PBR WOW!

[Gabriele Graves]

Not really a wow but I have to admit I love the effect.  Here is what PBR snow looks like as a terrain texture:

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Ok, proof of concept!

So, as part of a larger program relating to how we display "art" in SL (GIANT canvasses set at full bright crammed together in over-lit cavernous galleries), I'm experimenting with how PBR materials can make a pic on display in-world look better. This also relates to a mini-discussion between myself and @Fluffy Sharkfin about how PBR opens new potential for visual artists in SL.

I took this shot specifically for this experiment. I want 1) to use a normal map to highlight the texture of the brush strokes, 2) to use roughness to give it the kind of sheen one might get from an oil, and 3) to use metallicness to give a metallic reflectivity to select parts of the picture (in this case, a la Klimt, the gold bits).

I created the materials in Materialize -- there are some videos but not much documentation, so a lot of this was guesswork and trial by error. I loaded the resulting materials into the PBR Packer, and imported them into SL, where I created a brand new material.

Here's the result. Everything is a bit "over-done": I need to tone down the normal a bit, and certainly reduce roughness. And the metallicness didn't work at all for some reason; I need to figure out why.

But overall . . . I'm really pretty excited about how well this worked, despite my having only a vague idea what I'm doing!

[SandorWren]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Ok, proof of concept!

So, as part of a larger program relating to how we display "art" in SL (GIANT canvasses set at full bright crammed together in over-lit cavernous galleries), I'm experimenting with how PBR materials can make a pic on display in-world look better. This also relates to a mini-discussion between myself and @Fluffy Sharkfin about how PBR opens new potential for visual artists in SL.

I took this shot specifically for this experiment. I want 1) to use a normal map to highlight the texture of the brush strokes, 2) to use roughness to give it the kind of sheen one might get from an oil, and 3) to use metallicness to give a metallic reflectivity to select parts of the picture (in this case, a la Klimt, the gold bits).

I created the materials in Materialize -- there are some videos but not much documentation, so a lot of this was guesswork and trial by error. I loaded the resulting materials into the PBR Packer, and imported them into SL, where I created a brand new material.

Here's the result. Everything is a bit "over-done": I need to tone down the normal a bit, and certainly reduce roughness. And the metallicness didn't work at all for some reason; I need to figure out why.

But overall . . . I'm really pretty excited about how well this worked, despite my having only a vague idea what I'm doing!

I HAVE been wondering about using PBR on inworld pics. I can see it being useful to create the roughness actual brushstrokes create.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

23 minutes ago, SandorWren said:

I HAVE been wondering about using PBR on inworld pics. I can see it being useful to create the roughness actual brushstrokes create.

Which is actually precisely what I am doing here.

Almost all of my pictures these days are "textured" in a variety of ways, often with brush strokes that are overlaid on the image. (I use other kinds of texturing as well, though, such as noise.)

What I've done here is taken the brush stroke overlay (only -- not the pic itself) to create normal and roughness maps. The materials are a reflection not of the pic itself, but of the "texture" of the pic -- in this case, brush strokes.

I also wanted (and hope still to manage) to give the gold bits of this pic a metalic reflectiveness, as though painted with gold leaf. That's an effect I'm not going to be using very much at all, but I wanted to try it. So the metalness map has been constructed using the Albedo texture -- the pic itself.

 

ETA: One of the very GOOD side effects of using materials is that you can't set the pic at full bright, because that would wipe out the materials. So, the pics have to be displayed under "natural" lighting, and not merely rely on full bright to show. In this case, I've used a simple point light, but I'm experimenting with projectors for that as well. The overall effect of pics with materials, and artificial interior lighting (using a reflection probe too) will be to create a MUCH more realistic experience of a gallery. (Which is part of my "program" to  reform galleries in SL, but that's fodder for another post one day.)

Edited August 13 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Here's the result. Everything is a bit "over-done": I need to tone down the normal a bit, and certainly reduce roughness. And the metallicness didn't work at all for some reason; I need to figure out why.

Welcome to the conundrum that plagues every creator experimenting with materials/PBR.  When you're experimenting in order to create a specific effect there's always a tendency to over-accentuate things because of course you want the results to be noticeable and toning it down to more realistic and subtle levels can seem counterintuitive.  It may help to create a couple more images using the same techniques and then have a few copies of each to get more of an idea of how the effect works overall, sometimes staring intently at a single piece can cause you to lose perspective on the overall effect that you're trying to achieve and how it fits into the environment it's intended for.

It's curious that the metalness didn't seem to work.  It may be a silly question but did you make sure to set the metalness value in the materials editor when adding the ORM map?  Obviously the use of reflection probes and the environment you're testing in can have an effect on what is being reflected, but it should still have some visible effect assuming that the metalness map isn't entirely black and the metalness value is set to something other than 0.

 

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

But overall . . . I'm really pretty excited about how well this worked, despite my having only a vague idea what I'm doing!

It certainly does look promising!  I remember you saying that you're using Affinity and after taking a look at the features available and watching a few tutorials it seems it would be relatively easy to paint depth maps using custom brushes and then convert them to normal maps, so you can essentially hand paint brush strokes over an image or use selections to fill certain areas with different types of strokes with varying directions then generate a normal map that would contain brush strokes that follow the forms of the image.  There seems to be a few tutorials on generating normal maps from bump/depth maps in Affinity, most seem to follow the same process as demonstrated in this video...

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

5 hours ago, SandorWren said:

I HAVE been wondering about using PBR on inworld pics. I can see it being useful to create the roughness actual brushstrokes create.

 

4 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Which is actually precisely what I am doing here.

You could have been doing this for the last 10 years, with Blinn-Phong.

 

6 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

And the metallicness didn't work at all for some reason; I need to figure out why.

*cough* terminally broken hot mess released 3 years too early *cough*

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

3 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It may help to create a couple more images using the same techniques and then have a few copies of each to get more of an idea of how the effect works overall, sometimes staring intently at a single piece can cause you to lose perspective on the overall effect that you're trying to achieve and how it fits into the environment it's intended for.

Oh yes, more experimentation needed. My attempt to make it more subtle made it TOO subtle.

4 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It's curious that the metalness didn't seem to work.  It may be a silly question but did you make sure to set the metalness value in the materials editor when adding the ORM map?  Obviously the use of reflection probes and the environment you're testing in can have an effect on what is being reflected, but it should still have some visible effect assuming that the metalness map isn't entirely black and the metalness value is set to something other than 0.

Metalic is working; I think the problem is that the Roughness map is interfering with the reflective qualities, so I need to up the smoothness on the parts that are metallic. And that's complicated because the metals map is based on the Albedo, while the roughness is based on the bush strokes. So I need to "add" the metallic bits to the roughness map, something I'll have to do in Affinity. Fortunately, metallic is not something I plan to use very often at all, so I may just, for now, forgo it and focus on the other elements.

It'll take me a while to get this right, but I'll figure it out!

4 hours ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

It certainly does look promising!  I remember you saying that you're using Affinity and after taking a look at the features available and watching a few tutorials it seems it would be relatively easy to paint depth maps using custom brushes and then convert them to normal maps, so you can essentially hand paint brush strokes over an image or use selections to fill certain areas with different types of strokes with varying directions then generate a normal map that would contain brush strokes that follow the forms of the image.  There seems to be a few tutorials on generating normal maps from bump/depth maps in Affinity, most seem to follow the same process as demonstrated in this video...

I might try this, but Materialize does normals too, of course (although you have to generate a height map first). I've also got another web site that does a pretty good job of creating normals from basic colour maps.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

You could have been doing this for the last 10 years, with Blinn-Phong.

Yes, other than the metal effect. In fact, if I do in fact use this (which I will, at some point), I'll be loading both Blinn-Phong and PBR materials. An awful lot of the arts community is still pre-PBR, including, in fact, the curator at the gallery I'm currently exhibiting.

4 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

*cough* terminally broken hot mess released 3 years too early *cough*

I'll go with that!!

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yes, other than the metal effect. In fact, if I do in fact use this (which I will, at some point), I'll be loading both Blinn-Phong and PBR materials. An awful lot of the arts community is still pre-PBR, including, in fact, the curator at the gallery I'm currently exhibiting.

The "metalness" is just specular colour tinting.

That's it.Blinn-Phone you do this your self by hand with total control, PBR you go lazy and let the engine do it for you and hope it works.

The oil paint, is a "plastic shader model" material, greyscale specular highlights.

The gold leaf is a "metallic shader model" specular highlights tinted by the colour off the metal.

 

So for a Blinn-Phong version, you'd put the roughness map nto the alpha channel of the normal and specular colour maps, and do a grey scale specular colour map, with the gold leaf areas painted in a lighter tone of pastel gold.

Then you'd just experiment with the Gloss and Env numeric values till you got the look you wanted. Those values get multiplied on a Kodak-Colour basis by the alpha channels of the normal and specular colour maps.

 

That's how you vary the roughness and specular colour on a pixel by pixel basis.

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

19 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The "metalness" is just specular colour tinting.

That's it.Blinn-Phone you do this your self by hand with total control, PBR you go lazy and let the engine do it for you and hope it works.

The oil paint, is a "plastic shader model" material, greyscale specular highlights.

The gold leaf is a "metallic shader model" specular highlights tinted by the colour off the metal.

 

So for a Blinn-Phong version, you'd put the roughness map nto the alpha channel of the normal and specular colour maps, and do a grey scale specular colour map, with the gold leaf areas painted in a lighter tone of pastel gold.

Then you'd just experiment with the Gloss and Env numeric values till you got the look you wanted. Those values get multiplied on a Kodak-Colour basis by the alpha channels of the normal and specular colour maps.

 

That's how you vary the roughness and specular colour on a pixel by pixel basis.

 

/me feels a bit faint

I get the principle. And honestly, it doesn't sound a lot more difficult than what I might have to do to make metallic work in PBR. But I'm going to put that aside for now and focus on the basics.

And honestly, I'm not sure I even need Materialize. My basic pic is my Albedo (or, for BP, diffuse -- I don't need occlusion for this, unless I REALLY want to emphasize the paint strokes, so they're basically the same thing), the normal I can produce using the web site I've been using, and the roughness (or, for BP, specular) I can most easily do by hand in Affinity.

So, yes, the PBR and BP versions are pretty much exactly in parallel, except that the roughness map needs to be inverted for specularity.

One thing I don't really know is the difference between a BP normal and a PBR one. I know that there IS a difference, based I assume on the angle of the lighting?

Trial run #3 coming up.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

kk, my head now seriously hurts. I think we'll continue with this tomorrow.

Ugh.

(Yes, this would be easier with Blinn-Phong, in part because there isn't the extra stage of "packing" the maps.)

[Orwar]

9 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I loaded the resulting materials into the PBR Packer, and imported them into SL, where I created a brand new material.

Here's the result. Everything is a bit "over-done": I need to tone down the normal a bit, and certainly reduce roughness. And the metallicness didn't work at all for some reason; I need to figure out why.

   You can create materials and upload local textures into it to get a preview of the results before uploading stuff, saves you on uploading fees and it has the benefit of that you can adjust the separate maps in Materialize, export and overwrite the file you have locally updated, and it will update automatically in SL. Makes it very easy to make small adjustments (or running to reverse the roughness map because you forgot whether it was supposed to be mostly white or mostly black since it's inversed because it generates smoothness rather than roughness which is inverse of what you want on the other maps for 'moar effect') - and of course you can see it in actual SL lighting before paying for it, which is handy as the results may look great in Materialize but then it shows up in SL all .. Weird. 

   As far as the documentation of Materialize goes .. This snippet from their FAQ made me chuckle.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

26 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   You can create materials and upload local textures into it to get a preview of the results before uploading stuff, saves you on uploading fees and it has the benefit of that you can adjust the separate maps in Materialize, export and overwrite the file you have locally updated, and it will update automatically in SL. Makes it very easy to make small adjustments (or running to reverse the roughness map because you forgot whether it was supposed to be mostly white or mostly black since it's inversed because it generates smoothness rather than roughness which is inverse of what you want on the other maps for 'moar effect') - and of course you can see it in actual SL lighting before paying for it, which is handy as the results may look great in Materialize but then it shows up in SL all .. Weird. 

   As far as the documentation of Materialize goes .. This snippet from their FAQ made me chuckle.

Yeah, I've been loading the maps as "local" for that reason. And of course Materialize has a preview feature too, which will give you a general sense, but not what it will look like in SL.

The "smoothness" vs. "roughness" thing is annoying. I do wish these techies would DECIDE on stuff. "ARM" or "ORM"? "Albedo" or "Base Colour" map? (A lot of PBR materials I've seen even call this "Diffuse."

GET  YOUR ACT TOGETHER, PEOPLE!!!

[Orwar]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

"ARM" or "ORM"? "Albedo" or "Base Colour" map? (A lot of PBR materials I've seen even call this "Diffuse."

   I still say 'diffuse' (mostly in my own head I guess), it's just what I'm used to. 

   And since it's written as '(O)RM' in SL I figure that's what I'll call the RBG map. Might drop the brackets, not sure why they're there. Whether you want to use 'A' for 'Ambient Occlusion' or 'O' for just 'Occlusion', eh, don't know which is 'better' but it would be nice if there was consistency.

   I do quite like 'ORM' though because .. Snake. And book.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

47 minutes ago, Orwar said:

 I still say 'diffuse' (mostly in my own head I guess), it's just what I'm used to. 

So do I, mostly.

We will now get our collective knuckles wrapped: "Diffuse maps include environmental information!"

Yeah, whatevs.

Diffuse diffuse diffuse.

There. Bite me.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

4 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

You could have been doing this for the last 10 years, with Blinn-Phong.

This is very true, however...

4 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The "metalness" is just specular colour tinting.

That's it.Blinn-Phone you do this your self by hand with total control, PBR you go lazy and let the engine do it for you and hope it works.

The oil paint, is a "plastic shader model" material, greyscale specular highlights.

The gold leaf is a "metallic shader model" specular highlights tinted by the colour off the metal.

 

So for a Blinn-Phong version, you'd put the roughness map nto the alpha channel of the normal and specular colour maps, and do a grey scale specular colour map, with the gold leaf areas painted in a lighter tone of pastel gold.

Then you'd just experiment with the Gloss and Env numeric values till you got the look you wanted. Those values get multiplied on a Kodak-Colour basis by the alpha channels of the normal and specular colour maps.

 

That's how you vary the roughness and specular colour on a pixel by pixel basis.

... all that seems overly complicated and a pretty compelling argument for the comparative simplicity of PBR.  

[Orwar]

24 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Bite me.

   Ahem.

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

30 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

So do I, mostly.

We will now get our collective knuckles wrapped: "Diffuse maps include environmental information!"

Yeah, whatevs.

Diffuse diffuse diffuse.

There. Bite me.

I just call them all "colour maps" because they're the maps that make things coloured.

Edited August 14 by Fluffy Sharkfin
typo

[Orwar]

1 minute ago, Fluffy Sharkfin said:

I just call them all "colour maps" because they're the maps that make things coloured.

   But what if it's a black and white alb-- Um, diff-- Err. Thing?

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

2 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   But what if it's a black and white alb-- Um, diff-- Err. Thing?

Well, that's a bit of an edge case scenario but in that instance I believe the technical term would be a "colourless map".  

[Luna Bliss]

The interface on Materialize sucks....anybody know of a better program?  I did figure out how to actually see the interface it but I have to totally change my monitor resolution so that it appears bigger.

[Arielle Popstar]

9 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

The interface on Materialize sucks....anybody know of a better program?  I did figure out how to actually see the interface it but I have to totally change my monitor resolution so that it appears bigger.

Put it on your secondary monitor. You do have one right? You can easily set a secondary monitor to the resolution required in display properties.

[Nagachief Darkstone]

Finally got around to PBR-izing my otter-dragon.

Surprisingly, it's a good example of what PBR can accomplish. Since my face is entirely in shadow, the specular on my nose is entirely driven by the reflection probe data.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Nagachief Darkstone said:

Finally got around to PBR-izing my otter-dragon.

Surprisingly, it's a good example of what PBR can accomplish. Since my face is entirely in shadow, the specular on my nose is entirely driven by the reflection probe data.

Great shot!

It'll be interesting to see what can be done (and, alternately, how badly it can be misused) when PBR eventually (as surely it will) becomes available for skins and BoM.

[Luna Bliss]

16 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Put it on your secondary monitor. You do have one right? You can easily set a secondary monitor to the resolution required in display properties.

Unfortunately I don't have a 2nd monitor, though monitors are cheap these days so no problem funding it. But there's very little room on my desk for another monitor, though I might be able to squeeze in a small one.  Hopefully, eventually, I'll discover another program like Materialize...I'd even be willing to pay for it.