PBR Survey Results: Nearly half of Second Life users are waiting for PBR to work with Firestorm and other third-party viewers!

Here are the survey results for PBR in Second Life: While more than one in four people are excited to see physically-based rendering… almost half (44%!) are waiting for PBR to be integrated. Switch to Firestorm and other third-party viewers.

Firestorm alone is the most popular viewer among active SL users, far surpassing the official Linden Lab viewer, and as cool as the PBR reflective surface effect is, many prefer to wait until Firestorm has it.

The good news is that the volunteer team servicing the Firestorm project has announced that PBR integration is coming back in August. As one reader pointed out, the less good news is that it may take Firestorm some time to shine as a PBR.

There’s a lot of potential there, but right now there are a lot of flaws that need to be ironed out, and Firestorm is holding off until the flaws in PBR are ironed out, and it’s in a holding pattern because it’s the most widely used viewer. The number of people who can utilize PBR as users and creators will remain small. Don’t misunderstand. From what I’ve seen so far, I’m enthusiastic, but I don’t think it’s fully baked yet. (Pun intended.)
Posted by Spiffy Voxel

Or, to put it another way, major graphical improvements to the highly profitable virtual world of Second Life are virtually awaiting the efforts of a volunteer development team. Anyway, take a look at our early test demo of Godiva of Firestorm running PBR above to see what happens (eventually).