Alchemy Third-Party Viewer Now Includes PBR Graphics Features -- Watch These Demo Videos, Read More Details!

Alchemy, a third party Second Life viewer with a cult following of a few thousand users (by the developer's estimate), recently added the new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) graphics effects. With Firestorm's PBR update still in the works, I believe Alchemy is the first TPV to do so.

If you're experienced with installing and running executables, go here to download Alchemy.

The Alchemy team shared these videos with me (above and below) full of sweet reflective/lighting coolness, but PBR is not just about being able to achieve mirror effects:

"The metal shine is the easiest thing to show off," as the team's Tech Artist, Zanibar Pixelbottom, notes, "but it's a lot more than just that, even nonmetal and non shiny PBR materials get 'grounded' in the scene as they'll get the ambience of the scene casted on them."

Updating to PBR so quickly is on-brand for the Alchemy broad, lead developer Rye Cogtail tells me:

"[Alchemy updates tend] to follow the Linden development of new major and featurette branches rather closely, merging in what is ready or nearly so into Project or Beta releases. If memory serves, we were at Beta with PBR before Linden Lab had chosen to move it past their Project viewer phase.

"Having seen regressions in how the new rendering impacted legacy content diminish substantially as the Linden PBR project matured, and overall crash stability with Alchemy at nominal levels; the decision was clear to release PBR to the wider (non-Project) userbase."

Along with PBR, unique features to Alchemy include a lightbox floater with the LUT/sharpening/tonemapping adjusts and options. Or as Cogtail puts that in somewhat less non-technical terms:

"LUT(Look-Up Texture) and Tonemapping control the final look of the image.

"LUTs are used in the photo and cinema industry to adjust the colors of the image. LUTs directly remaps the image's colors.

"Tonemapping is (usually) a mathematical curve applied before LUT to map the HDR lighting of the PBR viewers to the sRGB/SDR range that most monitors work in. By default it is set to ACES, as this is what Linden Lab wanted to use.

"We have CAS and DLS as sharpening methods, both accomplish contrast-aware sharpen."

As all that suggests, Alchemy is pretty pointedly best for hardcore graphics lovers and the technically-minded. (And as with any executable, downloader beware!) I've also seen reports that it's pretty taxing on 3D graphics cards, so you may want to get out a spare fan before running.

Have you tried Alchemy? Share your experiences in Comments!

Comments

[Chris Thorkveld]

Alchemy has some amazing and esoteric cool stuff. It is technically advanced - it's also a very very good "daily driver" viewer - I routinely see it outperform the other more "mainstream" viewers in many/most cases - and I'm not a technically advanced user or a hardcore graphics lover - Alchemy when I use it on a good machine with standard "non-nerd" settings is pretty and fast and certainly no harder to SL in than any other viewer out there.

[Spiffy Voxel]

I've been using the current Alchemy Viewer for quite a while now, and the only problem I've had has been relearning a few things that are done differently on Firestorm. I don't have a super-powerful machine — 2017 iMac 27-inch — but the performance in-world is phenomenal! I now use it as my primary viewer with the official Second Life Viewer as a backup.

[Zane Zimer]

Cool VL Viewer has had PBR for quite some time now.

[Adrint]

Excellent viewer, but does have a few annoying bugs here and there.