Nagachief Darkstone

I appreciate the feedback, there's a few areas that do likely look a bit strange from resolution, such as the areas near the windows where the interior parts of the front wall are bespoke textures, rather than tiled. This hopefully will be improved when 2k textures come around do the sheer size of the object. I'm hoping at some point we get a good solution to mixing tiled and bespoke mesh textures since there are probably some areas that indeed don't work quite well due to how AO and SSAO behaves. Since both effects are removed by direct light, it can look wildly different depending if shadows are on or not. I know glTF scenes can support multiple UV maps, so that could be a solution in the future.

The pursuit to realism is useful in pushing graphics techniques to be more advanced and flexible. It's like the speedboat challenges for 3D Printers where you try to make the fastest benchy print while looking like benchy. Both the push to realism and the fastest Benchy allows us to figure out improved, novel methods in pursuing our goals. In the case of 3D Printing, the knowledge gained from Speedboating has greatly improved print quality, slicer methods, and overall print times. As with the push to realism, the novel and improved methods of graphics rendering we've achieved allow our more stylized worlds to be more diverse, expressive, and vibrant. Those newfound abilities to push more triangles and effects can go towards even smoother stylized characters rather than gritty realism. I suppose this is a long-winded way to say realism and stylized can coexist.

I've been on SL for probably longer than is healthy, lol. I don't think Second Life is inherently toxic. I do think there are toxic spaces within it, though. My best advice for those is if they don't pass the vibe check, find a new hangout. Leaving sucks but your mental well-being is always the most important thing. I think the most pressing thing is fear of change, though. It's something that I've seen come and go in cycles with any big change or new feature. Ultimately, the fears never come to bear each new big feature. Sometimes perhaps a disappointment of LL not going far enough but never catastrophe. I remember when people lost their minds over mesh and declared no-mesh zones. Those no-mesh zones are gone. It turns out that people moved on and adapted. Those that didn't, left. And that's okay. It didn't doom Second Life. As with Windlight, as with mesh, as with advanced lighting model, as with EEP: We will get through this with glTF/PBR and Second Life will survive and be a little better for a little while.

There is supposed to be a sheen on nonmetal objects, though that does seem oddly intense, have you put up a reflection probe in that interior room? As for AO maps, please don't invert them, white should be no occlusion, black should be fully occluded. You'll get real bad results if you try to use AO to remove the sheen as it will darken any pixel not in direct light. If you have an entirely black AO channel, the object will be entirely black where it's not lit.

Here's a couple of clips + snapshot of a fully PBR scene I cobbled together. Scene clip Scene clip, but with more rain

Finally stopped being lazy and tried out the materials part of the material viewer with one of my own objects. On the left, is the PBR MetalRough, on the right is the SpecGloss version. I tried to keep their smart masks the same unless it made no sense for the MetalRough variant (since I do a lot of extra work on the SpecGloss to use the environment channel)

From my experience with using Second Life: -CPU is the main component you should focus on; it appears the bulk of rendering is software rendering. Second Life will only use 2 cores, despite having 10+ threads. So, look for a CPU with high single core performance. -RAM is a massive factor in performance, up until you get to around 10 GB -HDD speed is a factor for loading assets, and moving your cache off the system drive will increase system stability. (Either put it on a SSD or create a RAMDisk) -GPU mostly handles textures and post-processing (FXAA, Bloom, Deferred Rendering).

Which doesn't bother me in the slightest. Sometimes you just have to drop users that are hampering progress.

I know I am! The effect is twofold for me. :catvery-happy: First, it (hopefully) means the end of broken avatars. Second, it forces people to use the latest viewer, which means the special effects and new features I use that accidently crash older viewers can be seen properly! (Several people I know are crashed by me wearing a rigged mesh and they are using snowglobe/1.23/pheonix-based viewer)