Kitely announced this week that it has added support for physically-based rendering (PBR) materials in both virtual worlds and the Kitely Market. This update also includes support for textures up to 2,048 x 2,048 pixels in size.
PBR materials simulate how light interacts with various surfaces such as clay or metal, creating the appearance of rising and falling areas with realistic light reflections, allowing for more realistic textures.
This feature requires Firestorm 7.1.11 or higher.
Kitely is one of the first grids to support PBR materials by porting features from the upcoming OpenSim 0.9.3 release to the current OpenSim 0.9.2.2 based system.
“PBR is not yet supported on all OpenSim grids,” Oren Hurvitz, co-founder and vice president of R&D at Kitely, said in the announcement. “This is a feature that will be part of OpenSim 0.9.3, but that version of OpenSim is not yet complete and many grids, including Kitely, are still using the latest stable release, OpenSim 0.9.2.2. The reason Kitely can now support PBR is because we ported the PBR functionality from OpenSim 0.9.3 to the OpenSim version.”
Kitely Market has been updated to accommodate new features and the “Textures” category has been renamed to “Textures and Materials.” We encourage sellers to mention the use of PBR in their product descriptions, as items using PBR materials may not display correctly in grids that do not support that feature. Alternatively, sellers can include generic textures as fallbacks to ensure their product looks good on any grid.
“Kitely Market is the leading marketplace offering hypergrid, so we decided to support the latest graphics options before OpenSim 0.9.3 was even officially released,” said Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner. Hypergrid business.
This update also adds a new PRIM_REFLECTION_PROBE parameter to the GetPrimParams and SetPrimParams functions, providing support for reflection probes through LSL scripting.
Although PBR materials can technically be used for terrain textures, Kitely reports that some issues were encountered during testing. The world map uses PBR materials to display objects, but it does not display other PBR properties such as normal map or roughness, only the base color texture. PBR terrain textures do not currently appear on the world map.
For content creators, Kitely has added a new “Materials” folder to the user inventory to store PBR materials.
Creators interested in learning more about creating PBR material can check out Second Life’s documentation on the topic.