Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight we were at the Crytek booth I am joined by a couple of CryEngine folks here and we're speaking with Scott who is an engine programmer and xena who is a 3d environment artist and today we're talking about PBR and a couple of the terms that you run into when researching PBR so for those of you who follow our star citizen coverage PBR is discussed very heavily by chris roberts and the team and they're pretty excited about it so we're going to define what that is here today let me just start with the easy question what is the top-level definition of physically based rendering what does it do for for the gamer the top-level definition is it has lighting techniques that treat light the way it really behaves in the world so you have conservation of energy you never get more light out than you put in you have physically correct distribution patterns of light and and physically accurate material definitions so with mentioning material definitions what what are the different types of materials that need to be considered in the environment for PBR well for example the very big differences between metal and nonmetals and this is where we cut the lines or every nonmetal has a specific value in spec map and metals have color in the spec map so this is the like we only separate non metal and metal and so you're mentioning spec Maps specular Maps there are other types of maps as well can we get an overview of the the most amost common Maps that are running - yeah of course so diffuse map albedo which is barely a without any lighting information and then have the normal map and in the normal map alpha channel goes the goes the class map and the specular map and the specular map you only need if there's a couple of different materials in the same asset for example wood and metal then you would need a spec map if not you just define the value via the slider but you always need a class map and a diffuse map on the performance side so I would imagine a lot of this is GPU side but is there any actual noticeable performance impact there's not a big performance impact it's just computing light in a different way than it did before using equations that are just more accurate so you get a very realistic look with with less effort the actual shader computations are not significantly different more more or less so so visually for gamers do you have any examples even using your own tech demos as a basis here do you have any examples of objects that are encountered in game where gamers can look at it and know this is using PBR well if they play rice everything's PBR so you just need to play one of the latest Crytek games and everything is PBR so every object they look at will have physic based rendering or shading and speaking of Rhys a couple other games use it when you're star citizen's using it with Rhys and in development did PVR on a technique side change how the game developers are building the the lighting for the games or did it make it easier for them well for artists especially it's a way much easier to tweak the assets normally you would have to tweak it for different lighting conditions will definitely get darker and everything and with ppi you can make it with one setting and it would work for every setting very cool so there's our top level overview of PBR we'll cover some of the map the map terms that were defined here in the article linked in the description below check out all the content of course thank you to Crytek and check out CryEngine for more information on that we will see you all next time you