2020 Content Creation User Group week #36 summary

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, September 3rd 2020 at 13:00 SLT. These meetings are chaired by Vir Linden, and agenda notes, meeting SLurl, etc, are are available on the Content Creation User Group wiki page.

EEP Fixes

Love Me Render

• The current Love Me Render (LMR) viewer (version 6.4.8.547427 at the time of writing) contains a number of EEP fixes (as well as other rendering updates) These include:
  • BUG-229107 [EEP] [Improvement] Ice level Slider Graduation.
  • SL-13539 [EEP] Large reflection on the water when facing certain angles.
  • BUG-228992 [EEP] Appearance lighting is broken when ALM is enabled.
  • BUG-228914 [EEP] Deferred Soften Shader fails to link when Atmospheric Shaders are disabled. This causes Debug viewer builds to crash.
  • BUG-228882 [EEP] Disabling glow rendering while ALM is off results in massive rendering flicker.
  • BUG-228781 [EEP] Specular color interpreted wrong (too bright) from point lights.
  • BUG-228581 [EEP] Specular map reflections are way too weak.
  • BUG-228840 [EEP] cloud texture is rendered backwards.
  • BUG-228431 [EEP] Water lighting is wrong at certain camera angles.
  • BUG-228752 [EEP] Sky turns black when render quality is lowered to Low-Mid.
  • BUG-225784 [EEP] BUG-225446 regression – HUDs are again affected by environment setting and BUG-225446 [FIXED] [EEP] HUDs are affected by Atmosphere & Lighting changes.
• These a further EEP updates to come, likely in the next LMR viewer, which will hopefully be issued in the next week or so. These should include a fix  to allow horizon haze to modify the Sun’s light and tint when it is close to the horizon.

Additional EEP Issues

• Moonlight: the Lab is also aware of a number of lighting issues related to the Moon (attenuation of moonlight through clouds, for example. Again, these will be addressed in time.
• Mainland ambient lighting: users have repeatedly noted that the default Mainland environment remains darker than under Windlight.
  • This is the result of an error made during the EEP deployment that now requires a simulator-side configuration update to be made that is slightly complex in terms of implementation.
  • Essentially, a code fix needs to be made, and then a new estate setting added to the simulator code to manage it, together with code to ensure the update is correctly propagated to the affected regions.
  •  Currently, the resources required to develop, test and implement the required changes are all heavily engaged in cloud uplift work.
• Density Multiplier issue: this is the result of the simulator restricting the multiple value. A fix for this is an upcoming simulator release.
• Linden Water / performance issue:
  • As noted in previous CCUG summaries, rendering Linden Water appears to impact viewer performance to a greater degree than previously (leading to some simply disabling Linden Water rendering (CTL-ALT-SHIFT-7).
  • LL currently don’t have a solution for this, in part because the precise point in rendering where the bottleneck seems to occur is proving hard to pin down.
  • Some  suggestions for dealing with it were put forward at the meeting, including:
    • As there does not appear to be occlusion culling for water, perhaps auto-disabling Linden Water from being rendered in the viewer above a certain altitude (where the water generally isn’t visible anyway).
    • Or adding a special texture UUID that, when set via EEP in a region / parcel,  resulting in Linden Water rendering being disabled (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-7, effectively) for all viewers within the region / parcel, rather than people having to manually disable Linden Water rendering. This could be helpful for major indoor shopping events, etc.
    • Note: both of the above were user-made suggestions, not ideas that have been implemented.
• Specularity issues: EEP has altered specularity rendering such that specularity in point lights can appear too bright, and in Sun / Moon light, too dim. Fixes for this are in the currently LMR viewer referenced above, but there is some disagreement as to how well (or not) they correct issues.
  • Part of this may be the result of EEP making adjustments so the specularity in objects appears more realistic, but creators have previously had to manually compensate for a weakness in specular map rendering in the past.

ARCTan

• Vir’s work in updating Jelly Dolls is now available in the Project Jelly viewer, currently availability as a project viewer (version 6.4.8.547487 at the time of writing). This work is also likely to find its way into a Maintenance viewer at some point.

In Brief

• Date of next meeting: probably Thursday, September 17th, 2020.