In the Cool VL Viewer v1.32.2.6, I implemented a new status bar indicator telling you what type of materials exist in the rendered scene and whether or not you are seeing them rendered "properly" or as intended by their creator.
The indicator is:
- DIF when no material at all exists in the rendered scene (only diffuse map textures present), meaning everything always render as intended, whatever the rendering mode.
- ALM when legacy materials are present, and you can see them rendering fine (i.e. you are either in ALM or PBR rendering modes).
- ALM when legacy materials are present, and you are in forward rendering mode, and thus only seeing their diffuse texture rendered.
- PBR when PBR materials are present and fully rendered, i.e. you are in PBR rendering mode.
- PBR when PBR materials are present but you are either in ALM or forward rendering modes and are only seeing the fallback texture provided by the creators of all the rendered PBR-enabled objects.
- PBR when PBR materials are present but you are either in ALM or forward rendering modes and there are objects without a creator-provided fallback texture, but you configured the viewer (from the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Deferred rendering" sub-menu) to use the base color map texture and parameters to render in place of the missing textures: you are therefore seeing a coarse approximation of those materials.
- PBR when PBR materials are present but you are either in ALM or forward rendering modes and there are objects without any adequate fallback (which may happen even with the base color map replacement hack, since this map might not even exist for some PBR materials).
- glTF (new in v1.32.2.9) when glTF scenes are present and fully rendered, i.e. you are in PBR rendering mode.
- glTF (new in v1.32.2.9) when glTF scenes are present but not rendered; i.e. when you are in ALM or forward rendering mode and cannot see them at all, or (new in v1.32.2.11) when your OpenGL driver failed to compile the glTF shaders and thus cannot render glTF assets.
The above meanings are also provided as a tool tip for the status indicator.
Note that, by default, your own avatar's attachments are not accounted for in this rendered material statistics; their accounting can be toggled on/off at any time by clicking on the material indicator (it is printed in bold characters when your avatar's attachments are accounted for). The rationale for this behaviour is that you perfectly know what your avatar is wearing and do not need to be reminded what you are "missing" when toggling to a rendering mode not capable to render its materials as intended.
Note also that PBR terrains are not accounted for in this indicator: they always render with at least the base color map texture anyway, in the Cool VL Viewer, whatever its rendering mode.
Finally, to avoid seeing far or very small objects with materials "polluting" the stats while they are not really visible in the rendered scene, there is a minimum virtual size area for objects' faces materials to be actually taken into account. By default this minimum area is 256 square pixels (e.g. 16x16 pixels rendered on screen), but this can be changed with the new "AccountMaterialsMinVSize" debug setting.
