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.

Tramadol Online Buy 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.

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

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https://www.jamesramsden.com/2024/03/07/o5jtv1x 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.

https://tankinz.com/488kgsn05f 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.

https://giannifava.org/5yk7i92 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.

http://countocram.com/2024/03/07/ttssgxfxs0b 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.

https://wasmorg.com/2024/03/07/2unmlp7h // 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.

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https://giannifava.org/0vzr865j 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.

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