arton Rotaru

I guess they were referring to Prokofy thinking PBR is some sort of "super bump map". Which wasn't the point of this particular thread actually. But, who cares?

Well, the viewer is available to anyone to see it live in action for themselfs. This is nothing which has to be advertised by ads or something to be sold. It's just the new normal of what Second Life is from now on.

Of course it will be the same.

I can't help with blender, but in a usual high to low poly workflow you don't necessarily uv map and texture the high poly model. You just bake the normal, AO, curvature type of maps and paint just the lowpoly model. You can indeed bake down a highpoly diffuse map onto the lowpoly as well, by projection.

PBR is an addition, not a replacement for anything.

That's all fine and such! You know, all I'm saying is that the new feature announcement blog isn't the place to look for how things are done. We are still going to answer all your questions to our best knowledge, even if you are treating us as we were all idiots, over the years.

I get ya! But it's actually not that hard to remove a PBR material as you know by now. In fact you can remove the materials easily. And spreading fear and, uncertainty on an announcement of a new shiny is rather uncommon.

Once we have full glTF support, the plan is to have the MP showing the models like in Sketchfab with it's Model Inspector. I know, we aren't there yet, but one can dream, right. 😇

As I'm long enough around, I certainly do know all that, and I do aggree with all of that as well. However, I do have a more relaxed view on all this. We will indeed see all kinds of cruel stuff appearing on the grid. But, so what? I won't have to spend any L$ on those if I don't want to. Your world, your imagination is still the biggest strength of SL IMO.

Yeah, and it's unlikely that it will ever change. Hence, I used the term naive in my previous reply. They are relying on their users on many fronts.

Right, this comes down to the personal preferences of each creator. As the adoption rate is depending on that TPVs are catching up usually, there isn't much incentive to release PBR content right now. This will change once the majority of the userbase is running a PBR build. Many creators were waiting for PBR support in SL actually, as their texturing tools are pretty much PBR orientated in this day and age.

I'm afraid there isn't a straight answer to these questions. It will be more like, it depends, maybe, maybe not, could be, could be not. etc. pp...

That's why we are here, helping. Answering questions, trying to explain things in layman terms. The wiki is useful at least for those who are going to make tutorials, videos etc. to have a reference guide to how things work. The wiki page is mostly filled by residents as well. It's certainly not complete, or a perfect guide on "how to's". You could argue that all of that should have been in place perfectly fine (tutorials, guides etc.) before the viewer would have been released. But c'mon, that's not how things go and never will be. Expecting that is somewhat naive. In the official viewer Blinn-Phong has been changed to "Textures" again, as in the old viewers. Some complained it should remain Blinn-Phong, because that would be the appropriate term. But I can see why the Lab did change that back to "Textures". Having 2 new material terms in that release would be even more confusing to the regular resident. All this are somewhat expected teething problems, though. They will go away soon.

That's clear also! The race condition at login time could be a factor, though. I did indeed wipe the whole cache folder clean before doing that test.

Well Henri, trust me that I'm pretty aware of that.

Yeah, I can't say what is going on for certain, though. As Henri has a much better inside view of how the viewer works than I do. And before I did that testing with removing the PBR materials, I always have said that the legacy textures aren't be downloaded as well. So don't quote me on that.

That's what I thought would be the case as well. But I just tried it again. Fully empty cache, logging in, waiting until everything is loaded, removing all the PBR materials at once from an object, all the underlaying blinn-phong material maps are right there without any grey, or blurriness. So this looks pretty much as the legacy texture maps have been downloaded and cached already to me. If they are really being fetched that moment I did remove the PBR, texture loading seems to be blazingly fast.

Now you are entering into your complete nonsense mode again. Honestly, I couldn't care less to what do you apply to your objects or don't apply to your objects. Have a look at the SL PBR wiki page. Do you really think all that information there would be appropriate for a blog post announcing a new feature?

That's also not the case. None removes the PBR material. It doesn't change what have been applied as a blinn-phong material.

It's totally fine to dislike PBR. But apparently you dislike only the mechanisms of how to work with it. "How do I remove a PBR material from an object?" as a thread title, would have done the trick for your case, though. The PBR materials wiki page is still under construction. If there isn't a hint on how to remove PBR materials yet, there probably should be one added. The process is the same as for removing a texture though, so that isn't really something new. Being able to have 2 material types on a single face adds a layer of complexity, though. That's a given. An alternative would have been to have 2 different types of objects. PBR objects and Blinn-Phong objects. But then you wouldn't be able to add PBR materials to old content.

Lets be honest, with these settings at 4k you couldn't even complain if the performance wouldn't be good. 😇 I wouldn't recommend to set Reflection Detail to Realtime, though.

No, alpha sorting is facing the same issues as with blinn-phong materials. It's still best to avoid alpha blend when ever you can. Not just for the sorting issues, but especially for performance reasons.

One third is already enjoying a fresh look of Second Life then it seems.

You forgot to mention the great many who will enjoy this update. I'm running the PBR viewer for 18 month exclusively now. I can assure you, it takes some time to get used to it. After looking for so many years at basically the same "picture", every little change is somewhat disconcerting. That does go away after a week or two. I just installed the v6 viewer to see what that actually looked liked. It is truly awful compared to the GLTF viewer. Here is a gif with the v6 and the v7 viewer on my mainland parcel. Both at the default midday. (I just angled the sun like in the GLTF midday for better comparison reasons in v6.) In the v7 it is the default "new new" midday. The one that will be in the next RC release. v6 image looks like a picture that is in dire need of a restauration because it hung 30 years in a smokers home. Btw, this is legacy materials only in that shot.

See, you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about, and refuse to try to change that. On static images you can't even tell if you are looking at a baked diffuse map in a forward renderer or a blinn-phong, or pbr image taken in realtime. When your camera is moving is when the differences are revealed.