Day: April 5, 2024

The following notes were taken from my audio recording and chat log transcript of the Content Creation User Group (CCUG) meeting held on Thursday, April 4th, 2024.

Meeting Purpose

• The CCUG meeting is for discussion of work related to content creation in Second Life, including current and upcoming LL projects, and encompasses requests or comments from the community, together with related viewer development work. This meeting is held on alternate Thursdays at Hippotropolis.
• In regards to meetings:
  • Dates and times are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
  • Commence at 13:00 SLT on their respective dates.
  • Are conducted in a mix of Voice and text chat.
  • Are open to all with an interest in content creation.
• The notes herein are a summary of topics discussed and are not intended to be a full transcript of the meeting.

Official Viewers Status

• On Wednesday, April 3rd, the Materials Featurettes RC viewer updated to version 7.1.5.8472515256.
• On Tuesday, April 2nd, the Maintenance X RC viewer (usability improvements) updated to version 7.1.5.8443777128.

Both of these updates were to bring the above viewers to code parity with the current release viewer (with bug fixes to to the Featurettes viewer as well). The rest of the official viewers remain as:

• Release viewer: version 7.1.4.8149792635, formerly glTF PBR Materials Maintenance-2 RC viewer, promoted March 26, 2024.
• Release channel cohorts:
  • Maintenance-W RC (bug and crash fixes), version 7.1.5.8443591509, March 29.
  • Maintenance Y RC ( My Outfits folder improvements; ability to remove entries from landmark history + Maint Z RC integration), version 7.1.5.8448596295, March 29.
• Project viewers:
  • Puppetry project viewer, version 6.6.12.579958, May 11.

It is possible the glTF Maintenance-2 RC viewer might be promoted to de facto release status early in week ’13 (commencing Monday, March 25th, 2024).

Graphics / glTF

• Work continues on the GLTF Featurettes viewer + support.
  • The view is in RC, but the simulator-side support is still working its way through the system for full deployment on Agni (the Main grid).
  • The RC viewer has been undergoing numerous bug fixes related to both PBR Terrain textures and Mirrors, some of which are in the most recent update, others of which will be included at the viewer continues to be updated.
  • The UI/UX changes required for Mirrors to overcome confusion relating to the placement of things like Mirror reflection probes (with the creation of Mirrors described a “not intuitive”) is still under discussion at the Lab and so yet to be implemented within the Featurettes viewer.
  • The pricing structure for uploading 2K textures is currently being finalised, although it is not ready to be formally announced.
    • As with other services / uploads, the pricing looks like it will be based upon subscription level (e.g. cheaper for the likes of Premium Plus / Premium than for Plus / Basic) and the overall resolution of the texture.
    • Further work will also be required on the back-end services to fully support the upload of 2K textures.
    • An upshot of this is that at the time of writing, there is a communications mismatch between the viewer and the Aditi test regions supporting 2K texture uploads, resulting in such attempts falling over.
• The HDRI support (replacing the sky with an HDRI file when rendered locally within a viewer to assist creators in checking to confirm their objects render in SL as they are seen within the tools they use to create their content – e.g. Substance Painter – and any variations are not related to the shader / import pipe) is still being tweaked.
  • In particular, now it has been tested internally and seen as offering some potentially interesting uses over and above pure EEP settings, consideration is being given to making HDRI an actual sky setting with simulator-side support.
  • One aspect of this would be the ability to use the lighting effects of HDRI within EEP sky settings, thus providing more true-to-life lighting without losing the use of existing EEP settings. Another might be using HDRI maps inside buildings and structure and not having the sky setting lighting leak into the structure.
  • Again, it’s important to not adding back-end support for HDRI is a future implementation, rather than anything being worked on right now, and would require work on both the simulator and back-end services (e.g. a new asset type to support HDRI would be required).
• Light sources: there have been requests for the likes of point light shadows (e.g. so a map on a table casts is own shadows); the ability to explicitly state whether or not a light source casts a shadow or not; ability to support shadows from multiple light sources (depending on rendering settings).
  • Some of this might be addressed through glTF scene import, and / or through further adoption of the glTF specification for lighting (e.g. punctual lights / physical lights  – such as spotlight cones, etc.).
• The work of glTF scene imports officially commenced in week #14. This work will be tackled in a similar manner to the Featurettes viewer – elements added to the viewer but placed behind debug flags until such time as they can be properly tested as the simulator support can be added (initially via Aditi, the Beta grid).
  • The will allow the viewer to be worked on and tested (with user testing) iteratively, rather than the work disappearing into a viewer fork that doesn’t see the light of day for months.
• It was asked whether or not EXR might be a better option for SL skies rather than EEP + HDRI.
  • Runitai Linden noted he has experimented with EXR alongside of EEP and found that while EXR comes “close” to matching EEP skies, its doesn’t quite have the same range, whereas the HDRI lighting overlap with EEP offers easier flexibility of use.
  • He also noted again that the primary reason for providing HDRI support was to allow creators that means of reference checking their content between SL and their modelling tool to ensure it is appearing as expected after going through the SL upload pipe, etc., when compared to its appearance into their development tool.
• Does the emissive map “knock out” the normal map if it is bright? No, but it can overpower the normal may and cause bumpiness, etc., to be less distinct.

In Brief

• There was a general discussion on reflection probes and why they are limited in terms of shape (sphere or cube) and supporting other shapes+ illumination issues where probes overlap.
  • The shapes are necessarily limited largely as a result of performance stability.
  • It was acknowledged that blending lighting between probes is more a matter of improving / altering SL’s default ambient lighting model – which may well be looked at down the road.
  • The current advice is to – if necessary – “bomb” a scene with reflection probes  – and if that doesn’t work, disable probe ambience in favour of the global ambience – it will still allow the probe radiance and so generate reflections.
• Occlusion volumes: the question was asked if it will ever be possible to have occlusion volumes in SL such that a room and its contents are never rendered in a viewer until the user actually enters the room in question.
  • It was acknowledged that this is the kind of thing the work with reflection probes might lead to, in terms of the basic mechanics being similar from a user’s perspective.
  • However, there are no current plans for developing such occlusion volumes at present, and a feature request on how user might want to use them / see them as working has been requested so the idea can be more formally reviewed / considered.

Next Meeting

• 13:00 SLT, Thursday, April 18th, 2024, at the Hippotropolis Campsite.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a gathering of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.