Physically Based Rendering

Hi there, FF Devs will most likely be familiar with the new art workflows involving Physically Based Rendering. Will Filterforge have some new options reflecting these newer rendering techniques? They are kind of already there, although I don't really understand everything in depth. The new workflows for Unity etc have meant taking a new learning curve towards good lighting. Maybe FF devs understand this and see a reason to kind of adjust render map export options or something.

I guess what I mean is I'm interested to know what the emergence of PBR will mean for FF development?

I'm a bit late to the party here, but FF can absolutely can do the vast majority of the maps related to PBR already.

In theory - PBR as you probably know requires a sophisticated pipeline in which gloss maps and other advanced reflectivity maps, and so on, are added to traditional diffuse/normal/bump/specular pipelines. Thus in theory PBR diffuse maps should be very lightly baked and the engine doing most of the work.

In practice - I find PBR as much of a mindset and mentality as it is a technical engine concept, and that PBR "looks" can be achieved with traditional pipelines by following a few rules related to the concept:

1. "Everything is shiny". Coined by John Hable back in 2010, this is the notion that there is no such thing as a pure matte (non-reflective) material in real life. Even low reflectivity materials in a PBR system should not have a zero specular component - everything reflects to some extent.

2. "Everything has Fresnel". Also Hable's concept. This is related to the notion that the sides of all materials as seen by an observer have a high reflectivity. Generally has to be done in-engine and in my mind is actually one of the weakest areas of modern engines right now, usually requires a custom shader.

3. "Everything has microsurfaces". Nothing in real life is perfectly smooth. Very few things are even close to it. That means just about all surfaces need normal maps/height maps that have microtextures. A metal wall might seem "flat" to a macroscopic observer, but up close it has little bumps, hills, valleys, and so on, and when designing textures that has to be taken into account.

4. "Everything is detailed". This is not a formal PBR principle, just my own saying - but basically it says that low-res textures don't cut it. 2K or better for realtime game engines and 4K or better for photorealistic or architectural static shots seems to be an absolute requirement.

Here's a shot of some materials I'm working on for a texture pack using PBR principles - but all the materials in question here are using at most four maps: "diffuse" (actually just base color in this case - there's a lot of pre-baking of light and shadow), normal, occlusion, and secondary diffuse (used to add noise to tiled textures at a different scale than the original).

The important factor is that all the textures were rendered with microsurfaces, just about all are high-res (2K), and all have a non-zero reflectivity - so really only points 1 and 3 and 4 are implemented - and I'd say it still looks pretty good.

http://imgur.com/a/uDEeL

I believe there should be an update in this thread.
Starting from version 9, Filter Forge fully supports PBR shaders for Unity and Unreal Engine, as well as a generic shader that can be made compatible with any other 3D engine.