PBR Officially Part of Second Life: Here's Starting Tips for Creators Interested in Playing With Physically Based Rendering in the Virtual World

Beholding a PBR in the Rumpus Room sandbox region

At long last, physically based rendering (i.e. PBR, i.e. reflective surfaces and such) are officially part of Second Life, integrated into the latest update to the official viewer. To see the PBR effect in all its glory first-hand, click here to teleport to the Rumpus sandbox regions.

"I think we will look back on this as another milestone in SL history, as impactful as the introduction of sculpties, or mesh, or material texturing," Max Graf, longtime 3D content creator, tells me. Often gruff or outright cranky about Second Life as a platform, Graf is pretty bullish with this update, with some qualifiers: "It is a really good start, though I am most excited about revisions and updates to this process going forward, especially how it will affect environments and terrains. PBR is a massive step forward for SL."

 

As that suggests, there's been some reported issues with PBR for Mac users (see below). But for now, Max has some starting tips/links for creators who want to play with PBR:

 

"It does not work on terrain yet, and at first a lot of things are going to look odd, like water, which is a hot mess right now. Eventually terrain will include smart materials but not yet. It will most likely be a different texturing method in world (as opposed to the current hi and low corner limits) as well as GLTF. Reflection probes are critical to PRB really working as it should.

 

"Blender has smart material /PBR capabilities, but if you do not already have that, Material Maker, s a free, open source app that does a very good job doing what Substance does, without a sub, because fuck Adobe. Adobe does have one tool I would suggest, however, and it is free." (OK, so don't fully fuck Adobe.)

 

Here's a before/after tutorial from Max on adjusting water for full PBR effect:

"The look of water can be changed within a reflection probe: to make it not so blue, but a different method is to create a new water by copying one from your library into a new folder (I called mine 'my environments') and adjusting the settings there." (More on probes here.) "This is the result [bottom pic]: You can see by adjusting the fresnel sliders it made the sky reflection lessen."

"Dkronfeld", who has a great Mac for running Second Life, does warn that other Mac users may have problems with the current build of PBR, and should lower their view distance:

"It slaughters performance, at least on Macs. I have to reduce my draw distance from 256 to 128 to make it usable. I'm trying this on an M3 Max based MacBook Pro and the problem that I'm getting is that if I'm moving around a lot (especially turning), the movement becomes very, very choppy, which does not happen with non-PBR viewers. The frame rate remains high though. Things are more or less okay if I lower my draw distance to 128 (from 256)."

Much more soon. And if you have PBR tips and tutorials, please post in Comments below!

Comments

[maxwell graf]

I should mention that I am using a 12 year old PC, 1st gen i7 chip, 64GB of ddr3 and a 2070 super, running on ultra and still getting about 50-80 fps running at 1 gig. I notice with that the updating on dynamic reflection probes is somewhat skippy, only changing every other second or so, but that may be the norm.

BONUS: for importing GLTF files to SL, grab GLTF packer which packs them so your normal maps don't compress, causing detail loss. You can donate to the creator in world, too: Ai (Extrude.Ragu). Awesome tool by one of our own creative folks:

https://aiaicapta.in/gltf-packer/

[maxwell graf]

Heads up courtesy of Nylon Pinkney who spotted this critical info:

"Meshes uploaded after the PBR release will look slightly different (and more accurate in your editor of choice) due to a change in the way SL handles mesh tangents (previously tangents were discarded at upload - this is no longer the case). This will mean that a PBR material applied to a mesh before PBR launched (28th nov) MIGHT LOOK INCORRECT; a simple REUPLOAD OF THE MESH WILL SOLVE THIS. This is not required, but recommended."

"Upload fees are good for the economy." - Nobody

[Jess]

sl looks worse now overall. A lot of clothing I loved looks worse. hair looks worse. This was definitely what i needed to drive me away. Most people I know left anyway.

[anon]

It's been so long that J actually forgot SL asks you to pay to contribute user content. it feels so backwards now

[Adeon Writer]

> Jess
sl looks worse now overall. A lot of clothing I loved looks worse. hair looks worse. This was definitely what i needed to drive me away. Most people I know left anyway.

yeah. i heard people cite this over a da de ago of why they should not impliment pbr. there is no "make pbr" button for old content, and diffuse content is going to suddenly look bad - and we have decades of it.

[Dana Enyo]

I am so NOT a technical expert on PBR. But I'm learning and experimenting with using it for clothing. That has a whole set of challenges for wearers (unlike furniture and buildings, the environment is going to change with every teleport), so I'm trying to do some education so an av knows what to expect. (And I hope to enjoy the inevitable surprises.)
So these aren't tutorials, but I think there is real information in these images and videos! Full disclosure: some of these promote items I sell, but I still think they inform. Flickr Album: https://www.flickr.com/gp/danaenyo/cpz9471w6C