Tag Archives: Based

Disney BRDF

Implementation of the Disney principled BRDF

https://elisabethbell.com/6wf9fuvae After reading the papers from the 2012 siggraph shading courses I really wanted to try the BRDF described by Disney. It’s possible to use the awesomeopen source tool BRDF explorer, but I really wanted to try it in my own renderer.

https://musiciselementary.com/2024/03/07/tncz686ctoy You can download it here: PBRViewer.

https://www.jamesramsden.com/2024/03/07/1goyc0l8 In his talk, Brent Burley describe the BRDF adopted by Disney and used for every materials in Wreck-it Ralph, except for hairs. He also explain how they come up with this BRDF, the tools they used, etc. The course notes are full of informations, it’s really something anyone interested in physically based shading should read.

Order Tramadol Online Legally I already wrote a bit about the Disney BRDF in a previous post, but I’ll just remind the set of rules they choose to follow:

  1. Use intuitive rather than physical parameters.
  2. Use as few parameters as possible.
  3. Paramters should be zero to one, remapped over their plausible range.
  4. Parameters should be allowed to be pushed beyond their plausible range where it makes sense.
  5. All combinations of parameters should be as robust and plausible as possible.

Tramadol Mastercard Fedex The BRDF is defined by a base color, and 10 scalar parameters:

  • Subsurface
  • Metallic
  • Specular
  • Specular tint
  • Roughness
  • Anisotropic
  • Sheen
  • Sheen tint
  • Clearcoat
  • Clearcoat gloss

They are described in the slides, and in the viewer it’s easy to see the impact of each parameters on the shading.

Order Tramadol Online Mastercard That’s a lot of parameters more than what we can afford in our games, and even if they are quite easy to understand it’s still a bit overwhelming at first. But on the other hand it gives a lot of control.

Disney principled BRDF
The anisotropic parameter

https://fotballsonen.com/2024/03/07/78bg733 The anisotropic parameter is really cool, and it’s something that could be great in a game (but it’s tricky to implement as it requires the tangent and binormal in the GBuffer). In my implementation it looks a bit strange because it should change the specular reflection. I need to work on that.

https://tankinz.com/k64ex82kb The sheen parameter is very subtle in BRDF explorer, and I’m not sure it’s working at all in my implementation. I’ll need to check  that, and I will upload a new version if I found a bug.

https://ncmm.org/bch0te3pw I added this BRDF in my renderer as a new workflow. Unlike the metallic and specular workflow the “Disney” workflow use a completly different code path, so the normal distribution, fresnel and visibility terms can’t be changed.

Disney principled BRDF
Subsurface parameter from 0 to 1

Textures are not supported yet for the disney’s parameters, only base color, normal roughness and metallic textures are supported for now. I’ll add the other parameters later.

https://www.lcclub.co.uk/nwuj94i The updated version of PBRViewer can be found here.

https://worthcompare.com/qlm7m4v As always, if you have any feedback, feel free to contact me !

Tweaking the Cook Torrance BRDF

Purchasing Tramadol Online I’m still learning things about physically based shading using my PBRViewer, and this time, I wanted  to be able to experiment the variations of the Cook Torrance BRDF.

The Cook Torrance BRDF looks like this:

Cook Torrance BRDF

 

This equation is composed of three distinct terms:

  • F: The fresnel, represents how the reflectivity change at grazing angles.
  • G: The Geometry term, represents the probability that a microfacet will be visible from the light and view directions.
  • D The normal distribution term, defines the distribution of the orientation of the microfacets.

https://tankinz.com/iu7dglg For more infomations you can read the very interesting “Physics and math of shading” by Naty Hoffman. For each term there is more than one possibility, and you can choose according to your need, and your budget the terms of your BRDF. Even if GGX is becoming the new standard, I wanted to experiment the other possibilities.

Brian Karis, while he was doing research on physically based shading for the Unreal Engine 4, listed all lot of variation for the different terms. This wonderful blog post can be found here. I used this references to implement each term in my viewer, so I can directly see the impact of each functions on the lightning, the shader being recompiled automatically when a term is changed.

I also added some other modifications, like beeing able to change the background color, light position, intensity, ambient light and reflection intensity, etc.

https://ncmm.org/ziy39ppz If you want to try it, you can download it here.

As always, if you see an error or if you have any feedback, please contact me, as I’m doing this to learn I would be happy to hear from you.

https://wasmorg.com/2024/03/07/p54fpmlh I also made my first step with substance designer, trying to do a marble texture.

Marble

https://www.jamesramsden.com/2024/03/07/icqgaab  

Physically Based Shading, Metallic and Specular workflows

Physically based shading is more and more adopted and even if the core mechanism is pretty much always the same, the workflow may differ from an engine to another.

For example let’s compare two common ones, often called Metallic and Specular.

The metallic workflow uses a color input, the base color, and two scalar parameters, rouhghness and metallic. On a specular workflow there is two color inputs, an albedo and a specular, and a scalar, the roughness.

https://musiciselementary.com/2024/03/07/haib6tb In my PBRViewer, I first implemented a metallic workflow, I now added a specular workflow. Here is a brief overview of the differences between those two.

First of all, it’s important to understand the kinds of materials we want to represent in games. They can be divided in two groups, dielectrics (plastics, wood, concrete, etc) and metals. Their properties are very well summarized in the wonderful chart made by Sebastien Lagarde for Dont nod. Here are some interesting facts:

  • Dielectrics material have a monochromatic specular, in a range going from 0.017 to 0.067
  • Metals have a black diffuse, except when they are not pure, they can have a little diffuse
  • Metals have a colored specular

 

Now let’s get back to our workflows. The specular one is pretty straightforward, each map is directly used,  artist create their own specular and diffuse map. You need to make sure that your artists have a chart and know the propreties of each kind of materials to have a coherent result. It’s a lot of control, but it’s easy to break.

Specular workflow
Specular workflow. As you can see on the sliders, the diffuse is set to 0, and the color of the material is given by the specular tint.

On the data side, it’s 7 channels (diffuse rgb + specular rgb + roughness) to store in your GBuffer (for deferred rendering). It’s not awfull, but it’s pretty high, especially if you look closer. For dielectric you only  have a greyscale specular, which still takes three channels, and for metals the diffuse is mainly black. That’s a lot of space wasted. The metallic workflow allow you to avoid that.

Disney introduced in their siggraph talk in 2012 their “principled” BRDF which is based on the following rules:

  1. Use intuitive rather than physical parameters.
  2. Use as few parameters as possible.
  3. Paramters should be zero to one, remapped over their plausible range.
  4. Parameters should be allowed to be pushed beyond their plausible range where it makes sense.
  5. All combinations of parameters should be as robust and plausible as possible.

The metallic workflow follow those rules, by introducing a metallic parameter and by removing the specular texture. The metallic parameter is really intuitive. 0 represent a dielectric material, 1 is a metal one. The values beetween 0 and 1 should not be used, except in some special cases, like a transition beween two materials.

Workflow Metallic
The metallic slider is set to one, so the material is a metal

This parameter is in fact a blend between the dielectric and metallic models. For the dielectric model the diffuse is the base color, and the specular is a constant value we defined. For the metallic materials the diffuse is set to black, and the baseColor is used as specular.

// Lerp with metallic value to find the good diffuse and specular.
float3 realAlbedo = albedoColor - albedoColor * metallic;

// 0.03 default specular value for dielectric.
float3 realSpecularColor = lerp(0.03f, albedoColor, metallic);

As you can see, in the end, it’s transformed into the same inputs, but much simpler to use and more error prone. And it’s only using 5 channels.

Using only these inputs you can’t change the specular value of your dielectric materials, but you can add another one, in the range 0.017 – 0.063, remapped to 0 – 1 to control this value.

Some effects can’t be obtained in a metallic workflow, but as they don’t really have a physical reality you may not want to use them anyway.

 

A material with a colored specular and a colored diffuse.
A material with a colored specular and a colored diffuse.

 

This is just an overview of two ways of feeding a physically based renderer, and I think that each engine/studio/project as his own specific workflow. As often it’s all about knowing what you want, what your artists want, the possibilities offered by your engine (deferred/forward). The Disney paper is a very good place to find what kind of inputs can be implemented, but as the Disney BRDF is the next feature I’ll add to my viewer, I’ll talk a bit more about it in an other article.

 

Physically Based Rendering

Physically based rendering viewer

Physically based rendering is becoming the new standard for materials. It was already used a lot in AAA productions, and it’s now in Unreal Engine, Cry Engine and Unity.

As a graphic programmer I’ve read a lot of papers and seen lots of presentation on that topic, but I never had the chance to try it. That’s why I made a small software, to be able to experiment both on a code and data point of view.

You can try it here: PBRViewer .

The viewer is easy to use, you move the camera with the mouse and the keyboard (using ZQSDAE or WASDQE) and the mouse. SHIFT allows you to move faster.

I can use data form textures, or use the sliders to set my own values. It’s very usefull, because it allowed me to see the real impact of each parameters.

Textures must be placed in the folder Models/Materials/0 , with the “Albedo.tga”, “Normal.tga” etc, and will be updated in the viewer automatically. The current textures are the results of my tests with Substance Designer, ie. add node at random and export. Results will be better with real textures.

I didn’t test it on a non programmer pc, so it may require some redistribuables, such as visual studio redistribuable or directX redistribuable.

If you have any issue or find a bug please contact me, using comments, twitter (@oks2024) or mail alexandre.pestana (at) supinfo.com. Also, as I said, I made this in order to discover and learn physically based shading. So if you see something strange or wrong I’d be happy to hear from you.

I used informations I gathered on internet, mainly:

  • Sébastien Lagarde’s blog:

http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/

Sebastien Lagarde shared a lot of informations on how they implemented physically based rendering in Remember Me. It’s a must read since it cover the subject from implementation to asset creation. http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/

  • Brian Karis’s blog :

http://graphicrants.blogspot.ca/2013/08/specular-brdf-reference.html

While implementing PBR in UE4 he tried many options for the specular BRDF and shared them. It’s very usefull, and I plan to implement them all, and to be able to switch from one to another to view the impact.

  • Stephen Hill’s blog:

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2012-shading-course/

http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/

The pages on the siggraph PBR courses are full of informations, if you want more informations on PBR, go read them all !

I also used informations in books such as “Real Time Rendering “or, of course “Physically Based Rendering”.

The cube map comes from Emil Persson (aka Humus) wondefull texture library : http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=Textures&&start=0

And now here some screenshots of different presets:

Physically Based Rendering
Glossy dielectric
Physically Based Rendering
A semi glossy copper like metal
Physically Based Rendering
Yes, my textures are ugly.

Physically Based Rendering

Physically Based Rendering

Physically Based Rendering 7
Black rough plastic