arton Rotaru

I have never seen it documented anywhere. I also have never seen anybody wanting to do that. So, when you tried, let us know what happens, and we might be able to have an answer for it the next time. 🤓

Unpopular approach.....scale it significantly bigger. Dunno if it helps, though.

Turns out the disapearing HUDs with transparent water unticked is a new one. Will be addressed soon.

The HUD issue will be fixed in an upcoming viewer. Screen space reflections are basically for reflections on water. If your performance tanks, keep them off. DoF is working correctly for me. Have to focus the cam on something and zoom close onto it.

Hard to tell about the connection. I'd recommend downloading the project viewer and try it. Besides that its more texture maps, as Qie mentioned, the texture streaming is all new in this viewer. For me textures coming in much faster, as its only downloading the mip size it needs to display an 1:1 texel to pixel ratio. Its usually only 3 maps as well for PBR. Only when an emissive map is required, it might be 4 maps. Chances are that even your performance will be improved. Worth trying for sure, before thinking about to quit.

Yeah, semantics. It was just an example. Indeed you can remove such a shadow prim, but my point was; The owner of said thing doesn't use realtime shadows, instead he likes these shadow prims. Then a friend comes over, who happens to like realtime shadows though, and has them enabled. Get what I mean?

It won't look more funky than it always would be. If you have a baked shadow prim underneath an object, and someone has realtime shadows enabled, the funk is already there. Always has been like that.

Those who are working on that project do know the code base very well. DaveP is a Linden since 2005. If you follow them on github, you could see what a major rewrite of the renderpipe this project actually is. Nonetheless, we all, the devs, and the residents who are alpha testing this, are trying our very best to keep the over all look, and feel, of the SL we love so much, as we know it.

The known issues on the release notes page is super outdated. A lot of these are actually resolved as well, but other issues, not listed there are still open. The resolved issues list is also very incomplete. We talked about the improved performance earlier in this thread already. This project is not only about PBR eye candy. It also has a completely new texture streaming pipeline, besides several other performance improvements. It's as Innula says, they are shipping the performance improvments along with new features this time.

That sounds more like it's just legacy materials with high shine settings. All my meshes which have only PBR materials applied render in pure white with the regular viewer. It's not a forced changed, though. Actually according to the PBR wiki page, LL is recommending that objects that use PBR materials should have a legacy diffuse map applied as well. So with a non PBR viewer it has some texture to render.

Oh no! I hate sculpted prims. 😆 Since mesh I never touched a sculpty. But thank you for suggesting this. Appreciated!

While all of what you listed might be true, it's still a pretty picture. And I guess that is what was intended with this "mugshot" .

Well, I have a completely different point of view on that matter. I immediately switched to the materials workflow when it was introduced in Second Life (2013). And personally I wouldn't buy anything that isn't specular mapped. A normal map will spring to live with a specular map much more. But that comes down to personal preferences. I'm not saying that one is better than the other. Actually I'm still selling sculpted prims, without materials on my MP store as well. And I won't take them out of my store even when PBR is released.

That's the thing with PBR. The base color map has no lighting information. No AO shadowing, no specular highlights etc.. The heavy lifting is done by the in-game shader indeed. Commercials and game content are completely different things, though. Don't expect SL PBR content to be uber awesome. We still have that 1024x1024 texture size limit. Our models are lowpoly still. The SL renderer is not HDR. The resolution of the cube maps used in reflections is pretty low, for performance reasons. I don't know why these commercials aren't good looking to you (I don't watch such stuff), but I'd say it's still the artists who are to blame.

Well, personally i'm also still using Photoshop CS6. From your description it seems that you haven't done legacy materials yet. Specular, gloss maps, and the envirinment mask. That's the traditional material workflow it used to be in games before PBR came along. A transition from that legacy workflow to a PBR workflow isn't that hard actually. But if you did diffuse map only, like in the old days of SL, before we had materials, it will be kind of a learning curve indeed. However, the Metalness-roughness PBR workflow is actually somewhat easier than the legacy material workflow. Instead of creating a specular map, a gloss map and a environment mask, you will just have to create a roughness map. Which is just a grayscale map similar to a gloss map. Just that dark values means less roughness. Hence, black in the roughness map is the most shiny. The metallic map is straight forward. If the surface is metal, pure white, if's it's non-metal, pure black, Easy is that. Those maps can be painted in plain old photoshop just as we did legacy materials in the days before Quixel Ddo, or Substance Painter came along.

It's not cutting out PS. You can still create textures the traditional way. It's just that tools like Painter make it more convenient. In the end it's just texture maps. No matter with what they are created. It's also never the fault of a program when the result isn't what you expect it to be. It's ALWAYS the artist who is to blame.

Well, like I said, I did not watch the video, because there would be nothing in it that I didn't know already. But, here is the thing. First of all, it seems they kinda winged the video. I guess it was on the agenda to put something out to the broader public. As of now, it's only a few people who are actually helping testing the whole lot. More eyes, more good, though. Then, Runitai (DaveP) is the lead graphics programmer at LL. See, he is a programmer, not a texture artist. Probably he hadn't pretty content at hand with the permission to publish in the video. So what he has shown is his "programmer art", and probably some stuff that is laying around for month in these regions. Some crude objects, where people did some testing with. The gist of this is, more people should try this out on their own, to see what is right and what is wrong. This video doesn't look like it is the awsome, polished presentation of a finished project. It just isn't a finished project at all right now.

Do you mean the MeetMat army? That's programmer art, as I mentioned before. Those are for testing the render engine. These are naked, "untextured" guys just for testing the different values of metalness, roughness etc..

It's a 1000 times cooler than what we have now for reflections at least.

Sort of. It won't be as nice and accurate looking as the actual duplicates.

A cube map is what is the environment map. It's called cube map, because it's folded on the inside of a cube. I did not watch the video, but I guess that Strawberry had screen space reflections on, which would make her Avatar react immediately in the reflection. When you create a reflection probe from a prim, it will be the 10 meter sphere by default to prevent that there are tiny probes all around. To make that a box probe, go to the drop down menu in the reflection probe section of the build floater, and set it to Box. The sphere will turn into a box. Then you can scale this up to the usual prim limits. 64 meters. The bigger the better, or lets say, a probe of just 1 or 2 meters is pretty useless. When creating a probe for the inside of a room, you want to slightly penetrate the inside walls, floor, ceiling of said room, by a few cm so that the walls are also captured in the cube map.

There are 2 types of reflections. Those from the cube environment maps, the reflection probes generate, and screen space reflections. The latter will only reflect what is actually on screen (hence the name) and are in real time. The cube maps do update every 5 to 10 seconds or so. Kinda odd for us SLers, but something we will have to get used to I guess.

I did not watch the video, but what is shown in these 2 images is what is called programmer art. 😁 It's the graphics devs area where they make proof of concepts. Nothing more. The project is also not even in it's beta phase, so things are changing on a daily basis. I guess what you call fake reflections is the current implementation of screen space reflections.

PBR and the reflection probes doesn't come across in static pictures.

No, you are still missing the mark. I'm saying that the performance of the PBR viewer is much better for me even with all the rendering features turned on, than what I get with a current viewer with all the fancy features off. If that is considered a bad thing, I don't know what to say.