I’m 99% programmer and 1% artist, so I rely on the asset store for art assets at the moment. I’ve been pretty intimidated by the whole Unity 5 PBR/standard shader talk, so I started playing around with it without worrying about all that junk about measured values, blah blah blah.
My first attempt at converting existing textures was with a free spaceship model that only included a JPG diffuse and a normal map. The results were “interesting” but it’s tough without source layers. My second attempt was with a paid model that only had diffuse and specular (no normal!?), but luckily it included the Photoshop PSD with everything nicely separated.
This is the result of my first attempt on that second model using metal/smoothness. I’m sure artist types would spend countless hours defining each material properly (as they should!), but I think this is pretty cool for a quick-and-dirty conversion. The original using the legacy Specular shader doesn’t actually look as bad as this (not sure why it looks like THAT in Unity 5). I mean, in Unity 4 at least the specular of the out-of-the box one is at least slightly visible, though it’s still kind of anemic.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28342849/PBR%20Texture%20Test/PBR%20Texture%20Test.html
My thoughts:
- If you’re going to rely on the asset store for models and will be using the Unity 5 standard shader, favor those that include PSD files.
- C’mon artists, time to step up and start including PBR maps: flat albedo, metal/smoothness, and AO.
- Unity 5 PBR is kinda sick!
If you don’t want to do the web player, here’s a still image comparison:
