I donned my Rendering Engineer hat once again and decided to go back to the PBR system, with a view to nailing it well and truly on the head.
In total it took almost four working days, including tinkering with Substance material exporting, but every minute was worth while, as you should have noticed in these 4K screenshots 🙂
The testbed has 26 PBR materials set up, ranging through plastic, various metals, rubber and even ice (though not yet translucent), and only the one shader rendering them all. Yep. Entirely data-driven loveliness, fully in the hands of the artist, and all exported from Substance so it’s an AAA industry standard solution gracing even the likes of Unreal DK 🙂
I couldn’t work out where I’d introduced kinks into my PBR shader in the article I did, so I had to start again from scratch using a known working PBR reference shader (which itself had problems, but nothing like mine did!). This means I have to revisit/trash/rewrite my PBR article – which is a downer, but my fault for getting it not quite right in the first place!
The source textures are all trilinear filtered 2048 x 2048, and on a 4K display they look pretty darned nice even very close up (click on the images for the 4K originals – jpeg’d though so no picking please 🙂 they look better in-engine!). These should do the trick for the planned art content pipeline/authoring for Dom’s many and varied vessels when the time comes. Though probably we’ll be 8K standard and looking at 16K by then!
Anyway, in the meantime, enjoy the pixel goodliness…
PS. I won’t be doing another 4K video in a hurry 🙂 This one was 3Gb and took hours to upload at 1Mb/s! 🙁 Also, apologies for the crappy audio clicks/buzz whatever, I’ve had to update to Camtasia 9 to do 4K and they’ve screwed up all the audio recording and noise removal filters, so I couldn’t debuzz / de-click as normal.
PPS. I have no idea why the images are named ‘Professional Bull Rider’ btw – nVidia’s GeForce Experience Share capture feature decided to name them somehow… I don’t have a penchant for dangerous animal sports… 🙂
And I couldn’t resist slapping one of the PBR materials onto one of SolCommand‘s large scale freighters…
They don’t look ‘quite right’ as the enviroment (ambient) mapping pass is not using ‘black’ as you see in the background, but a cubemap of a spacey-type environment which isn’t rendered into the scene. Trust me, it will look even better when I get this all working in Dom 😉
Oh, and just to confirm it does indeed cut the Substance ‘mustard’ here’s the ‘typical’ Material Ball model as seen across t’web, with Ambient Occlusion included…
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