Porky Gorky

If it's a competition you want, let's all sign up at PBR.com and become Professional Bull Riders (which is a real thing). Whoever comes top in the standings next season gets to choose the default PBR EEP. Edit - On reflection I think we should forget this idea, it’s a load of old bullocks!

Well I think there is an easy answer, which is for LL to provide a default environment fit for purpose. Content creators can use an equivalent HDRI map when authoring PBR if they want to and consumers can place legacy and PBR into the environment with acceptable visual results. That surely has to be the goal for LL. If people want to deviate from the default and start experimenting with other EEP’s then that's their prerogative, but it should not be a requirement. Personally I won't be providing recommended EEP settings with PBR content because the PBR / glft rollout still seems to be in beta and still subject to change at any given moment. I will just support customers if they ask.

No, I am talking about the default EEP here which is LL's responsibility. A decent default EEP would hopefully negate the need for people to change their EEP settings at all if they dont want to.

Having blundered my way through learning how to create EEP’s in the last few weeks, I have created some that work well with both my really old content and my new PBR, but only from the outside, when lit from the sky. Interiors are a whole different matter though. The only option seems to be to add lighting. Not a bad thing for PBR as it looks great with lighting and reflection probes but it feels wasteful using lights to achieve the look of natural daylight in interior spaces.

Surely it’s not complicated? Create a varied range of EEP settings then test them on the various types of content. Pick the one that works best for use as the default.

Whilst this is true in principle, it was unheard of in SL at the time when I met IBM i think, so when I said the fees were high, i meant compared to any other opportunities i'd heard about during that time. In later years SL was hyped as being Web 2.0, (I think that was the term) and lots of companies wanted a slice and were paying realistic levels of compensation, it became more commonplace to be paid a RL wage as it were. This is both true and not true. Whilst some IBM employees were here for business, some were at work, being paid and just mucking about in SL because they could, with no business related goals. /engage anecdote mode: Here is how I met IBM, A random dude came into my stop and bought everything. I would estimate about 30 prefabs at the time. Then he sent me a message a few hours later and asked me to come and set them up for him as it was his first day and he didn’t know his arse from his elbow. He offered me L$10k for a few hours of work. I got chatting to him and he told me SL was available to everyone in his office. He’d made an account and a coworker had given him L$50k. He didn't even know L$ had a RL value, he assumed it was game money. In the coming days, other IBM employees saw the builds I’d set up on their land and this led to commissioned work, if I remember rightly the first job was to build replicas of RL conference rooms from various IBM sites.

Yeah, in fact I ignored the stick entirely and went off topic because someone said the word “meshy” and it got me all excited in my ai zone which resulted in a spewing of unsolicited ai related propaganda. Please forgive me. 🙂

It can't be a faliure because they introduced PBR a few years ago. Thats the key to success dont you know. Any day now things are gonna turn around for Roblox, you mark my words 🙂

I just came back after 12 years and looked at my 32000 items and thought NOPE! I know the MP stuff is in a folder called MP Migration. Beyond that I decided to ignore the rest and just make a new folder called 2024 and I am working out of that. I was never into avatars much and am still walking around in one I put together in 2010. I know nothing about mesh avatars or how clothing works or any of it. I don't even know what I don't know yet, if that makes sense. It's a bit overwhelming, I need someone to make a youtube video that starts with “previously on Second LIfe” and then recaps 12 years of development.

Yep it is a major problem, especially considering the one environment they did give us is pretty bad. Any average "player" who plops down some PBR for the first time in the default environment is not going to be happy when it doesnt look like it did in the store or the pictures. Undoubtably it will hinder PBR adoption.

This is not true in my experience. I can author a PBR material built using a HDRi environment that matches my PBR friendly EEP in SL. I import it in and it looks exactly as I expect. I then take that PBR material into another PBR friendly EEP which is a desert environment and it looks different, because the light is different, but the PBR is still working as expected, the surface looks different because it's a different type of lighting. I then take the PBR into a winter environment and it looks different again because the lighting is different, but the PBR is still reflecting the surface as it should. I’ve not had time to make other diverse EEP’s to test in so the examples end there. The point is, the PBR is working correctly in all 3 environments, but looks different because the lighting is different which is to be expected because that’s how PBR works. Anyone who is expecting their PBR surfaces to remain consistent when travelling in SL without using a personal EEP all the time is going to be out of luck according to the opinions I've read in this thread. PBR is not the problem, and PBR compatible EEP’s are not the problem, both can work together and deliver predictable results. I think the problem is people's expectation for consistency, they may spend a lot of time and money on making their avatar look great to both themselves and hopefully others. Anyone who wants to jump on the PBR train is going to have to leave that mentality behind and embrace the diversity of environments that PBR will find itself in, or just use a personal EEP. Maybe after a few years of everyone moaning about how bad their avatars look landowners will naturally gravitate towards using more universal EEP settings. Or maybe LL will roll out a new default environment that is fit for purpose and actually works with all old and new content. This would surely greatly negate the problem.

I purchased a bunch of cheap PBR materials from the marketplace when I first started looking at PBR a month or so ago and some of them were very poorly created with roughness values not suitable for the surface types, resulting in many being too reflective. I guessed someone was using gloss maps for their roughness values, but who knows. Your wood material could be one of them. The PBR materials in the inventory library are good for testing, they all work well. There is also a pack on the MP of 1000 plus PBR materials sourced from AmbientCG.com, for free, for use under a creative commons license. I’ve tested maybe 30 of them and they all worked well enough.

The IBM folks were great, they were so enthusiastic about SL, and they paid ridiculously high fees for commissioned builds as did a lot of those big real life companies that jumped on the SL bandwagon back in the day.

I definitely recommend meshy.ai too. I’ve tried all notable 3D AI generators and imho meshy.ai is leading the field right now. You can generate a 3d model with a material and use it straight away in a static render. I still can’t reliably generate low poly topology suitable for real time rendering though, it just doesn't meet my standards, so I have to retopologize, then redo the UV’s which makes the material useless, so I then need to re texture it. It can be faster just to make the model from scratch. Sometimes I take the model and use it as a base in Zbrush to create something different and hopefully better which can be handy. I also find it very useful for concept work. I use stable diffusion to generate 2D concepts that I feed into the 3D ai generator. I can create entire 3d scene concepts this way, test what works and what doesn't and present more “finished” concepts. Plus using this little ai pipeline, I am presented with ideas that I would not have come up with myself. It can make my work feel more fresh and exciting and ironically, more original. Meshy is a great tool for 3D artists right now, I love it. On the other hand I also hate it because I know it (or some other ai) will eventually replace me and take my job.

What lovely shiny balls you have! What software are you using to create these PBR materials? Thanks.

Sorry I should have been more specific. I don’t care about MY legacy content, that I sell. If LL breaks the grid for ALL legacy content then that is obviously a bad business move and bad for the future of SL. But that is not my problem to solve, it is LL’s. So when I say I don’t care about legacy content, I mean I dont care about solving the problem of my old legacy content looking bad. If it doesn’t work anymore then I will just stop selling it rather than adapting it. Right now i'm only focused on PBR and the problems that presents for my specific PBR content. I shall rely on LL to sort out the rest 🤣 Edit - to add the reason I don’t care about my legacy content is that I haven't created anything for SL in 12 years! All my stuff is diffuse map and prim/sculpties based. Yet still, every single day for the last 12 years I make at least one sale. In 2024 my general response in my head to making sales is “WTF is wrong with you people, stop buying crappy old content and find newer better stuff”. I’ve always supported customers though as it's the right thing to do.

To be honest this post is all news to me as I’ve been gone for 12 years. I’ve never heard of Numb and Crawl and find it interesting that there is at least some widespread consistency to be found in the EEP settings currently being used on the grid, beyond the default. It makes me wonder if someone could leverage the popular “brand names” of Numb and Crawl and create PBR compatible versions of the EEP’s, branded under the same well known names. What we really need is for one single PBR friendly EEP to become dominant amongst all the other's. If one EEP is favoured and used by the majority of PBR users then it would offer content creators an option to use it as a basis under which to develop future PBR. It could steamroll from there into a world of joyful consistency.

Well that’s obvious to anyone reading this thread or trying PBR in world. The ONLY solution is to change the lighting model to one that is more realistic. I already create PBR for cross platform use, created using industry standard, realistic lighting models. I use realistic values for lighting just as I do for PBR surface parameters which is the universal system you speak of. This practice has been adopted widely, at least in the games industry from my experience. The only way to get PBR created using industry standard practices to work in SL is to change the lighting. Maybe people don’t want SL lit Jenna’s way but they should want it lit in a way that is fairly similar because it simulates realism to some degree. I am not using Jenna’s EEP but I am using something similar. Either way, both work with a standardised roughness/ metallic PBR workflow. I can import materials created for another platform and they work well enough using one of these EEP’s. Maybe the surfaces look slightly different due to the 2/3 ACES but it’s close enough given the inadequacies of SL. It is what it is. This is not my experience at all. I create content for Unreal Engine. I have taken a modular Scifi pack that I have been selling on Unreal Marketplacee for years and imported it into SL and built a scene with it. With the EEP's discussed earlier it looks close enough, in fact considering this is SL it looks great. Right now I am in a position where I can import PBR content created for other plaforms into SL and the only customisation I need to do is to reduce LOD's. I tried doing this with ALM and BP years ago but it was a still too much work to customise assets. That is no longer true today. By “Useless Engine” I assume you mean Unreal Engine, the most popular and accessible game engine in the world for developing AAA games, second only to Unity in general game development (I am a Epic fanboy!) ....but go on. Regarding the EEP's. If a PBR user has a PBR friendly EEP then the PBR should still look ok. If 10 users are all in the same space using different PBR friendly EEP's then the PBR will look diferent to each viewer as their lighting will be different, but the PBR materials should still be reflecting their lighting in a consistent and realistic way, if it doesnt then their EEP is not PBR friendly and they probably shouldnt be in a PBR environment. Regarding the club scenario with all the different lights, that is just chaos and you are right, my consistency bubble is well and truly burst here.

Despite still selling 1000’s of my own “legacy” products across various accounts I don't consider legacy content as part of the problem I am trying to solve. In fact I couldn't care less about legacy content. The problem I have been trying to solve is consistent rendering of PBR materials under different SL lighting environments.

The main purpose of PBR is to accurately simulate the physical behaviour of a light beam as it interacts with any given surface. PBR surfaces should be authored using realistic data values (all available online) in order to simulate the realistic absorption and reflection of light. This means PBR materials should render consistently across multiple platforms when placed within realistic lighting environments and indeed they do. So the problem with SL as discussed at length in this thread, is that the default lighting environment is not realistic, the light rays that are absorbed, scattered and reflected are too blue. The only solution is to change the environment to one that simulates light more realistically. @Jenna Huntsman free EEP on the marketplace is a good example of one that works. The sky still looks blue but the way the light interacts with various rough/metallic surfaces is acceptably realistic. So on a personal level the problem is solved. My 10 test materials look acceptable with my customised EEV. They look as good as they do in Unreal Engine before lighting is baked and post processing added, but that’s ok, they look acceptable considering this is SL. So my 10 test PBR materials of varying roughness and reflectivity look good in my EEP. I have achieved consistency in my little bubble of SL. I now know with confidence that I can import any of the 1000 + PBR materials I have authored in Substance Designer over the last 10+ years and they will look acceptable in my consistency bubble. So here is my prediction for the future. As people adopt PBR we will see lots of little consistency bubbles pop up on individual parcels and regions. They probably won't be exactly like my consistency bubble but they will be similar, they have to be if they want the PBR materials to look anywhere near realistic. As I mentioned earlier PBR relies on real data values for surface creation, so any roughness/metallic PBR materials sourced from websites or Substance Source or Megascans or wherever, should all be using consistent RL data values. SL users will tweak their EEP to make their PBR look more realistic and they should all arrive at settings that are fairly similar. I foresee a world of semi-consistency bubbles, my PBR materials may not look exactly the same in someone else's bubble but they should look close enough. If they don't then the EEP probably won’t be suitable for ANY PBR, so the end user will tweak their EEP until they create their own semi-consistent bubble. It won’t be perfect but I think it will be workable.

Yeah we need a levelling system like D&D. Get to lvl 100 and you unlock height map displacement and ray tracing.

Hasn't this already happened though? Just yesterday I was in a store looking at a PBR chair, basic wooden frame, with a fabric seat. The creator was using 8 materials on the chair, so that would be 32 x 1k textures which is absurd. If 2k textures are rolled out maybe LL could offest the impact by heavily reducing the number of surfaces/faces available on each piece of new mesh.

I was enticed back into SL by the introduction of PBR and have spent a few hours a week over the last month being a PBR tourist. Alchemy is definitely one of the best examples of usage I've seen. Well done on being a PBR pioneer! Are LL actually planning to introduce 2k textures or are you just wishful thinking? I think I remember right at the start of SL that we could import 2k textures but LL put a stop to that for obvious reasons. Maybe it’s finally time for 2k to shine. (apologies for the bad PBR pun).

Since realising I could highlight reflection probes I've been more nosey, looking at them in public spaces as well as poking around a few build platforms looking at WIP’s. I’ve seen a broad spectrum of usage ranging from single box probes around an entire building to numerous overlapping spheres as well as more considered usage focusing on individual spaces. Not much consistency yet in the usage I’ve seen. I’ve also noticed some weird effects with moving objects, for example a door opening inside the probe would cause the probe to recalculate the reflection capture which had a notable effect on the materials within the probe for just for a few seconds. Has anyone else noticed this?

Edit - NVM, I figured it out.