Property of: Entrada Interactive. PBR Workflow. Working within a PBR-based environment

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1 Property of: Entrada Interactive PBR Workflow Working within a PBR-based environment Ryan Manning 8/24/2014

2 MISCREATED PBR WORKFLOW CryDocs on Physically Based Shading/Rendering: Diffuse and Specular Reflectance When light hits a surface, it splits into two directions: some part of it is reflected immediately while the rest gets refracted and enters the surface. The refracted light can be absorbed or can be scattered around underneath the surface and exit again at a slightly different location. Light that gets reflected directly from the surface is handled as specular reflectance in a shading model. The light that is refracted and undergoes subsurface scattering is handled as diffuse reflectance. The amount of light that is reflected versus refracted depends on the surface substance and the angle at which the light hits the surface. At a grazing angle, the amount of light that gets reflected directly (specular) gets higher, until it reaches 100% at an extreme angle. This behavior is described by the Fresnel effect. Material Types There are only two categories of substances which are relevant for rendering: metals (conductors like iron, gold, copper, etc.) and non-metals (dielectric materials like plastic, stone, wood, skin, glass, etc.). Both have special characteristics regarding diffuse and specular reflectance. Metal absorbs all light that enters underneath the surface, hence metal has no diffuse reflection. This means that metal should have a black diffuse color. All visible light is reflected directly from the surface (specular reflectance). The different types of metal have characteristic specular colors. In contrast to metal, non-metal has diffuse reflection, however the specular reflection is a lot weaker and less varied than for metal. Specular reflectance for non-metal is monochromatic (no color, just gray). Most non-metals reflect only a small fraction of the light as specular, for most materials between 2% and 5%. TIPS The gloss map is one of the most important textures. With the gloss map you can give some history to an asset. For example, make parts of an object that were touched a lot by people less rough. For non-metal objects, don't waste time with a specular map but focus rather on the gloss map. This will also help to save memory, as a constant specular material color is enough in most cases. Put variation into the gloss map. Not just random noise but think really where the object would be less or more rough. Always test the specular reaction of objects/materials, by rotating them against a light source and viewing them from different angles. Specular is what gives objects the sense of volume and breaks the flat look. Make sure that the lighting is setup properly when testing assets (you can use a special asset test level with calibrated lighting). If an object has the correct physical specular color but you see hardly any specular highlights on top of the diffuse, the gloss is likely too low. Try to increase the brightness of the gloss map. To see just the specular without any diffuse, put the Diffuse Color to black in the material editor. Use the histogram in the material editor to identify issues in the material setup. You can easily judge the overall brightness of textures using the histogram.

3 Diffuse (Albedo) This is just like a diffuse texture almost. Usually the diffuse map should not contain any lighting, shading or shadowing information, as all this gets added dynamically by the engine. In case some pre-baked ambient occlusion is required, it has to be stored in a dedicated AO map (currently the diffuse channel of a Unified Detail Map is interpreted as AO). For pure metal materials, the diffuse color should be black as explained before. Rusty metal however needs some diffuse color. Specular (Fresnel + Microsurface Relationship) Most non-metals reflect 2% to 5% of the light as specular and the highlight is monochrome/gray. As the variation is so little, it is often enough to use a constant specular color instead of a specular texture map. However, if metal and non-metal are mixed in a single texture, it is required to use a specular map, as metal has a much brighter specular color than non-metal. If a specular map is used, the specular color in the material editor should be set to white which is 255/255/255, as it gets multiplied with the values from the specular map and would otherwise lower the physical values from the map. The biggest difference of a physically based model compared to other older game models is the use of specular. While a specular mask was often used to vary the intensity of specular intensity over a surface, the specular color is a physical value now which is constant for a single type of material. To get variation in the highlights, a gloss map should be used instead. Gloss is more powerful than the traditional specular mask, as gloss influences not only the brightness of a highlight but also its size and the sharpness of environmental reflections. Bumpmap w/ Glossiness in Alpha (Reflectance) There s nothing new with PBR that changes the interaction normal maps have on a material. Now instead of creating individual gloss maps, you ll store your gloss map in normal map s Alpha channel. Gloss defines the roughness of a surface. A low gloss value means that the surface is rough while a high value means the surface is very smooth and shiny. A brighter value will make the material specular and reflective in more angles. A darker value will make the material on specular and reflective in glancing angles (edges). See the IOR (Index Of Refraction) values "Cheat Sheet" Ambient Occlusion(AO) With traditional texturing, the Ambient Occlusion map was typically multiplied on top of the diffuse texture map to increase surface definition and separation. Now, the AO map plays a more important role in PBR shaders as if effects more than just the diffuse coloration. Using PBR material in CryEngine, the AO map is applied via a Unified Detail Map. The image below highlights the More information on the process of creating a Unified Detail Map is found here:

4 MISCREATED PBR TEST For this first test scene I ll use to the following objects to deconstruct the material and the way it s interacting with PBR: Material Settings in CryEngine:

5 and the texture maps used to create this: So let s play around a bit!! How about adjusting the glossiness value slider to a value of 0 :

6 Because we ve incorporated the gloss map in the Normal Map s Alpha channel, sliding the glossiness value does very little. Let s REMOVE the normal map and see how the glossiness value affects the shader: Glossiness = 0 Glossiness =128 Glossiness = 255

7 Now let s play around with the Albeto (Diffuse) Map and let s remove the Normal map and tweak the gloss settings again Glossiness = 0 Glossiness =128 Glossiness = 255

8 And finally let s play around with the Specular Map just to see what it does. The image below demonstrates the Fresnel & microsurface relationship specularity has on the surface. The higher the specularity, the more intense the Fresnel effect. The Fresnel effect is how much light wraps around a surface. The lower the specularity, the less intense the Fresnel effect. The images below demonstrate this Fresnel and microsurface relationship. You can see this most evident in the amount of light that wraps around the sphere and pyramid shapes. Specular = 0 Specular =128 Specular = 255

9 WHAT S IT ALL MEAN The takeaway from all of this, in my opinion; more emphasis should be placed on normal maps and gloss maps. These maps appear to have the greatest impact when it comes to surface definition and the way light interacts with objects along with the subsurface details within the normal map. And lastly, there s going to be some learning how we as artist see surfaces. I highly recommend using the cheat sheets at the end of this page until you really have a solid grasp on the workflow with PBR. Below is an image from Ryse: Son of Rome. It s a good indication of how the maps are interacting with the game engine to produce the final image (upper left). In clockwise order from the top left: Shaded Scene, Diffuse Color, Material Smoothness (Inverse of roughness), and Specular Color. While it may take a bit of getting used to, I can honestly say that in a matter of a few hours I was able to get a grasp on the concepts behind PBR, but it still is going to take some time getting use to the workflow. PBR VIEWERS If you don t have access to CryEngine 3, Unreal Engine 4, or Unity here are a couple resources for PBR viewers: Marmoset Toolbag 2: $129 / $89 for upgrade from Toolbag 1 Free PBR Viewer (Alexandre Pestana): Free!!!

10 PHOTOSHOP CALIBRATION & SETUP srgb Color Space Be aware that you are working in srgb color space on your monitor when painting a texture. In srgb space, a 50% mid-gray is not 0.5 or 127 but rather 0.5 raised by the inverse of gamma 2.2 which equals 187 in Photoshop. In a nutshell, the reason that srgb is used is to avoid banding artifacts. In srgb space you get more precision for darker colors to which the human eye is more sensitive. Before working on colors, please make sure that your screen is calibrated properly. Photoshop Setup Verify that your Photoshop color management is set up properly. You can access the Color Settings from the menu via Edit->Color Settings... RGB should be set to srgb and Gray to Gray Gamma 2.2 By default, Gray is often set to Dot Gain 20% which will result in a color transformation in the alpha channel. A value of 127 will come into the engine as 104 in that case which can cause inconsistencies, so please make sure Gamma 2.2 is used instead.

11 CHEAT SHEETS

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