To help people get to grips with the new Standard Shader, we’ve been creating a number of assets to ease people into the confusing world of PBR. This started with the first iteration of the Shader Calibration Scene, which you can download from the asset store here.
We’re making our internal PBR calibration charts available, which are cheat-sheets to help show what values each slot of the standard shader expects, in order to create a particular material. There’s a chart for both the default metal/smooth mode, as well as the specular/smooth variant. We’ve been using these to quickly grab colours for setting specular and metal values, and they also gave us a quick reference for what albedo and smoothness values to use.
Here’s a preview of the charts:
You can download these as part of the Shader Calibration Scene, or as a separate zipped download linked below. This download contains the full hi-resolution .png and .pdf files.
This is very nice and very useful - it’s great to see you support PBS not only from the technological perspective but also in terms of “make this usable for as many people as possible”. Right on!
Hi @ksam2 , sorry to hear you’re having problems. Are you getting any error messages from the asset store? Or is there an issue with the download itself?
I’m afraid it’s only on the asset store right now. If it helps, I can zip up a package for you when I’m back in the office tomorrow morning and send it over?
Thanks a lot peteorstrike, btw just curious, seeing from the chart that full 255 white are used is there a plan to improve to bloom,Tonemapping/HDR based effect to fight the glittering/firefly effect caused by high smoothness value?
Thanks! These will be helpful for my team.
I think some example emissive materials would be a great addition, or perhaps to another scene if emission complicates this chart too much.
A similiar chart that took all those metallic and non metal examples and actually gave example colors for their smoothness would be a lot more useful. Dont really find these charts all that useful in its current state. Though i suppose they are a little more useful for people who dont know what the difference is between metallic and specular workflow.
@Zomby138 I might be a little tight on space there now but there’s a very simple steel sample in the Shader Calibration Scene if it helps!
@Reanimate_L There’s been a recent refactor of the image effects but I’d expect the current ones to be the ones that ship with 5.0. I believe the sparkles are mitigated a little by using Standard shader with correctly exposed HDR’s, Linear colour space, and photographic tonemapping but it seems as much an AA problem as it is an image effect issue. I’m hopeful we can look at improving visual issues like that further along the 5.x cycle.
@chrismarch_1 That could be really handy as part of the Shader Calibration Scene, great suggestion. We’re tweaking some things with HDR colours/emissives, so this might have to wait for after 5.0 launch!
@kurylo3d The difficulty with applying specific values to smoothness is that it has no reliably, scientifically measurable attributes, unlike albedo and specular, and it’s almost always set artistically.
There can be a smooth, shiny aluminium, and there can be a dull, rough one. A shiny, wet brick, or a dry, dusty one. Yet brick and aluminium, regardless of how shiny or rough, usually have the same albedo and specular/metal values. And what distinction do we make between a scratched metal and a scuffed metal, in terms of smoothness? The variations are far too numerous to cover, which is why we figured that it’s best left as a sliding scale, that is to say - the smoothness is the one value you need to play around with depending on how you want the material to look. By far the most important numerical values for the ‘correct look’ are the RGB for albedo and specular maps and the greyscale values for metalness.
There are examples in the Shader Calibration Scene of different smoothing values for certain materials, so you can at least look at some simple, more specific samples there.
I don’t know too much about these kind of workflows, so I found it interesting just how different they are - I kind of assumed that albedo would remain consistent, with only the spec / metallic parts differing but it seems that each method requires a completely different approach to authoring textures.
Just a note to the moderators: Shouldn’t this thread be stickied? It would be very unfortunate if it disappeared from the list after a while. Or, maybe even preferable: Could we have one stickied thread that links to all those “official” threads? I think this would be preferable because to many stickied threads can get a little annoying when browsing the form. Maybe just one with the title “Official Threads” would be enough - and then all those nice official threads could be linked from there.
yes bit that being said… giving us diffuse colors of every material doesnt much help either… i mean lets face facts… wood can be colored any number of ways… your not really giving us much info outside of what our current color texture maps already hold.
A better thing to do for people is to give common setups. and show what colors belong in those work flows… shiny floor wood… stones… glass… gold… etc etc… Think the most help ful thing u did was show the difference between spec and metallic workflow in regaurds to the colors of reflections.
Is there anywhere I can lookup the texture input values for the metallic shader? OK I get from this chart, that R = metallic and A = “smoothness” (though why it’s reversed and isn’t roughness from 0.0 to 1.0 is…???). I’m looking for guidance on the G channel and B channel though. Through experimentation I’ve concluded that G = Micro Occulsion…? But can’t figure out B… if it’s even anything.
Also is there a general guide for the other shader values such as Height and Detail Mask, and are there recommendations or guidelines for “skin” or thickness/backscatter workflows for Unity 5?