Getting through to people that ‘OMG it is too light’ and ‘OMG it is too dark’ is not a fault in the viewer, it is a fundamental change in the lighting model. Many people live their lives with a flat toned WindLight/EEP, something like CalWL.

CalWL lives right on the edge in the old model, it is deliberately intended to flatten contrast and leave things featureless. Needless to say something that dependent on the prevailing light algorithm is going to look different in a new algorithm.

Sadly people are throwing up their hands in despair and running back to the previous version without trying to fix it. For now that works, in the long term it won’t.

That said, having reached a wider audience it opens the marketplace for people to start to create new EEPs that can become the new CalWL. However, as these are assets there is no way that anyone can wave a magic wand and say your CalWL preset is not PBR ready, you (user) need a new one, you have to change it.

As these are part of the library we can all take a copy and modify them, but many will balk at that idea, and I get it. I do hope to have time soon to give some guidance on how those that are willing to learn can do it for themselves. But we need to get past the denial and screaming stage first.

I put a number of tips into my release blog, covering how we can deal with certain performance issues. Firestorm has (of course) some settings that the default viewer does not; most useful for the low RAM people is probably the ability to restrict max texture size to 512 or 1024.

People who were previously running without ALM are now having to load more textures even for regular assets that have legacy materials. This will push up the demands on RAM and VRAM and sacrificing quality (resolution) may be the best short term option.

More tips here on the Firestorm blog, including:

1. Limit FPS – The viewer can limit the frames per second. Some people want to see the highest number possible in the FPS counter, but in practical terms, the benefit is limited, and your machine is working hard for no real benefit. Use the limit-FPS function to set the maximum number of frames per second. This is far better the the similar “VSync” option that many suggest, because it can be set to any arbitrary number and does not have to correlate with your monitor refresh rate.
2. Override VRAM – By default the viewer will try to make the best/most use of the resources of your PC. This includes the “VRAM”, the memory on your graphics card. Letting the viewer use all of this is fine while you are using the viewer, but is not so useful if you are watching Netflix or YouTube in the background. By using the VRAM override capability, you can tell the viewer to use only a part of the VRAM. This option is likely to change considerably in future updates to give you more control, for now this coarse control is a starting point. There are a number of problems that this setting can help address, but we’ll cover those in future blogs or support pages.

3. Max Texture Size – This viewer introduces a new large texture size. Moreover, PBR is generally more texture intensive. You can now select the maximum size of textures that you wish to see, alleviating additional memory pressure, especially on those of our users with smaller amounts of RAM and VRAM, at the cost of texture details.         Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands / Fruit Islands