On Monday 10th June Linden Lab officially announced “three groundbreaking updates designed to elevate your virtual experience: Mirrors, PBR Terrain, and 2K Textures“. The lab says that “these updates are designed to help you create more realistic and visually stunning environments in Second Life. Whether you’re a seasoned builder or just starting, these tools offer new possibilities for creativity and innovation“.
Everyone can download and try out the latest PBR viewer here. This is a big update from the lab and the Firestorm team hopes to have a full PBR viewer release within weeks now. Beta testing is still ongoing and preparation is wrapping up soon.
Here are the latest updates below…
Mirrors: Step into a more immersive world with real-time reflections. Our new mirror functionality uses reflection probes, providing stunning and dynamic reflections. Perfect for adding realism to your virtual environments, whether it’s for a sleek modern home or a bustling cityscape. You will find the options to make a reflection probe on the Build window, under Features.
PBR Terrain: Prepare to be amazed by the next level of terrain detail. With Physically Based Rendering (PBR), you can now apply advanced GLTF materials to your landscapes. This means your terrains can have intricate normal maps and metallic-roughness maps, bringing a new depth and realism to the ground beneath your feet.
2K Textures: Say hello to high-definition details. We have increased the maximum texture size from 1024×1024 to 2048×2048 pixels, allowing for more detailed and efficient textures. This upgrade is perfect for creators looking to enhance the visual richness of their builds, clothing, and objects.
Here are some additional notes for this release via the Release Notes page.
Additional notes for this release
- Second Life will only render the single closest planar reflection probe.
- With Mirrors enabled residents should expect a decrease in performance since everything is being rendered twice.
- PBR Terrain is only available on private regions at this time.
- Uploading 2k textures as part of bulk uploads will incur the higher 2k texture upload fee, which is implicitly agreed to during a bulk upload. See known issues below.
- Texture scaling occurs before we calculate upload fees, see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits#All_Viewers for guidelines.
- A 2048 x 512 texture upload will cost the same as a 1024 x 1024 because it is exactly the same number of pixels.
- 2k textures for Bakes on Mesh (BoM) is coming, meanwhile, please do not start creating 2k onion skin avatars.
- HDRI sky previews are now available to experiment with, in the Develop menu and we’d love to get your feedback on what you can imagine doing with them.
Along with several GLTF PBR materials fixes to make all our residents and our third party developers lives a little bit easier.
Spread the word about the latest PBR updates.
Daniel Voyager 