New PBR Shader

[SolarPortal]

Few a couple years since we moved to gen2 skyline, the PBR has never looked right and has been difficult to match to other software and always seemed to have more specular in the wrong places than it needed creating a sort of satin sheen to the surface.
So we have spent the past week and a half rewriting the PBR shader to be more industry standard including changing how the roughness blur works.

We wanted to show the difference here:

All shots are pure ambience with no lighting, just pure IBL

OLD PBR:

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NEW PBR:

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OLD PBR:

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NEW PBR:

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OLD PBR:

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NEW PBR:

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We have also improved the normals quality as we found that BC5_SNORN produced a horrible blocky effect:
OLD PBR:

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NEW PBR:

Clipboard Image (8).jpg (66.06 KiB) Viewed 46082 times

Just posting this in case you wanted to know what we are up to
Have a good one everyone

[epsilonion]

wow, look at that detail, looks miles better now...
great to see, thanks for keeping us updated..

[SolarPortal]

just another comparison shot:

Left is old PBR shader, Right is new PBR shader

Clipboard Image (1).jpg (130.07 KiB) Viewed 46056 times

[Sage1969]

Verrrrry nice work! Now it seems to catch the eye more which I'll gladly take by the bucket load.

The metal looks like metal and not brushed or like frosted glass. This is nice!

Question- Will the new version be able to have a texture or decal fade in specific time frame without figuring out a script (writing myself) or no. I'll try to figure it out either way.


Keep up the good work.

[SolarPortal]

Good, glad you guys like it. The quality is far superior, also the AO map slot is now working as i found both the old shader and new shader code had an error with the texture array slice index of the ao texture.

@Sage, do you have an example of what your after?

Also i believe an action was made once, but not sure how old that would be now if its even in the engine anymore.

We are also going to be building in a world normals tool for detail layers so you could have moss or snow on top of rocks which ever way they are rotated.

[SolarPortal]

reworking the parallax occlusion mapping technique for the shaders and have some pretty decent results, i got slowed down for half a day as didnt realise the mesh i was using had broken tangents, but here are the results so far:

Just normals:

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Parallax Occlusion mapping with height based AO:

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We also have the height maps discarding fragments which are outside of the texture range allowing the surface to look more bumpy when aligned with the background.

Also working on self shadowing for the parallax occlusion mapping which adds much more.. i have a semi working self shadowing, but it isnt correct enough to show yet,

[epsilonion]

Question- Will the new version be able to have a texture or decal fade in specific time frame without figuring out a script (writing myself) or no. I'll try to figure it out either way.
Keep up the good work.

I think hes after a lua hook so that he can blend/fade in or fade out when he wants it to fade via lua.
I THINK its maybe like a fade to black or something like that (like you get in video editing).

[SolarPortal]

Yeah, but with the new lua coding, you have direct material access to the pointers within c++.
Lua in skyline is hugely different now because of the new object pointers to direct c++ class instances. It means direct access and most if not all the relevant controls the classes contain inside c++. (Not every class is implemented, but once we have a majority of the data in lua, it could be considered a lua SDK for skyline with plans in the future to load Lua Dlls with other integrations or classes.. )

So doing this in lua would not be as hard, as you would grab the actual material and just run a snippet of lua and fade the alpha around as you could with other properties. Not alot has been mentioned about this new lua system on the forums so far but its immensely powerful. I have even started a custom editor using the qt plugins for the vehicle editor and am controlling and entirely separate renderwindow, scene, node and model system purely in lua since the new lua object types allow mirror copying of c++ with a few key differences.

So to answer this one, i reckon it would be good to see it done on the new version once we have a final build. The current PBR material is just getting all the additions the old shader had but at the same time improvements to features like parallax occlusion mapping, wind animations etc.. not to mention but we are also going to be implementing tessellation using pn triangles into skyline. And these are just the tip of the iceberg for new skyline.. its taking time, but we hope to blow a few minds when we release lol

We are essentially calling this v2.0 skyline which would be gen3!

[Sage1969]

Thanks guys some interesting stuff there.

Sounds very much like what I was asking about if not the same not sure though.

Say I have a snow scene or wet footprints on a floor which are decals. I would like set to a specific amount of time that will allow a fade away in increments or maybe even cycle through 3 or 4 different decals to make the fade away.

I always left scripting to others and am less than a newb but will learn.

However it ends up though the new features and upgrades sound exciting.

Trying not to pace!

[epsilonion]

It would be nice to get the material hooks in the api server..

[SolarPortal]

Yeah, but the new api is not released yet. so when we release, there will be an updated API to represent the new changes.
@Sage, that makes sense now, thanks

Please bear in mind, that in the near future we will have screen space decals for use

[epsilonion]

awesome thanks for the info, can not wait till your all sorted and to see the new improvements..

[SolarPortal]

New video showing the new IBL based lighting with no lighting sources in the world, so this is all pure ambience:

[Sage1969]

Very nice SP. Until now I did not realize IBL could look better

[Zethael]

Wow, great work!
I really like the new PBR Shader, that's a big development step. Can't wait for the new generation

[SolarPortal]

@ igor-black, Sadly, Ogre PBR did not cut it and took too much work to take assets from main PBR production software into the engine and make it look the same.

With the new PBR, its pretty much a 1:1 ratio as long as nothing changes which it shouldn't considering its PBR lol

@ Zethael, Thanks for the great comment. We are doing what we can where we can to get this engine ready, just so much to do