Useful PBR videos

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

With the new update to 0.9.2.2, we now have the first fully working(?) iteration of PBR available for us to play with.

There is a lot to take in for both creators and regular users, lighting and texturing can be quite a technical subject. But it is also a huge opportunity for making stunning new content and worlds for those that take up the challenge.

I will be posting my experiments and findings in due course, but for now I thought I would share some of the most useful primer videos that I have found so far that I have been following myself.

Firstly for absolute beginners, what even is PBR?


Then this Second Life university video by Boston Blaze is an excellent overview of everything involved relating to Second Life and OS. This was enough for me to get experimenting.


And finally, how to create "lighting probes" which are essential to the new lighting model and making PBR content look good inworld. Zanibar Pixelbottom has several videos on this topic and I recommend them all.


If you find anything in the above videos difficult to understand or require further explanation, please post below and I will do my best to help you.

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Hi Ozwell,

OpenSim 0.9.2.2 doesn't have full PBR support, that's only included in 0.9.3 (which has yet to be officially released). This means that what you currently see on Kitely is a work-in-progress. I don't know the full extent of what is missing but 0.9.3 has multiple patches for PBR support so my guess is that it's not inconsequential.

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

That is why I put a (?) behind "fully working"

So far the lighting modes we identified as broken in the Firestorm thread appear to be working, reflection probes can be created, GLTF files seem to upload correctly.

I am sure there will be a lot of devil in the detail currently, but it seems to be enough to get started and experimenting. From what I can see the "core" of the PBR system is present and usable.

But yes - probably foolhardy for anyone to start making drastic changes to their worlds or start uploading stuff to the marketplace just yet.

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

While I have been able to get a GLTF file to load correctly and remain consistent between logins, it does seem that there is an issue with uploading "regular" textures. Sometimes they are refusing to load entirely and just showing as a grey map. This only seems to impact textures uploaded since the recent update.

As you can see in the pic here, upload looks fine.

Second login, the normal map wont load.

Third login, nothing will load.

[Ilan Tochner]

What viewer (and version) did you upload these with?

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Firestorm 7.1.9.74745

They seem to be ok today. I have logged in and out several times and they seem to be behaving as expected.

EDIT: Dang, spoke too soon it seems. It took several attempts but.....



The diffuse and specular maps are both refusing to load in this case. To be clear, the ones that HAVE loaded are using other textures from previous upload attempts. Sometimes those dont load too, just in this specific instance only the lower one has failed.

[Ilan Tochner]

Please try uploading these using Firestorm 6.6.17 (the last version that didn't include PBR support). Did this fix the issue?

[Brayla Sana]

The new PBR viewer NEEDS <- (I would make this neon and blinking if I could) to be whitelisted in the antivirus. If it is not, the textures load all wonky. This is an issue in SL as well. There is a guide here to do it. You need to whitelist the viewer itself (firestorm.exe), slplugin.exe, slvoice.exe, and Inside the llplugin folder, dullahan_host.exe. the last one seems to be the one that is the most often missed. Not being whitelisted will cause textures to go grey.

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

Sorry for taking forever to respond! I was off on a little vacation and had no time to test. That does seem to have partially addressed what I am seeing. stopped the textures from going grey. That really does need to be put up in lights somewhere, as I think most people would reasonably expect Firestorm to ask for the permissions it needs either at install or whenever a feature requiring permissions is activated (kind of how voice does). Thank you Brayla for pointing that out.

But I still seem to have an issue with the textures refreshing/reloading randomly. Normally Vsync would be the answer but that does not seem to make a difference and again it only seems to be things I have uploaded recently being impacted.