Porky Gorky

Thanks!. I read the wiki link Viola posted, then googled ”beware the mole people” which took me to a 2008 transcript of a meeting where the LDPW was launched. I was delighted to see the first resident speaker was Prok, calling the Lindens out on their BS and trying to hold them to account. And she is still doing it now in this thread. What a legend!

Who are these mole people? Are they forum mods or something more special? Someone please catch me up on the mole people origin story, thanks!

BTW, learning that you could highlight reflection probes is a top tip! I never realised you could do that. I highlighted the probes at the Alchemy club and was really surprised by how many they used. Spheres within spheres, all the spheres overlapping to some degree. It was a sight to behold and very interesting.

Maybe it could be considered an acceptable problem to live with, given the shortcomings of the platform and the problem discussed in the last few pages regarding shadowed tiled materials. SL must have many thousands of examples already where multiple alpha blended surfaces are visible to people, @Frionil Fang mentioned two examples just looking out the window of their prefab. It’s certainly worth testing in a building I think to see how prevalent the blending order problem is.

The Alchemy club seems to be a mixture of PBR materials with occlusion shadows, maybe baked from the original model and tiled PBR materials that lack shadows from the environment, These seem to work well in some areas and not so well in others. This opinion was formed after I spent 10 mins moving my camera around specifically looking at shadows though. When I step back from that and look at the build from a holistic perspective it looks great. When I came back to SL a few weeks ago Alchemy was the first place I visited to see an example of PBR and on that visit I didn’t notice any issues with shadows because I was not looking for any issues. That being said I can see how various elements could be improved by adding shadows on alpha blended polys layered on top if thats an option. I guess the question is do they need to bother as it already looks good?

Yeah I was calling it the decal approach as it simulates slapping down separate alpha blended geometry, but it’s obviously a poor substitute for actual decals. Please speak more about the blending order problems? Thanks

Thanks! The decal analogy is a good one. I guess creators who want to sell prefab buildings with realistic AO and higher resolution materials have 2 choices: 1. The decal approach which will optimize material usage but cost extra Li due to all the extra polys. 2. The baking AO directly into materials approach which would optimize Li but would result in a performance cost as it would require many more custom made materials. Option 1 is the responsible approach to take. I think Option 2 is maybe the easier approach to take and content may look better. I can see a scenario where creators choose option 2 in order to keep the Li count down and pass the performance issue on to the end user. Maybe there is a balance to be found between the two.

I’m not completely sure I understand this, which I'm sure is due to my brain and not your explanation. The way I interpret this is to have 2 layers of polygons, a base layer with the high resolution tiled PBR materials and then another layer, offset slightly in front of the base layer which contains the occlusion shadows, blending into the alpha. So essentially layering shadows on top of tiled surfaces using extra polygons? Is that the gist?

Hi @Charlotte Bartlett thanks for the encouragement / pep talk. It's genuinly appreciated. I’ve been testing sphere probes in non rectangular interior spaces and I am achieving more acceptable results. Spheres seem to allow some level of overlapping. Do you know how overlapping probes work in SL with regards to their importance? We can’t assign importance values to probes. Unity documentation says “By default, Unity calculates the intersection between the reflective object’s bounding box and each of the overlapping probe zones; the zone which has the largest volume of intersection with the bounding box is the one that will be selected.” Do you know if this how it works in SL? Also I seem to be using a lot more probes, do you know how costly probes are on performance? I’ve used many and haven't noticed any performance loss, but I am using a workstation built for rendering, so not your average rig. Thanks

Yep, apparently you are absolutely right! This is one of them “I feel like a complete idiot" moments. I just assumed you needed edit rights to land to change it. Please forgive my noobishness.

Yes please @Gabriele Graves, I would love to visit! I’ll be the guy wandering around using an avatar made in 2010 🙂 Thanks.

Yeah I guess that is true. I found the Alchemical Sandbox by accident whilst being nosey, looking at thier PBR products. It made me wonder if there are any other PBR pioneers out there who are generous enough to run a sandbox.

Is anyone aware of any privately owned sandboxes that have changed their EEP to better suit PBR? I found the Alchemical Sandbox which has an interesting environment and I am wondering if there are more out there? Thanks

Thank you very much, perfectly explained and with screenshots too, you rock! I’ve used the projection modifier to bake high poly to low poly numerous times so this all makes perfect sense. I’ve just never considered using the projection modifier to bake low poly to nearly-no poly, it’s a great idea. Thanks for the time and effort you spent explaining it.

Hi @arton Rotaru I realise you posted this comment two and half years ago but I see both you and the thread are still active so I am not sure this is officially necroposting. Anyway… Please can you go into more detail on this process using 3DS Max? I am unsure exactly what texture is being projected? Are we talking about rendered images of the final model on alpha backgrounds, one for each side? Also not sure what you mean by projected. When you say imposter model, these are the polygons that make up the lowest LOD i assume and do these polys need to be hidden in all the higher LOD models? What % of the UV space would you use for the imposter UV’s on for example a chair with a single texture at 1024x1024? Thanks alot for any info you can provide, it seems like an excellent idea, I'm just not sure of the best method to achieve it. Thanks. Edit: Here is arton's answer if anyone is interested.

I agree, ZBrush has better computational power and can handle multiple millions of polygons whereas Blender tends to struggle, ZBrush beats blender hands down in the level of detail that can be achieved. When it comes to digital sculpting the only thing Blender beats ZBrush on is price.

If you can afford the license for ZBrush and Substance then you should use them both. A common workflow involves sculpting a high poly model in ZBrush, then create the low poly model in your 3D modeling software, then use Substance Painter to bake your high poly to low poly maps, generating as many maps as you can including normals, curvature, thickness, AO and position. These maps will feed into the smart materials in Substance Painter offering you more functionality when texturing. You can also use Substance Designer to author your own tileable basic materials or smart/procedural materials for you to use in Substance Painter or you can import basic tileable PBR materials straight into SL.

I think a reasonable solution to the problem is for LL to deploy a new decent, default grid wide EEP setting that doesn't suck like the current one. We need a base standard default lighting model that both PBR and BP creators/users are reasonably happy with. This should offer consistency for creators and users and consistency is important for physical based rendering, People are still free to adjust their own EEP settings and creators are still free to support those niche requirements. Just give us an acceptable and consistent base standard to work from.

I arrived back in SL 2 weeks ago, drawn in by the PBR buzzword. I wondered if it was worth my effort to make my 3D PBR content compatible with SL as it’s generally made using a metallic/roughness workflow. After 2 weeks of testing and learning I fear you may be 100% right. Not a complete waste of time though, i’ve been gone 12 years, but I want to get some land, build something cool, as long as I have 100% control of the environment then the PBR will work.

Nope, but good idea, I should have tried.

I don’t have land to test EEP settings. A while ago I attached a bunch of objects with various PBR materials to my avatar and visited dozens of parcels with different EEP settings to see how they look. The results ranged from amazing to terrible, however the takeaway lesson I learned is that there is no consistency at all in the environments within SL apart from with the default settings which makes everything too blue. I was left with the question; How do I create and sell PBR houses when there is no standardized lighting model? This question led me back to these forums after many years away. I found content creators had already answered the question, they are going to ship their houses with recommended EEP settings. Seems like a reasonable solution given the problem at hand. So then I consider the new PBR prefab business. I sell a prefab house with recommended EEP settings. The end user is going to need furniture. If they go buy furniture made by another creator (who used different EEP settings) it may not look right, Ok I think, so I have to sell furniture too, oh and trees and landscaping and all the things! Then I start thinking about the avatars using my house. Once avatars start getting PBR’ed up to the maximum, will they look good in my EEP settings? Maybe I should sell avatars and every possible accessory they could ever want, that will solve the problem! So what I need to do is design and sell every single PBR product my house owner might ever need so that everything looks good in my recommended EEP settings. At this point I just continued making content for Unreal Engine where THINGS MAKE SENSE!!

On the first day of testing Reflection Probes I tried placing one large probe over a whole PBR house and it didn’t work. At first I thought it was working (when viewed from a distance) because I was able to reduce some of the blue sky color which was reflecting on the materials which made them look nicer and more accurate. However once I got in close the reflections were not accurate at all. Reflections were being captured from outside the walls and from adjacent rooms etc. I’ve tested more since then and learned that the reflection probe creates a volume. It is from the center of this volume that an image is taken of its surroundings which is then used to generate the reflection and ambiance effects. So there would need to be a reflection probe (or multiple probes) in each room or space within the building in order to achieve accurate reflections and ambient light bouncing.

I think I am starting to see the bigger picture thanks to the last 2 posts, so thanks for that! So far all my PBR tests have been done in sandboxes where I can’t control the EEP. The PBR reflects the sky color too much so I have compensated for this by using the reflection probes to make the materials look more accurate. I seem to have got into the mindset that the Reflection Probe volume has to encompass every PBR material in order for it to look correct. I think the way forward is to explore a balance between more suitable EEP settings and more strategic use of Reflection Probes. More testing required.

I look forward to seeing the PBR buildings that creators produce however I fear they will be too restricted by the limitation of the Reflection Probes to be that interesting, I like curves and organic and unconventional architecture but I cannot see how that can be achieved right now if probes need to be included.

Yep that is true. I meant that only PBR materials within that volume would be affected by the reflection probe, compared to PBR materials outside of the volume. I wasn’t considering non PBR things.