Metaverse ProTips: Sansar First Impressions from a Second Life Builder

Brookston Holiday has been building in Second Life for 12 years. You can view his work on the SL Marketplace here and his ProMaterials brand.

I’m not really sure how I feel about Sansar. I got to try it last December, and I was so underwhelmed, I didn’t log on again for 6 months. It was clunky, and “experiences” downloaded so slowly that I simply couldn’t put up with it. Things have improved, things load a bit faster now, and there are features I’m excited about, but overall, it still feels like I’m fighting against it, rather than working with it.

Sansar has some really rough edges. Avatars walk slowly. Really, really slowly. I remember the first few times I logged into Second Life and how much fun it was, just to fly around. Sansar’s movement isn’t fun at all. The first thing I do now, when I go to a new experience, is hit the F4 key. F4 turns on the free camera mode, so you don’t have to wait five minutes to walk across a room.

But this is the creator beta, so I assume it is aimed at builders. Linden Lab is probably more worried about the creation tools then the viewer itself at this point. That would explain the poor avatar customization options, the lack of social features, and the generally clunky way you get around in both desktop and VR modes.

I am excited about the look of Sansar. Here's why: 

It really stacks up well against more modern game engines. When you go to upload a mesh and start messing with the materials, you’ll see slots for roughness and metalness maps. This sounds like PBR to me, which is great!

PBR, or “physically based rendering”, is a joy to work with compared to Second Life’s materials system. In PBR, you are basically describing the physical characteristics of an object, and the shader just works. You define how rough and how metallic an object is, and it responds to all lighting conditions realistically. So I was super excited to create a test object to see just how great the new materials will look. The answer? They look pretty crappy.

The shaders in Sansar don’t appear to be PBR

It doesn’t appear to look any better than Second Life. The roughness maps I uploaded seem to change the specular highlights, but that’s about it. The metalness doesn’t have any effect as far as I can tell. My best guess is they have yet to implement any sort of reflectivity, which is a big part of PBR. The realism of PBR is largely a result of the reflectivity changing based on the angle between your eyes and the surface of the object. The picture below is of a PBR shader. Notice how the ball is red on the front, but becomes more reflective of the environment on the sides. Sansar isn’t doing this. (NOTE: There is a good chance it all works perfectly and I’m doing something wrong! If I am, please let me know in the comments.)

A red ball using a PBR shader. Notice the reflectivity changes.

But let's set the materials system aside. Sansar was built with virtual reality headsets in mind. In VR, frame rate is hugely important for a comfortable experience. If things start to lag, it’s easy to get sick. So of course, Sansar has robust tools for builders to make sure their content is optimized. Except, no, not at all.

Most of the experiences I’ve visited within the Vive have problem areas. You’ll be walking around comfortably, and then an item comes into view that starts the headset jittering and lagging. At the Apollo experience I can view everything comfortably except the damn rocket! In the Egyptian exhibit, everything is fine except the map of Egypt in the center of the room.

When  you’re editing a scene, I think there should be big red arrows pointing to anything that is using an oddly large amount of system resources, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t any feedback at all. I try very hard to optimize things I build for Second Life, but I think I’m in the minority. It becomes a bigger issue when overly complex mesh can cause people to be physically ill, like in Sansar.

I’m going to keep trying Sansar. I’m excited about the idea of social VR experiences, and creating within that context. I think you should be too. I just hope that Sansar becomes a joy to build in, because right now, it really isn’t.

Brookston Holiday (@ProMaterials on Twitter) has been building in Second Life for over a decade. In his first life, he is a freelance 3d Artist, musician, and amateur sailor.

Comments

[Maxwell Graf]

are you baking the GI? If so, what setting - basic, standard or best? That will actually produce a better effect by far.

In the scene settings is where you are able to specify/turn it on, off. Then save & publish. During publish you will see "calculating global illumination" as part of the process.

Additionally, you can use an HDR map, convert to exr and upload that for your skybox - it will keep the HDR tonal qualities for the GI bake

[Carl Fravel]

Hi, Brookston, thanks for sharing your experiences.
I see many experiences in the Sansar Atlas that suggest that the 'look' can be stunningly beautiful once one gets the hang of setting up materials, lighting, and the baking settings well. Hang in there. You've hit the nail on the head: this is still "Creator Beta", focused on a time for creators to make a bunch of engaging experiences and content, and, by implication, to both learn how to do that, and to help Sansar prioritize their improvements. There are hundreds, probably more than 500 now, experiences in the Atlas. Many of them are very well done. I would also be curious what the GPU is in your PC, whether it is below, at, or above the recommended capability. It makes a lot of difference to be GTX 1060 or above. Also, there is a lot of emerging documentation now, both in the sansar help area and even a book on the Kindle store by . Have fun, be in touch.

[Ethos Erlanger]

I am one who is in favor of the "Slow Walk" that Sansar has achieved. It is realistic. And I am all in favor of reality even when it is Virtual. If you were in a model of your own home in Sansar, and walked from the front door to the back door in 2 seconds like we see in SL, you would be out the back door before you had time to grab a cookie from the kitchen.

Slow down and smell the roses.

[Carl Fravel]

Oh, for some more eye candy, in addition to the Atlas pictures and a free visit to Sansar experiences, there is now this Flickr group, Sansarian Delight, at https://www.flickr.com/groups/3583894@N21/

[Bufje]

Brookston Holiday, i think the problem is "building in SL for 12 years" and not using a true software? Sansar is bit more complex than SL about textures and lights, but you can find many infos about in help pages and forums. In Sansar, you have many shaders to map, and they are not so simple to understand.
Some hints: https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003259646-Materials-editing-and-shaders

And read the forum, many info about how use different software.
Then, joke a bit with GI, as Maxwell suggested.

But you have a shop caller Pro.Materials, so i think you already know all this things?

ps: in Help page, you can read about PBR: Sansar uses a custom physically based renderer (PBR) and doesn't use specular maps. However, Sansar does use roughness and metalness maps to define the specular highlights of an object.

Read this fucking manual :)

[Ciaran Laval]

The slow walking is due to trying to optimise the platform in VR, in testing LL have noticed that fast moving avatars look really weird in VR mode, but they are working on the issue.

https://modemworld.me/2017/08/05/bjorn-and-widely-linden-discuss-sansar/

[Brookston Holiday]

@Ciaran That's a really good point I hadn't thought about or read that article.

@Bufje I believe I set up the materials correctly, using the normal, rough, and metal channels.

@Maxwell I didn't bother with the GI as I just wanted to test the pbr shader. As I understand it, the GI bake will add indirect lighting info into the albedo. I'm sure it looks cool, but doesn't make the pbr reflections more realistic looking. As a side note, I and many other builders have been pre-baking GI onto our builds within Second Life for many years. The great benefit of Sansar having it be baked at the experience level, is that the same assets can be used in different lighting situations.

[JohnC]

What a luxury it must be to be able to dissolve all criticism by simply pointing out that you have not finished yet. “take it easy man, it might take years for us to reach our stated product goal”
Sansar cannot be criticised, it is bullet proof. Of course most other “professional” products at least attempt to make their initial offering resemble in some way what they hope to achieve. LL have had many, many years experience of the acceptance of their peculiar approach customer satisfaction in SL. There is an advert in England related to various paint and wood stain products, the slogan is “it does what is says on the can!” Is this not what any customer might expect of any product released as professionally produced. All I hear about Sansar are hopes for what might be when finally it reaches it's ultimate goal. Let us then hope that the currant LL are not anything like the LL that ran SL.

[Alessandro Cintoli]

Sansar open beta is Windows only. Which leads me to believe that either it will never be on the Mac or it will be a port. No thanks.