A new rendering system is coming to Second Life, known as PBR, or physically based rendering. This is the industry standard these days, and it’s really nice to see LL stepping up and making the major code change needed to support it.
If you have no idea what PBR is, and you want to know all the gory details, you can read about PBR on Wikipedia.
Some of the most eye-catching effects have to do with reflections. For example, realistic metals are one of the most difficult things to represent with the old rendering system. And PBR makes it a piece of cake!
The official SL viewer already has PBR enabled, and it’s coming to Firestorm Real Soon Now™.
Which brings me to the reason for writing this post… I’m revisiting some of my products to redo their textures to support PBR, starting with the carbon truss scope, which I textured before PBR became the way to do things, even in Blender.
Here’s a new render with the recommended SL HDRI sky lighting the scope.
Updated render of the BF Carbon Truss Telescope using PBR (physically based rendering)
I’ve redone all the materials using what Blender calls the Principled BSDF shader, which I’ve been using in Blender since it arrived there. Only now I can take the shader outputs directly into SL and expect the textured object to closely match how the render appears in Blender.
Some noticeable changes in the above image:
- You can clearly see the resin overlaying the carbon fibre
- The steel counterweights and support rod look much more realistic (and should provide realistic reflections of what surrounds them in SL)
- The matte black inside the tube and the optical path now has just the right touch of gloss to make it look believable (nothing in real life is totally matte)
- I’ve added a finder scope on the OTA, which you can easily remove from the scope if you like the plain look.
I can’t wait for the version of Firestorm with PBR to launch so I can try this out in SL!