PBR texturing and problems - a rundown.

Q - What is PBR and how does it relate to second life?

A - PBR (short for Physically-Based Rendering) texturing is a semi new format used in the 3d industry that is used in current render engines, Second life has now been upgraded to take advantage of this new format, leading to new opportunities with enhanced textures that more realistically interact with light with a high level of focus on improved metal and emissive (glowing) representation.

Q - How does it differ from the old format?

A - The diffuse/specular/normal workflow has been replaced with a new workflow of Base Color/Combined roughness metal/Normal/Emissive (4 textures in total, in addition there is now no need to apply each map separately or upload separately as they can be packaged together in a material which can simply be dragged and dropped onto an object. 

In your inventory they should look like this -

Double clicking the item (now known as a material) will display the textures in their material slots.

Clicking properties in the inventory will bring up short details.

Q - How do I use them in SL?

A - It's pretty simple, just drag and drop the material from your inventory onto a object.

To enable reflections you'll need to spawn a cube scaled to the object with the "reflection probe" and "dynamic options" selected.

From there you should be good to go!, No need to adjust values lights or shadow as everything should now be handled by the system!

Q - So what are the advantages?

A - The advantages are multiple and include

    - Increased and more realistic visual appearance

    - Emissive mapping

    - Reflections

    - Very little need for baked shadows or lighting adjustments (but as a         side note I still like to bake my AO into my base color.)

    - Improved pipeline, nearly all 3dCG software including Blender now use     and support PBR material creation making for a much better and easier     creation experience.

Q - What are the disadvantages?

A - There a couple

    - Increased processing (GPU)

    - Currently only SLviewer is supported.

Q - So only SLviewer is supported?

A - Yes, however Firestorm is working on a PBR viewer however it's a few months away with currently an Alpha/Beta version in testing, those that use Firestorm will have to grit their teeth and use SLviewer or wait.

If you try and use Firestorm viewer you'll end up with objects displayed as white and the material in your inventory denoted with a ?, it will look like this -

Q - Can I get a refund if I'm having problems?

A - Currently I only offer refunds if the material/item is proven defective within reason, sadly despite my multiple efforts to warn people of the issues with firestorm during PBR implementation, many people have just ignored the warnings and purchased without knowledge of what PBR is, this has led me to withdraw refund options in this circumstance as I can not prevent this occurrence from happening. 

I hope this article helps people in SL adapt to PBR as it's an exciting new upgrade!

Have fun!