Improve Autoprobes
Extrude Ragu
Currently autoprobes are very environment unaware.
I was watching a creator friend of mine put together a tank in an area of my region that is high up in the sky and does not have probes set up. It was a flat area with not much around. I was surprised to see the reflections on the tank by default were not realistic at all with the bottom of the tank reflecting the sky as though there was no floor.
Rezzing a manual probe changed the lighting dramatically. It went from looking very wrong to normal.
I feel like this limitation with probes is going to stifle adoption of PBR in the long run as most people new to SL won't understand.
I'm aware that most game engines rely on creators placing manual probes, but SL is a unique place with unique problems. I think it would be good if at least research was conducted into the possibility of some environment awareness in the placement of autoprobes. For example by analysing the surrounding physics shape topography of a scene etc. I'm aware this could never be perfect, but I feel like it would be better than the situation we have now. This would help improve the success of PBR as a whole IMO.
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Observation Arcana
This might be fixed when windlights are updated again to allow for HDRI uploads, which replace the default sky with a texture with image-based lighting. I think this option was in the developer menu of a beta viewer, but I don't think we've seen updates to it anywhere? It was really pretty and useful, but I couldn't play with it as easily on the beta grid. Surprised it wasn't added along with PBR.
Kyrah Abattoir
Currently autoprobes appear to have the most trouble with skyboxes, I tend to encounter autoprobes that are stuck inside a wall or a floor.
Crexon Resident
If you want "good autoprobes" that would be raytracing. Raytracing does exactly what you are referring to that cast rays to take into account its surrounding environment. There have been some project SL viewers built with raytracing that prove its possible. But as a simple search on google will show you will need hardware like a good graphics card with raytracing cores to handle that computation in realtime.
There is no "best" autoprobes. If there was you would be an millionaire because you would be able to sell your product to all the game studios who could lay off most of their level artist. Im not saying its impossible, just studios with 10x the budget of LL cant do it.
The next step up from the current autoprobes are raytracing. Its the main reason why behind raytracing has been pushed hard by the game studios and graphics card manufactures. its not just the "better graphics omg" its because they can just build out a scene, then let the hardware "figure it out" and they could lay off level artist.