Scylla Rhiadra

You want me to set you up with Cinn? Well . . . do you have any prior experience as a "business manager"? Also, I want 15%.

Ok, but do you have any other . . . "business ventures" on the go? You're an attractive woman . . . I can set you up with a guy I know, if you're interested.

So, I've made an important career decision. This "artiste" stuff is very nice and all that, but the REAL money is in real estate. I have therefore decided to become a slum landlady, and have accordingly bought my first apartment building. Hot and cold running roaches, peeling wallpaper, aesthetically pleasing reddish tap water, and guaranteed air-conditioning in the winter can all be yours for the low low price of . . . well, negotiable. I might be willing to settle for a take of your crystal meth business.

For sure. In fact, there are likely scores of different categories that I've neglected. And that's the point, really -- our relationship with sexuality doesn't neatly break down into the kind of simplistic binary that this proposal wants to enforce. I'm not interested in sex here, but I'd die of boredom in a PG rated world very quickly. On the other hand, I'd also die of boredom on a grid where ALL I was encountering was sex-focused.

Second Life features people who . . . Want Second Life to be as safe as Disney World Aren't interested in sex, but also don't want to live in Disney World See sex as important to their virtual lives, but actually spend a great deal of their time, and in most cases probably the majority of it, doing other things Are here for the sex only, and in some cases may not even ever step out of sex sims or BDSM dungeons I want to suggest that majority of SL residents fall into Category 3, with Category 2 coming in somewhat lower in numbers, but still sizable. Those who want, or in practice only live, segregated sex/no sex lives are, I'm pretty sure, a minority here. It's odd how many people don't seem to get that for most people sex in SL is actually integrated into our everyday lives -- just like in RL! We are sexual beings even as we're tidying the living room or filling out spread sheets. There isn't a "sexy Scylla" that I keep in a box, and only bring out for special "sexy occasions."

The PG grid would last around a month, and the Adult grid maybe a month longer. Nothing like fragmenting your marketplace to kill a good thing.

We all remember that one party . . .

So do I, mostly. We will now get our collective knuckles wrapped: "Diffuse maps include environmental information!" Yeah, whatevs. Diffuse diffuse diffuse. There. Bite me.

Yeah, I've been loading the maps as "local" for that reason. And of course Materialize has a preview feature too, which will give you a general sense, but not what it will look like in SL. The "smoothness" vs. "roughness" thing is annoying. I do wish these techies would DECIDE on stuff. "ARM" or "ORM"? "Albedo" or "Base Colour" map? (A lot of PBR materials I've seen even call this "Diffuse." GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER, PEOPLE!!!

kk, my head now seriously hurts. I think we'll continue with this tomorrow. Ugh. (Yes, this would be easier with Blinn-Phong, in part because there isn't the extra stage of "packing" the maps.)

/me feels a bit faint I get the principle. And honestly, it doesn't sound a lot more difficult than what I might have to do to make metallic work in PBR. But I'm going to put that aside for now and focus on the basics. And honestly, I'm not sure I even need Materialize. My basic pic is my Albedo (or, for BP, diffuse -- I don't need occlusion for this, unless I REALLY want to emphasize the paint strokes, so they're basically the same thing), the normal I can produce using the web site I've been using, and the roughness (or, for BP, specular) I can most easily do by hand in Affinity. So, yes, the PBR and BP versions are pretty much exactly in parallel, except that the roughness map needs to be inverted for specularity. One thing I don't really know is the difference between a BP normal and a PBR one. I know that there IS a difference, based I assume on the angle of the lighting? Trial run #3 coming up.

Yes, other than the metal effect. In fact, if I do in fact use this (which I will, at some point), I'll be loading both Blinn-Phong and PBR materials. An awful lot of the arts community is still pre-PBR, including, in fact, the curator at the gallery I'm currently exhibiting. I'll go with that!!

Oh yes, more experimentation needed. My attempt to make it more subtle made it TOO subtle. Metalic is working; I think the problem is that the Roughness map is interfering with the reflective qualities, so I need to up the smoothness on the parts that are metallic. And that's complicated because the metals map is based on the Albedo, while the roughness is based on the bush strokes. So I need to "add" the metallic bits to the roughness map, something I'll have to do in Affinity. Fortunately, metallic is not something I plan to use very often at all, so I may just, for now, forgo it and focus on the other elements. It'll take me a while to get this right, but I'll figure it out! I might try this, but Materialize does normals too, of course (although you have to generate a height map first). I've also got another web site that does a pretty good job of creating normals from basic colour maps.

Which is actually precisely what I am doing here. Almost all of my pictures these days are "textured" in a variety of ways, often with brush strokes that are overlaid on the image. (I use other kinds of texturing as well, though, such as noise.) What I've done here is taken the brush stroke overlay (only -- not the pic itself) to create normal and roughness maps. The materials are a reflection not of the pic itself, but of the "texture" of the pic -- in this case, brush strokes. I also wanted (and hope still to manage) to give the gold bits of this pic a metalic reflectiveness, as though painted with gold leaf. That's an effect I'm not going to be using very much at all, but I wanted to try it. So the metalness map has been constructed using the Albedo texture -- the pic itself. ETA: One of the very GOOD side effects of using materials is that you can't set the pic at full bright, because that would wipe out the materials. So, the pics have to be displayed under "natural" lighting, and not merely rely on full bright to show. In this case, I've used a simple point light, but I'm experimenting with projectors for that as well. The overall effect of pics with materials, and artificial interior lighting (using a reflection probe too) will be to create a MUCH more realistic experience of a gallery. (Which is part of my "program" to reform galleries in SL, but that's fodder for another post one day.)

Ok, proof of concept! So, as part of a larger program relating to how we display "art" in SL (GIANT canvasses set at full bright crammed together in over-lit cavernous galleries), I'm experimenting with how PBR materials can make a pic on display in-world look better. This also relates to a mini-discussion between myself and @Fluffy Sharkfin about how PBR opens new potential for visual artists in SL. I took this shot specifically for this experiment. I want 1) to use a normal map to highlight the texture of the brush strokes, 2) to use roughness to give it the kind of sheen one might get from an oil, and 3) to use metallicness to give a metallic reflectivity to select parts of the picture (in this case, a la Klimt, the gold bits). I created the materials in Materialize -- there are some videos but not much documentation, so a lot of this was guesswork and trial by error. I loaded the resulting materials into the PBR Packer, and imported them into SL, where I created a brand new material. Here's the result. Everything is a bit "over-done": I need to tone down the normal a bit, and certainly reduce roughness. And the metallicness didn't work at all for some reason; I need to figure out why. But overall . . . I'm really pretty excited about how well this worked, despite my having only a vague idea what I'm doing!

Yeah, this is an issue that we've dealt with before here. People don't really understand how computers work: they are "magic" in some regards. And they don't want to muck around with them, especially if they are being used for things like work. It does have a different UI, but I haven't found it really alien from FS? And one can customize the layout somewhat, putting buttons along the bottom, top, and sides. But I get it.

Zali is joking, Sandor. She's suggesting that the computing requirements for PBR viewers is in essence putting a "price tag" on our friendships there, because you or they may need to buy a better computer or upgrade one in order to actually engage with them in-world.

There IS an in-world FS group for Mac users that I know has been very busy working through, and helping people with, the Mac-specific issues that have arisen with the new FS release. I have a friend who has made use of it. She could also consider Alchemy, which is available to Mac users. I can't speak to the Mac version myself, but the Windows version is very good. It lacks some of the functionality of FS, but more is being added regularly (Area Search is coming, I've been told). It's definitely faster than FS, and it looks good. Nicely put.

Oh. I definitely "started it." Credit where credit is due!

Cinn's position is, I suspect, that of most people -- they can run PBR at acceptable levels, most of the time, but have to throttle their settings in some situations. Caitlin, however, is obviously one of those (*checks notes*) "three or four people" in SL who can't run a PBR viewer at all, or not to a degree that it is functional. It's a useful reminder of the knock-on effect that these performance issues are likely to have: it's not just Caitlin who is being impacted here. You have a very good computer, and can run a PBR viewer without problems, but your SL is going to be very detrimentally impacted nonetheless if Caitlin suddenly finds she can't run any viewer at all.

I think sadly it's more complicated than that (and I do have every sympathy for the mods here for that reason). If I post something telling someone "you're overreacting" or "you're not being very sympathetic," and it more or less stands on its own, that's unlikely to get removed. If however, it spawns, and is literally the beginning of a 9 page running firefight, the odds are good it's going to get removed, however anodyne the original comment might be.

I think it must become difficult to disentangle posts that are part of a conversation, but not "flaming," from those that are, especially when some involve quoting nastier posts. As well, there seems to be a sort of "Law of Critical Mass": a few isolated nasty posts will likely get ignored, but when it flares up like a bush fire, the (natural) tendency I think is to nuke everything from orbit. When that particular branch of the conversation extended to several pages of back-and-forth between a few posters, I knew that we were going to see a major pruning. Unfortunately, some good stuff got caught up too. I do totally get what you're saying though. I put a reasonable amount of thought into most things I post, and watching what might, in total, be a half-hour or more of "work" composing often carefully crafted replies go "poof" suddenly is definitely disheartening.

True -- it seems to mostly (or most dramatically) impact blonde or lightly coloured hair, and the effect varies according to the angle of the projected light, and how direct it is. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with materials. I've never seen that sort of effect on BoM makeup though.

So excited about this. My animesh cat is going to love what I can do with my spray bottle now. Little b*stard.

I agree that tempers get rather unnecessarily frayed around this subject (including my own on occasion), but it's not hard to understand, I think, why something that has really pretty fundamentally changed the experience of SL for many people might do that. There are lots of causes, some reasonable and some less so, for why people are annoyed. Most people didn't know this was coming; it took them off guard. Some who have been managing in SL on very definitely subpar computers have suddenly found that SL is all but unusable. Others, who may have been told that PBR would make SL look better, discovered that it didn't, and maybe even made it look worse. There's actually no central place to find information about fixes, other than the Firestorm wiki and support group. Etc. Most of this will get better, as PBR-optimized EEPs become more common, and more in use. Some will simply get used to washed-out lighting, or too-dark interiors. And some will get better computers. The performance issue is a tough one. It's got better than it was initially: the first PBR viewer from LL was not good, but they've since improved it. The current FS PBR viewer is also not good, in terms of performance; I am reasonably confident that too will get fixed. But for some, on very old or inadequate computers, it's not going to get better. It's perfectly valid and objectively true that one can't expect to continue to function on a platform that is evolving with a computer that is ancient or not up to snuff -- but point that out to people who may be faced with losing what has been an important part of their lives doesn't actually remedy anything. For many the natural and understandable reaction is going to be anguish or anger. Implying that it's somehow their fault that they haven't got a newer or more powerful computer, when we can know nothing about their personal circumstances, is only going to aggravate that. On the other hand, there certainly are people who are excited about PBR, and about the potential it holds for future developments down the road. They care about the platform too, and believe -- probably correctly -- that modernizing and updating is the key to the continued survival of SL. tl/dr: the voices are loud and vehement because the personal stakes are high for both "sides." The Pro-PBR people are going to win this -- have indeed already won this. We're not going back. It seems to me that it would be good for them (and actually, in some regards, I'm one of them) to be gracious in victory, and to try to understand the very real upset and anger that the "losers" here are expressing. They may be a very small minority, but that hardly makes the anguish of those who find SL barely usable anymore any less real.