As I’m on a sort of vacation from my RL job this week and next week, I’ve been able to spend more time attending classes, fooling around with Blender, and thinking about what I want to make for fun, for creativity, and maybe for some $Lindens.

After attending the PBR class the other day in the #BlenderSchool classroom in Second Life, I tinkered with the assignment we were given – download and install the official SL PBR viewer (which is now an RC “release candidate” version), then go to the “Rumpus Room” sims on either the main grid or the “test grid,” and do a little testing of the changes to the edit floater for adding/tweaking the PBR textures. I didn’t have a “set” with everything in the new format, but I had 4 different test textures from class, so I used those.

There’s a snapshot from my Second Life profile feed here. It gives the location of one of the Rumpus Room sims where the PBR stuff is enabled. There’s a lot of interesting stuff rezzed out that people were testing, so I took a copy of a shader ball and played around with it. There was a large “SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED” sign rezzed out in the main grid

#AltText – A Gyazo.com snapshot of a jumble of Second Life objects with various reflective materials applied, with a “Safety Not Guaranteed” sign showing in the background.

When I logged in to the “test” grid and went to roughly the same area, there was a LOT more stuff rezzed out, and many people had laid things out in an orderly way, with floating text above each object giving the different settings they used in the new PBR Materials edit floater. Other people loaded up “shader balls” with textures they added. Apparently Blender is capable of exporting a single file that contains the “set” of PBR maps, that can be dragged and dropped on objects. Or we can pay to upload each of 3 or 4 maps separately or in a batch (that’s going to make uploading textures more expensive for anyone who never got around to playing with the old “Blinn-Phong” systems that is how we’ll refer to the previous SL materials system.

#AltText – a closeup of a slightly differently textured “shaderball” showing a golden inner color and a copper-patina outer color, next to a Second Life avatar wearing a top hat.

This picture doesn’t show the shininess of the 2 colors, but just changing the tints in the “Emissive” mask was fun. Other people were obviously working on more advanced objects in both the main and test grids. My old hat still shows the little golden glints in it from the old Blinn-Phong materials I had set up in it – there’s a bit of lacy texture that’s about as shiny-metallic as the old system could get, but as it’s just very open Victorian lace, it’s not too stupid looking.

Resources:

An approved HDRI lighting texture for testing purposes (also a couple of “node trees” for Blender in the .zip file from GitHub

Link to the PBR Materials Project RC viewer, and Release Notes

Link to the SL PBR Materials Wiki.

Link to the Firestorm viewer blog that discusses PBR/glTF