[Official] 5.0 - Feedback request for PBR/Standard Shader

Unity Engine
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1

Hello Beta Testers!

We would like to hear your thoughts on our new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) system for 5.0. Please take a moment to answer the following questions to help us make PBR the best it can be. Please try to answer all the questions to give us more context for your feedback, especially the questions about who you are and how you plan to use PBR.

Who are you?

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

How can we make it BETTER?

Do you like the PBR workflow?

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?

Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback to help us make 5.0 even better!

Erik

2

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

  • large,open-world first person shooter / survival game

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

  • high quality, realistic looking materials.
  • consistency in different lighting conditions- dynamic time of day (along with enlighten)

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

  • it looks great.
  • consistency in different lighting conditions - author texture once, should look good everywhere.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

  • more texture data required per-material (using procedural substances when possible)

How can we make it BETTER?

  • Variations of the standard shader for blending. (vertex color, splat map, etc)
  • Visual, node-based material tools (eg: shader forge, unreal 4 material editor, shaderfx, etc)
  • Create some common standard shader variations for use in Substance Designer
  • Better bloom image effect (see Sonic Ether bloom)

Do you like the PBR workflow?

  • Overall I like it a lot. I especially appreciate the fact that you guys are aiming for visual consistency with Marmoset Toolbag - it looks really close! It makes the workflow soo much easier when you have multiple tools with visual parity.
  • Would be AWESOME if there were some common variations of the unity 5 standard shader in substance designer and painter. Would save a lot of constantly exporting maps and alt-tabbing between marmoset and other tools.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?

  • Create textures in substance designer, preview in marmoset toolbag, bring into unity

  • Bogging me down:

  • no variations of standard shader for blending textures

  • no PBR terrain shader available means there is no easy way to do PBR on terrain currently, other than RTP3, but I am targeting mobile and it doesnā€™t seem to work. (and RTP3 author talking about leaving asset storeā€¦)

  • no linear color space on mobile platforms

  • need a unity 5 shader for use in allegorithmic software

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?

  • This isnā€™t specific to Unity5 PBR, but in general Anton Handā€™s talk at Unite 2014 helped a lot - he mentions hard / soft requirements for making PBR look ā€œrightā€, at the time I was unfamiliar with the image effects that can be used to really make PBR shine. (tonemapping, color grading, bloom, etc)
3

Actually, Iā€™m not sure how much mipmaps relate to PBR/Standard Shader, but I have to express one serious annoyance and blockade Iā€™ve been running into related to mipmaps and this seems like the closest feedback topic that it would fit in.

Who are you?

I am a programmer working on a tiny team of just two people.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

I am working on a voxel-based sandbox game, where the focus is on the building experience for the player rather than on adventuring.

Rather than answer each question (because I think I wonā€™t provide useful answers to those questions, with my current heavily limited experience with the standard shader), Iā€™m just going to point out the one suggestion I have and hope youā€™ll take it here:

Please allow me to specify the max amount of mipmaps. For example, cap it at mip 5 and not use mips 6+.

I heard itā€™s as simple as exposing a GL property. Iā€™d rather not use performance-draining workarounds if I donā€™t have to.

The problem is, with an atlas, at mips 6+ the resolution of the mips becomes so low that itā€™s no longer possible to distinguish between each individual block anymore, and so blocks get merged and coloration in the distance is poor quality.

4

Who are you?

-Director and programmer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

  • Side Scroll Action Game in PS4

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

  • Maybe

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

  • Asset making cost down. more frendly artist shader.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

  • Why did not support translucent ?
  • Additive Effect weak for PBR(linear color space)

How can we make it BETTER?

  • Support translucent.

Do you like the PBR workflow?

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
-solve your bug.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
-both : It is very easy but if there problem there is no solution.

5

Who are you?
Iā€™m an ex environment artist for the games industry, now a full-time indie developer.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Iā€™m building Eastshade, which is a visually striking, non-violent, open world, first person game whoā€™s mechanics revolve around exploring. Its currently for PC.

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
I want my game world to be surreal, weird, yet believable. Iā€™d like the behavior of light in my world to be as realistic as possible. I want to stylize my game world through architecture, vegetation, landscape, skies, atmosphere, and NOT through how light behaves.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
Iā€™m not using Unity 5ā€™s PBR yet because I will first have to wait until it has a terrain shader and vertex blend shader. Iā€™ve heard it said that the standard shader will cover 80% of use cases. Iā€™ve worked on only one game that used a PBR pipeline and that was Infamous: Second Son. On that title, it seemed like 90% of our materials had vertex blending. Anything with large surfaces will need something to imply large scale weathering and break up the tiling. It will either need a second UV channel with masked blending, or vertex blending. On uniquely unwrapped items I could use the standard shader, but those are still pretty rare in game art, not only because they require unique texture memory, but they are uniquely authored as well (its time consuming to create a one off texture for something like a water fountain or gnarled tree trunk). To me vertex blending isnā€™t merely a cool feature, its a bread and butter shader.

6

Who are you?
bit of everything for about 7+ years
etcā€¦

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Iā€™ve always wanted to go all out on a Character Action game(Devil may cry, metal gear rising, etcā€¦).

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
i love PBR its what iā€™ve been using in CGI for longer than its been in gaming.
its just part of my art style and now i can migrate it over to unity.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Lets me work with the material rather than fight the shading.
Wider range of visable materials.
Funner.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
Quality Contrast can occur pretty badly with a limited shader library.
example: non-authentic looking water along side really authentic looking sand makes the water look terrible even though the water is really sophisticated and would look amazing on its own. effects that are harder to approximate look even worse along side Hard surface PBR being near perfect.

How can we make it BETTER?
Shading: distance based roughness. this is more of a bug than anything. roughness is a cone not a blur. on the box projected cubemaps and later on the card reflections it should get sharper closer to the object but it doesnā€™t so it becomes really obvious that its just a blur.

Proper Mip Blur. currently it just blends to a lower res version which looks crappy on non-bumpy rough surfaces. like alot of metals. skyshop actually stores a blurred version in the mip channels. it look WAY better. so yeah, that. please =3.

True Metallic/Roughness rather than Metallic/Gloss.
In CGI roughness is used, as it describes the surface better than gloss since gloss was made for an algorithm not an artist. also most programs use Metallic/Rough.

Also please have some in-engine way of packing the alpha channel.
Idea: maybe make an asset type called TextureSet that you feed a set of images and it automatically packs them properly for the shaders and offers things like adjusting tangent space, etcā€¦ basically an in-engine texture modification system. plus i nice middle man to work with. lets artists provide any assets they want at no runtime cost. this way the artist can use seperate roughness map and have it auto-packed into the alpha. also things like color adjustment could be put there. invert green channel of normals etcā€¦ while shader coders could write for whatever textures they liked as well. or in my case it would be nice to be able to do the simple way on both.

I know its a drum thats been beat alot. Visual Shader Editor. as an artist and a programmer i can say that shaders are an artistic area that in unity is handled by programmers. and programming doesnā€™t yield good art. its the wrong perspective.
example: Procedural textures sucked until substance designer made an artistic interface for it. you wouldnā€™t want programmers making your art. same goes for if you are both iā€™m afraid. programming sucks at making art. :<

Do you like the PBR workflow?
its kinda meh. excluding above complaints of no roughness, packing roughness wastes my time, etcā€¦
its just kinda meh. its lacking the effects i usually use(Cloth Fresnel, Refraction, Vertex Blending, etcā€¦).
its very nice to have a built in solution but id be more likely to use something like marmoset skyshop as i can easily customize those with shaderforge.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
packing the alpha channel is a waste of my time.
tweaking things like gloss values takes up alot as well. would be nice to have an in-engine curve for roughness so i donā€™t have to keep jumping into photoshop.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
see above/
getting used to describing a material rather than the shading takes some getting used too but once i understood, i loved it. but that was years ago. in blender.

Final Thoughts: love that unity is focusing on the artistic side more but remember. Tech is not what makes games look good. its Art. the more you enable artists to do there thing the better unity games will look. its not the unbiased shading that makes my renders look good in blender. its the modelling and material editor. it doesnā€™t matter if unity has all the graphical doodads of UE4 if they donā€™t have the tools. i use unity because the API is the best i have ever worked with but the systems(Collision, Rendering, Gameplay, etcā€¦) in Unity are kinda meh. not bad but not good either. i say expand on your toolset for creation. make it even easier to make things. thatā€™s how you make unity better.

keep up the awesome Unity!

1 Like
7

Who are you?
Iā€™m the CEO of Parabole, an interactive media development company based in Quebec City, Canada.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
A first-person adventure game called KĆ“na that takes place in the 1970ā€™s Northern Quebec.

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
The game takes place in environments inspired by reality, so we have to make sure everything look as close as possible as in real life.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Since specular values are based on scientific measures such as the Refractive Index of materials, it makes it easier to create things that feel real.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
The lack of documentation. Most of what we do are actually based on this (useful) article. We had to compile his program that parse through a database of Refractive Index values to get precise specular data to use in our game. The converter is a command-line program and is not really intuitive to use.

How can we make it BETTER?
Providing a library of real-life materials like Quixel Megascan with physically-accurate specular values that fits right in Unity 5. That library could be user-generated so people could critic and improve other people work.

I would also add that it would be useful to have some kind of Subsurface scattering implementation - or light wrapping - to better simulate translucent materials such as skin and snow. It would be useful for any game that features human beings.

Right now, it feels like the PBR workflow is limited to a specific set of hard surface. Also having anisotropic reflection would be great for brushed metal surfaces, but I understand the value of keeping things simple for the Standard shader.

Do you like the PBR workflow?
It certainly is better than the previous workflow, so yes we do like it.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
We are still in progress of converting our whole project to the new workflow. We have to write terrain and snow shaders that fit with the new system. For things like walls and furnitures, it was really easy to do the switch and nothing bogged us down.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
It was a gift from god. We were cheating using rim lights and other stupid things to get things as realistic as possible. The Standard Shader is in most case easier to implement and gives better results - in less time.

Keep up the good work Unity!

8

Just want them as tightly optimised as possible with perhaps a fastest setting for things that arenā€™t so important on screen, to optimise. Weā€™d switch to that one for distant lods too.

2 Likes
9

Who are you?
A solo game dev doing the impossible one feature at a time.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Iā€™m making a sci-fi action game with nonlinear exploration and complex melee combat.

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
The art style is semi-realistic, so pretty much every object in the game will benefit from PBR.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Ease of setup and consistent results. And of course the fact that it doesnā€™t look like 90s offline CG.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
Nothing so far.

How can we make it BETTER?
Provide support for more types of materials. In particular, Iā€™m missing the following:

  • Anisotropic hair shader that supports directional comb maps
  • SSS for skin and other translucent things
  • Refraction for transparent materials (glass and water)

Do you like the PBR workflow?
Yes, absolutely.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
I spend most of the time authoring the textures, obviously.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Nothing, Iā€™ve been using PBR shaders before Unity 5 and Iā€™ve understood how light works even before that.

10

Who are you?
CTO at Animech Technologies in Sweden

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
We use Unity for all kinds of visualizations, not games. We usually aim for as high quality as possible while still mostly going for mobile devices (mostly later generation iPads).

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
We use Marmoset in Unity 4x in almost all our projects, and it is invaluable to achieve a high quality ā€œphotorealsticā€ result. We have several experienced shader coders, including me, that has further optimized Marmoset in different ways to suit our needs better and to achieve more specific results, as well as run faster on mobile hardware.
When/If Unityā€™s own PBR system is better than Marmoset, we will use that instead.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Results are more predictable and in any normal situation better. The workflow is more intuitive and it brings our products more inline with each other, and allows us to achive better results in projects where there are fewer senior developers (especially shader coders and artists), by setting a more stricts set of rules to follow to achieve a certain result.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
PBR is taxing on the hardware. You can optimize to a certain degree, but sooner or later there will have to be a number of quite expensive shader instructions such as texCubeLod or multiple texCube operations.
OpenGL and DX9 (the latter being less of a concern for us) doesnā€™t support proper blending on low res mip cubes, which introduces really bad artifacts on shaders with low glossyness. For some reason this effect is even more noticable on Unity 5 than Marmoset; and you end up having to either go with higher glossyness than you want to to reduce the effect.
Iā€™m not sure there is a good way handle this, except switching out the texCubeLod with 2 texCube-instructions (one to a specular and one to a diffuse cube, then blend them); which is more taxing on the hardware.

How can we make it BETTER?

  • I would like to have control over fresnel in the standard shader. I know most dialectrics and most metals have almost the same fresnel, but there are complex multi layer materials (some very common, like carpaint), which require more control over fresnel. I guess I could always write my own variation of the standard shader, but it would still make sense to have it there.
  • Include a version of the shader which better mitigates the problem with low glossyness materials (mentioned above), using possibly more expensive operations.
  • There are multiple issues with PBR in WebGL that arenā€™t visible in the editor.
  1. Possible fragment interpolation errors. You can see this here: Unity WebGL Player | Kinnarps WebGL
    Zoom in and look at the table at a grazing angle; something causes the reflection to be calculated improperly between different triangles. It might look like a mesh error, but this problem isnā€™t visible in the editor or in the standalone version. (disclaimer: I know the controls are wonky as hell, this is a one day demo. disclaimer: I know the UI looks like something from kindergarten. Itā€™s a mockup and that is supposed to be obvious).
  2. Glossyness doesnā€™t reach the same high values as in editor. You canā€™t really see that in the demo above, but the legs on the chairs and the table are fully mirror-glossy in the editor, while in webgl they are way less glossy.
  • I want a camera exposure slider that goes above 1 in the editor. Itā€™s so handy in Marmoset to have a camera exposure slider that allows me to use low intensity HDRIs without having to open them in photoshop and tweak exposure over and over. Just let me over-expose in Unity to whatever level I want. Itā€™s nice to have to achieve certain whiteout effects as well.
  • More controls for the generation of cubemaps. Number of mips; control over blur when creating diffuse cubs; controls over exposure and gammaā€¦

Do you like the PBR workflow?
Yes, but the parameters and controls Unity 5 are a bit all over the place at the moment. Others are just worded badly or poorly explained. Iā€™m guessing I shouldnā€™t be too hard on it during beta though; I bet you are hard at work trying to get the whole UI to be more self explanatory.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
Yes, and most of them are listed above.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
It took some time to fully realize all the repercussions a energy conserving system really has. I kept wanting materials with both high diffuse and high specular, if you know what I mean.

1 Like
11

Just a simple request really. A World mode, so that tiling is done over world co-ordinates rather than per mesh. Enabling multiple meshes to have one material draped over all of them. For example a cliff made of different rock meshes.

1 Like
12

Another thing: as mentioned above, fresnel control would be nice. Also be nice to have variants for terrain ie 2 texture splat, 3 texture, 4 texture etc - currently no support. Would be excellent to have parallax heightmap support there too for realistic terrain blending.

I love Whippetā€™s suggestion too.

2 Likes
13

Yes. Splatted terrains with paralax heightmap support. Too right.

1 Like
14

How can we make it BETTER?

just some quick and random thoughts:

  • texture blending controlled by vertex colors. supporting 2 different texture sets would be a good start i guess. texture blending based on hight maps when used with parallax mapping.
  • parallax occlusion mapping as simple parallax mapping might be a bit outdated
  • ambient brdf as described in the black ops papers e.g. as ambient specular reflections tend to be much to bright
  • translucency or subsurface scattering even in deferred as there should be enough free texture channels in the current g-buffer layout
3 Likes
15

Who are you?
Right now probably best described as Hobbyist Dev

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
FPS

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Honestly, itā€™s almost everything I always wanted. I use it on literally everything now.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

  • Pretty easy to use
  • Looks awesome
  • It getā€™s the artist vision better across than the old shaders ever could
  • Covers most material needs

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

  • Spec and Gloss as one Texture. I rather would have two seperate slots. Thatā€™s how these Textures come out of something like Quixel, and itā€™s faster to work with as seperate files. I know itā€™s a performance thing, but I value workflow more in this case.
  • Still a lack of options (will list missing features in the next question)
  • Very hard to mod. Itā€™s true Iā€™m no shader expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I expected to make changes to the lighting model a little faster. Right now thereā€™s so many files, I have a hard time understanding and even harder to mimic it for a custom shader with just minor alterations (for instance controlling the Reflections is a lot harder now for me compared to Unity 4 Cubemaps and I have no guidance to help)
  • No help with the Transparency Issues on Deferred (common problem with that Render Path I know, just saying)

How can we make it BETTER?
Needs more Options. It covers a fair amount of use cases, but itā€™s frequently lacking simple things. My Wishlist:

  • Checkbox for Double Sided Rendering required
  • Support for Refraction in Transparent Mode
  • No Tessellation Options? That surprised me a lot.
  • Better Parallax. Itā€™s time to update it, really. Itā€™s quiet cheap right now and with a lack of Tesselation thereā€™s not much alternative.
  • Seperate Specular and Gloss Slots
  • Emissive could work better. Why does it all need to be static first?
  • Offer more PBR shaders for other common Material cases the Standard Shader currently does not cover. Specifically: Hair (Anisotropic), Skin (SSS), Car Paint

Do you like the PBR workflow?
Overall, yes, and Iā€™m happy that we can choose whether we want SpecGloss or Metallic now.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
Yes, waiting on Enlighten and weep for the fully used CPU coresā€¦ because I work with a lot of Emissive things.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
I learned it while there was just SpecGloss, so I had a hard time understanding the new values since most resources are for metallic. I imagine it now is much better to get into for new users since Metallic is supported. Because of the lack of resources I had some trouble understanding what is what and did some stupid things. Like I remember I initially had difficulty realizing what Gloss does exactly and mistakenly put what should be Specular (RGB) into Gloss and vice versa. Iā€™m really not sure why i thought that, it just was very confusing at the time. I still donā€™t fully understand the role and rules of Albedo in SpecGloss workflow. Overall I managed to learn it through experimentation, but the Color Field and Slider when not having a SpecGloss Texture really didnā€™t help make things clearer at the time - the results were just so different to real textures. Different Skyboxes / Lighting Conditions and Reflection Probes have a drastically altering visual impact with PBR that can be very confusing to author for if youā€™re new to it, but may appreciate after mastering the workflow (adaptation to Environments is after all one of its nice features)

16

I kinda wish you guys would make a SSS shader for U5 Standard so it will have the same quality as the other shaders

1 Like
17

Who are you?
Lead Programmer at Blue Isle Studios

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
First person exploration

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
External environments light very well and give consistent results in different lighting setups. Detail maps are very useful for ensuring objects such as large rocks look good when viewed up close.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Consistent and easy to work with overall. The features make sense and are clearly laid out. The shader auto optimizes itself based on what you use making it somewhat ā€œfool proofā€.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
The specular component to PBR is complex and could use documentation. There are some shaders that still donā€™t use PBR such as terrain and speed trees therefore giving inconsistencies to the scene without a lot of custom shader work.

How can we make it BETTER?
Give the developer the ability to make everything PBR, release a standard shader variant for terrain grass and trees.
Provide more advanced documentation on the specifics of the specular component (ie: color range index to based on physical material/specific functionality from color channels or alpha channels). Add documentation on how a reflective cubemap factors into this. There may be a bug but sometimes occlusion didnā€™t appear to work on some meshes.

Do you like the PBR workflow?
Very much so.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
Tweaks are generally fast. The initial time investment doing research to figure out how to use specular and a lot of trial and error bogged me down significantly.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Specular.

2 Likes
18

Who are you?
Indie/Student

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Online stealth game

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
I have different seasonal changes and lighting changes, night/day, so getting more accurate details across these with less effort is great. i also use PBR workflow in other software so it makes my life so much easier to keep my libraries consistent.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
with allgorithmics tools PBR is just so much quicker now, i can make a set of awesome texture maps in minutes now ready for use, and of course it just makes more sense to work with.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
cant say i have used it long enough to mention any really bad issues with it, i suppose the extra maps make a bigger game size, but on pc thats not really an issue these days unless your going mobile.
i would say to have separate map slots, but at the same time im thinking well wouldnā€™t it conserve overall game size if we donā€™t waste the alpha channel.
really it only annoys me when i look at the map and its black or mid grey, personally i think it would be nice to have the separate slots but on the build it combines the two maps into one.
i donā€™t know much on this sort of stuff, so it probably sounds better than it actually is to do.

How can we make it BETTER?
im no shader expert so personally i would love some support given to shader forge to create a standard PBR shader that matches unityā€™s. this way i could create my own variations, for example i use a lot decals in my game with a custom blending effect on them, however if i had to write that sort of shader i would be lost. hmm maybe i should learn how to write shaders, if only i had the time.

Do you like the PBR workflow?
love it.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
apart from custom needs which i think most can relate to nothing major. i think everyone will have some sort of suggestion for a different sort of PBR shader variation, the only way i can see of satisfying everyone would be to have a standard but with a great deal of flexibility so that we could customize to however we feel fit, i think visual node system is the only way for people like myself who donā€™t know shader language.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
spec/gloss confused me for a bit, but now metal rough has been implemented into Unity thatā€™s no longer a problem. and of course trying to write my own is great fun.

19

Who are you?
A one man company that makes games and plugins/tools

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
First Person shooter

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Everything, except planar reflections, using a second camera is faster for these.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Once you get it going, itā€™s pretty nice and very versatile. The examples in the store are an awesome starting point to get to learn the different channels.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
The initial setup is a bit tricky if you just dump in your ā€˜oldā€™ textures.
The shader itself is hard to tweak, no tesselation support.

How can we make it BETTER?
With different channels used per texture slot, it would be nice if these were easier to change.
Better yet automate channel optimizations by flagging per texture if a channel is used.
Then optimize by combining simmilar texture settings into combined rgba or rgb channels). I am not sure this would end up using less resources. But a single channel texture is bound to be smaller then a four channel one. We could already whip up an editor extension that handles the manual channel combinations to check if this helps reduce the amount of textures needed.

Also if a shader is using a texture value multiplier (like a color or a number, perhaps add a bake settings into texture option) to allow the removal of static calculations. We need it to be dynamic as well, a per field bake toggle would be nice as well. Or just add a simpler standard shader, that a baked version would transform into once hitting bake material.

Add easy clear cut documentation / introduction video to the manuals, some great ones are already available, but try to condense it to the bare minimum. Perhaps include a reference value sheet like the popular spec table. A simple overview of value ranges and channels used would be awesome. shader-UniversalShader.html is not giving out anything in terms of information on texture channel ranges and results.

A better way to manage groups of textures for material assignment, perhaps rethink the asset selection menu to include grouping by asset folder? Using a (unity editor preferences tweakable) naming convention _norm, _spec to automap to a shader input would be awesome.

More ways to generate procedural skyboxes to use as the first basic reflection, which is needed for PBR to work.

Do you like the PBR workflow?
Yes especially knowing that Unity will optimize the shader per material and remove the unneeded parts.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
Tweaking UV maps on large objects, easy for an artist, but for me it just takes more time. I usually end up using matcap or world mapped shaders, but the PBR shader look quite complicated/intimidating.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Figuring out how the values work, is easy enough once you learn how to google.
What really stumped me was the epic reliance on reflection probes / skybox for lighting and final look, which should have been way more obvious.
After realizing why everything looked bland and dark, fixing it became easy (just add a skybox and/or reflection probes).

20

I forgot to mention in my piece of feedback that since almost every object in the scene is on a single ā€œsmartā€ shader. Thereā€™s an opportunity to atlas nearly everything so that the majority of complex scenes batch into very few draw calls.

Currently this is an opportunity weā€™re investigating but if unity natively supported something like this, performance (from a cpu rendering perspective) would come easy.