EEP changes the
world around you.
Sky, sun, moon, clouds, atmosphere, water, ambient light and the passage of time. If you change the mood and lighting of the whole scene, you are probably dealing with EEP.
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EEP & PBR
SECOND LIFE • START HERE
EEP & PBR
WITHOUT THE
TECHNOBABBLE.
Why Second Life looks the way it does, how WindLight became EEP, what PBR changed, and why the same shiny couch can look gorgeous in one room and vaguely blue in another.
YOU ONLY NEED TO KNOW THIS
EEP changes the
PBR changes how
surfaces react.
Metal, wood, fabric, plastic, paint and other materials can respond to light in more believable ways. A polished metal surface should not behave like rough cloth, even if both happen to be gray.
EEPlights the world+PBRreacts to that light=THE LOOK YOU SEE
HOW WE GOT HERE
WindLight → EEP → PBR
These names get thrown around like everybody was present for the previous twenty years of Second Life. You were not required to be. Here's the useful version.
BEFORE EEP
WindLight
WindLight was Second Life's older environment and atmospheric lighting system. Residents used custom WindLight presets to change skies, water, haze, sunlight and the overall mood of the world. Photographers built enormous collections of them, which is one reason you'll still hear residents say “WindLight” when they really mean an environment preset.
Still useful to know: If somebody asks what WindLight you used, they probably are not asking you to install ancient software. They're using the old name for the kind of environment we now handle through EEP.
2018 → 2019
EEP arrives
EEP means Environmental Enhancement Project. Linden Lab described it as a major enhancement to the legacy WindLight system. Project viewers appeared in 2018, and EEP became available across all Second Life regions in April 2019.
It also gave residents a way to import old WindLight settings, so years of favorite skies did not simply have to vanish.
LATE 2023
PBR goes grid-wide
PBR means Physically Based Rendering. Second Life's glTF PBR materials rolled out grid-wide in late November 2023, bringing an industry-standard metallic/roughness material workflow into the world.
This was not just “better textures.” It changed how newer materials can describe what a surface is and how that surface should respond to light and reflections.
FIRST HALF OF THE PUZZLE
So what does
EEP actually do?
Think of EEP as the environment wrapped around your Second Life. It decides far more than whether the sky is blue.
More than a background
Sky settings control things such as ambient light, the sun and moon, their positions, atmospheric color and the visual character of the sky itself. That light affects the scene you are standing in.
The world below the horizon
Water settings control how Second Life water looks. Color, haze and reflection behavior can all change the feeling of a shoreline, ocean or underwater scene.
Let the environment move
A Day Cycle can change skies and water over time. Regions and parcels can have an environment that moves from one part of the day to another instead of staying frozen at a single look.
Environments became things you can keep
One of EEP's big changes was turning Sky, Water and Day Cycle settings into inventory assets. They can be saved, shared and, when permissions allow, transferred or sold just like other inventory items.
Different places can feel different
EEP added parcel-level environment control. A parcel can have its own environmental identity instead of every experience on a region being forced to use exactly the same atmosphere.
SECOND HALF OF THE PUZZLE
PBR is about what
the thing is made of.
Computers do not look at a chair and instinctively know that one part is brushed metal and another is fabric. A PBR material gives the renderer more information about how those surfaces are supposed to behave when light hits them.
What color is it?
The basic color and visible pattern of the surface. This is the part that feels most like the texture maps Second Life residents already know.
What tiny shape does it have?
Normal information can make light react as though a surface has small grooves, bumps and details without adding all of that geometry to the object.
How should light behave?
This packed information helps describe whether a surface behaves like metal, how smooth or rough it is, and how recessed areas respond to surrounding light.
Does part of it glow?
Emissive information lets parts of the material appear self-lit, useful for things such as screens, signs, LEDs and glowing details.
You do not need to memorize any of that.
If you are shopping, decorating or taking photographs, understanding the idea is enough. The map-by-map details become important when you start creating PBR materials yourself.
WHERE PEOPLE GET CONFUSED
EEP and PBR are
different systems.
They still affect each other.
A PBR surface is paying attention to its environment. Change the environment and you change the light and reflection information available to that surface. That means the exact same PBR item can look noticeably different under two different EEPs.
This is why a metallic dress, polished floor or shiny couch can look perfect in a product photograph and completely different when you rez or wear it somewhere else. The item did not necessarily change. The world around it did.
That relationship is also why photographers should stop thinking of EEP as only the pretty sky behind the avatar. With modern materials, the environment is part of what is lighting and shaping the photograph.
REFLECTION PROBES, IN ENGLISH
Tell the shiny thing
what room it's in.
Reflection probes sound much scarier than the basic idea.
Think of a reflection probe as Second Life telling a reflective surface: “This is the space around you.”
PBR reflections need information about their surroundings. Second Life can create automatic reflection information, but automatic guesses are not always ideal, especially indoors or on sky platforms where too much open sky can get sampled.
A carefully placed manual probe can define a room or space more accurately. Linden Lab's own guidance uses roughly one probe per ordinary room as a useful reference point and warns against attaching probes to every little piece of furniture or decor.
IMPORTANT
A reflection probe is part of the scene, not a magic shiny-object attachment. More probes are not automatically better. Too many overlapping probes can create visual problems and hurt performance.
TROUBLESHOOTINGWHY IS
WHY IS
EVERYTHING
BLUE?
If you've put on or rezzed a PBR item and suddenly wondered why it looks like somebody dunked it in blue paint, you're not imagining things. Environmental light and reflections can contribute a blue cast, and automatic reflection probes can make that particularly noticeable in some interior or skybox situations.
- Change the EEP.Try another environment and see whether the material changes with it. If it does, you've already learned something useful.
- Check the space.Indoor rooms and sky platforms can expose reflection-probe problems more obviously than open ground-level scenes.
- Try a proper reflection probe.If you own or can modify the scene, a correctly sized room probe may give PBR surfaces better environmental information.
- Use a current PBR-capable viewer.Modern PBR content depends on modern viewer support. If something looks wildly different from everyone else's screenshots, the viewer is worth checking.
- Don't assume the product is broken.PBR is designed to respond to its surroundings. Different light can produce a genuinely different result.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ME?
You do not need the same
answer as everybody else.
Not much, honestly.
You should know the words well enough that they don't sound like a foreign language. Beyond that, enjoy Second Life. You do not need a rendering degree to sit on a beach with your friends.
Know what you're buying.
If a product says PBR, expect its appearance to respond to lighting and environment. A vendor image is one lighting situation, not a promise that the item will look identical under every EEP.
The room matters now.
Environment, local lights, material choices and reflection probes can work together. A beautiful PBR room is increasingly about the relationship between the objects and the space around them.
Yes. You should care.
EEP has always mattered to photographers, but PBR makes that relationship even more important. Changing the environment can change how skin, clothing, metal, furniture and the entire scene read on camera.
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
Creators eventually need the deeper technical side: glTF, metallic/roughness workflows, material authoring, reference environments, probes and how content behaves outside the software where it was made.
WORDS YOU'LL STILL HEAR
A tiny survival glossary.
- WindLight
- The older Second Life environment system. Residents still commonly use the word as shorthand for a sky or lighting preset.
- EEP
- Environmental Enhancement Project. Second Life's inventory-based system for skies, water and day cycles.
- PBR
- Physically Based Rendering. A way of describing materials so light can interact with them in more physically believable ways.
- Blinn-Phong
- The name Second Life now uses for its older, pre-PBR materials workflow. You'll still see plenty of it. Old content did not suddenly stop existing when PBR arrived.
- glTF
- An open 3D standard. Second Life uses the glTF 2.0 metallic/roughness workflow for PBR materials.
- Metallic
- Information describing whether a surface behaves like a metal. Metal reflects light differently from materials such as wood, fabric or plastic.
- Roughness
- How rough or smooth the microscopic surface behaves. Smoother surfaces generally produce sharper, stronger-looking reflections; rougher ones scatter them.
- Reflection Probe
- A defined volume that gives the renderer environmental information for reflections and indirect lighting in that space.
- Emissive
- A part of a material that appears self-lit rather than depending entirely on external light.
WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE?
YOUR SECOND LIFE STARTING POINT
New To Second Life
This guide is one piece of the larger path. Head back to the main New Resident page for viewers, avatar help, vocabulary, places to go, photography and the rest of the things Second Life forgot to explain.
Back To New To Second Life →WANT THE TECHNICAL VERSION?
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