arton Rotaru

there is an exposure slider in grafix prefs. That might come in handy.

Are these the WL's used to lit the avatar and made everything just flat? Dumping those is long overdue IMO! 😇

EEP has just added additional features of Windlight. It did change actually nothing for me as I always used only 3 of the 4 environment presets. It added nothing to content creation.

No worries about PBR. It will take the same route as mesh did. As much as everything is build in mesh now, everything new will be PBR materials in a year or so. A few years further ahead and people will joke around how dull and dumb SL used to look before PBR.

I filed that one for ya! Good catch! https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-234872

The striping artifacts on the Ocean are coming from the Screen Space Reflections. I keep those turned off. And yes, it's a known issue since February actually. Unfortunately it hasn't been fixed yet.

The glitching probes at high altitudes should be fixed already in the GLTF Maint viewer. Give that a shot maybe. https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer/7.1.2.7215179142.html

I don't know. I never used the Black Dragon viewer myself. (I don't use any TPV actually). But it's possible that BD has a tonemapper on board as well. I know that the Alchemy viewer has tonemapping options.

The big difference is that the PBR viewer is using ACES tonemapping. This does apply to any content. What it does is that the colors are more saturated and the contrast is increased. You see the difference when you switch off the Post-Processing in the Snapshot floater. Without the ACES tonemapping the picture looks like it went through a smokers home for a decade or so. Now the sad part, the strength of ACES had to be dialed down by 33% to prevent legacy content from being oversaturated too much, and the contrast being too strong. So the tonemapping we have now in SL is a mix of 2/3 ACES and 1/3 Linear tonemapping.

I'm already in my bed now. I'll get back to you tomorrow. 😇

What we need is Point Shadows. Hence, having point lights cast shadows in all directions. I dunno how expensive those would be in SL though. Since we only have 2 shadow casters from directional lights already.

Actually that 6(8) point light limit did apply only to the non-ALM forward renderer. ALM on (deferred renderer) there was an infinite amount of point lights supported already. IIRC the number of point lights is now capped at 4096 in the PBR viewer. The limit on shadow casting projectors is still 2.

Thanks! The good thing is, point lights are rather cheap to render as 16 of those will be batched together. That doesn't apply to projector lights though. The not so good thing is that only 2 projectors will cast shadows at any given time still. If I switch on the headlights of my car infront of that room, the shadows inside may vanish. 🙃

Yeah like I said, the probe is starting the scanning of its surroundings from the center point of the probe. So it's drawing your legs onto the floor in the direction the ray hits from the center to the walls. I know something like these "mirrors" are somewhat confusing, and people will mistaken them for real mirrors. However, I still like those much more than the old cubemap reflections. So I keep making them. 😇

The plan is to start with one active mirror at any given time. If there are multiple mirrors around you, the closest to you would be active, the others won't.

What you see in the models of a mirror is the cubemap that is created by the reflection probe. The probe is "projecting" from it's center to the extends of the probe what it "sees" along the way. so everything you see in the mirrors is flat drawn onto a wall so to say. Hence the distortions. These are NOT realtime mirrors! Those will come later. You also never should set the reflection probes to Realtime in the graphics menu. However, I like my "mirrors". Much better than that old reflection of the standard cubemap we always had in SL.

Lets see... that are 13 point light sources plus the ceiling lamp which is a projector. All it takes to illuminate the entire room is the ceiling lamp though, all the other lights are more or less for decoration purposes, because I like them. (There is one more point light even when opening the hatch of that secretaire desk in the background.) 😇 This is PBR materials only inside that room. If somebody wants to take a look how that looks in action (static images just doesn't do it justice really) you'll find it here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dorjiev/80/87/802

I have put in close to 40 Jira reports over the course of the GLTF development so far. All of them have been fixed. If there is no Jira for a problem, it doesn't exist. That's the way it is.

Basically yes. The reference HDRi that has been chosen wasn't the nicest one either, but it did it's purpose during development. Everybody were on the same page, so to say. The different EEPs aren't a problem, since PBR is here to look correct under any environment. If you have funky EEPs, content will likely look funky as well. That's totally fine. Only EEPs shouldn't opt out of the post-processing. In that case materials that are created against ACES would be undersaturated, less contrasty. The culprit right now is the new Midday preset, as it's not very nice in it's current state. Personally I do use a custom Midday that has been created by Residents. Which is much warmer in temperature but still has the black ambient color to drive it by IBL.

Explaining the why would require to recap 18 month of development that was like a ride on a rollercoaster combined with a white water rafting tour. Just a few things. The Midday preset has been changed so that there would be a setting for creators to build against that does somewhat matches the viewport of Substance 3D Painter. The remaining 3 presets should have been reworked like the Midday as well. But on the course of development, a solution to address various problems was to auto-convert EEP environments to use the ACES tonemapping by default as well. To opt out of the post-processing you will have to re-save your EEPs with the Ambiance slider set to 0. All 4 presets in that menu have the ACES tonemapping post-processing. Some creators wanted to have an additional midday preset without the ACES tonemapping, though. So the Midday (Legacy) preset has been added back in. (IMO it shouldn't be there at all.) So in fact, only the Midday (Legacy) is actually like legacy because it has the post-processing tonemapping disabled by default. I would recommend to wrap your concerns regarding why the Midday can be darker than the Midnight preset in a Jira. It's a valid concern and might be addressed by the developers.

I skipped Bodies, Heads, EEP, and Animesh. PBR is something for me at least. 😇

Haha, no you shouldn't read all that, but at the beginning, this page explaines what IBL is and the interesting part is this image of the radiance and irradiance map. Those two images is what reflection probes actually create. The radiance is used for the reflections (think chrome), and the irradiance map for the ambient lighting of the scene.

This might help to understand what these reflection probes actually do. https://learnopengl.com/PBR/IBL/Diffuse-irradiance

FWIW, the ambient color of the new Midday setting is black to make the ambient lighting driven only by the Image Based Lighting (IBL) of the irradiance map that is created alongside the reflection map by the reflection probes. So when there is no light source around there won't be any light. The black ambient color and other parameters of the new Midday might be not set in stone yet.

I dunno who asked for EEP, but PBR came from Linden Lab, because they want to implement the full glTF standard into SL. Part of this glTF specification is the PBR Metallic-Roughness material. I'm not aware of any group who asked for glTF actually. 🤷‍♂️ Other than that I'm thinking pretty much the same as you about the mobile client. 😇