projector, simply does an inadequate job. At the same time (although this may be in part because I've had a difficult time finding an EEP that projects shadows well in a PBR viewer), shadows seem generally to be less pronounced in PBR. But you're talking about a PBR material here, not the difference between a PBR material with an ORM map, and BP material with the AO baked-in. What I take it you are suggesting is that a baked-in AO -- effectively, a diffuse texture -- would still be of benefit in PBR? What then is the role of the occlusion in an ORM map?

Well, if so, then I'm confused about what @Porky Gorky and @Fluffy Sharkfin are saying, tbh. It might not affect the direction of the shadows, but their intensity, perhaps? In any case, there does appear to be a difference between how the information in an occlusion map is processed from BP to PBR. At least if SL's lighting system does what other PBR-based systems do.

No, apparently they do different things. An AO baked into a diffuse texture is static, and the shadow doesn't change or respond to the light source. An occlusion map in an ORM map, on the other hand, does.

Well, except theoretically an occlusion map in a PBR material reacts more dynamically to light than one baked into a BP Diffuse texture. In theory. I think. I'm just not sure how noticeable that would be on most objects. On a brick wall? Sure, probably? On a dress? Maybe not so much. I do wonder if there are any real advantages to "updating" to PBR for the majority of things we actually wear or use.

Not to be catty about this, but this seems an odd way to recommend PBR-textured items. I get your point: PBR isn't necessarily "shiny" (although I suspect, until creators get the hang of it, overly shiny will be a thing). But I do wonder (again) what the advantages of PBR over BP are in cases where high reflectivity or metallic textures are not a factor. Does a more dynamic Occlusion map, loaded into the ORM component of a PBR material, make that much of a difference, for instance, in a garment? I ask this quite genuinely: I don't know.

Ceka's link will give you some of the basics of setting up or editing an EEP, but unfortunately it's now somewhat out of date, as configuring an EEP has changed with the introduction of PBR. You can find a bit of guidance on the thread I've linked to below, and there's a very brief video from JuicyBomb embedded there which is not unuseful. The key is to play with the "Reflection Probe Ambience (HDR)" slider, and perhaps the "Ambient Color." Jenna Huntsman has a few brief but worthwhile notes that specifically relate to EEP in PBR here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Jenna_Huntsman#EEP I thought I'd seen a new Firestorm Wiki entry on this at one point, but I can't find it now and may be mistaken. There's almost no "official" documentation on EEP (because of course there isn't): the article in the Knowledge Base on editing environments dates from 2011, and is about the old Windlights. So, experiment! There's no one to tell you you're doing it wrong!

Isn't that pre-PBR though?

I gotta admit . . . I have folders of new EEPs supposedly calibrated for PBR, and some by creators I generally trust to do a good job, but . . . most of them are not great. Your comparison with CalWL is dead on: most of them are either washed out with little or no shadows and contrasts, or they are dark dark dark. I've found one or two that I can live with, but I really need to sit down and start producing my own.

Yeah, this was what I thought. If one of the points of PBR is to provide consistency across different kinds of lighting, SL's partial implementation has defeated that. Which is why I responded "yikes" to your comment about calibrating it for a particular environment / EEP. But I suppose it's no worse BP already was in that regard?

. . . and was viciously attacked and mugged! It's a sad statement on our society today that one can't even go to the beach these days without being set upon by young, scantily clad punks.

Another shot of "Talia" from my "Two Women" series.

How do you get that, Frionil, do you know? As for the smoothness / roughness issue, I've just been inverting the maps.

This I've certainly seen is a problem: generally, there's a lot of data in the colour map that doesn't need to be or shouldn't be reflected in the height and normal maps. It's one reason why I've been using two different colour maps to produce materials for pics -- one for the normals, and another for roughness and metallic. There's stuff in the pics that I want reflected in the normals, but not in the other maps, and vice versa. I'm not quite sure what this is, or how it should or can be corrected? Yes, this is very much the sort of thing I was thinking about. Does setting Materialize to "Maya" fix that? Or not? ETA: The various different normal generators I've seen don't seem to distinguish, or make it clear which of these two they are generating.

Yikes. This certainly makes sense, but isn't it also true that PBR materials are available in different formats, i.e., OpenGL, DirectX, etc.? And I've forgotten where it was, but someone mentioned configuring Materialize so it was producing SL-compatible materials? ETA: And are there ways to determine if a PBR material is "accurate," other than eyeballing it in particular EEPs?