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

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 doesn't seem to work. (and RTP3 author talking about leaving asset store...)
  • 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 isn't specific to Unity5 PBR, but in general Anton Hand's talk at Unite 2014 helped a lot - he mentions hard / soft requirements for making PBR look "right", at the time I was unfamiliar with the image effects that can be used to really make PBR shine. (tonemapping, color grading, bloom, etc)

 

Actually, I'm not sure how much mipmaps relate to PBR/Standard Shader, but I have to express one serious annoyance and blockade I'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 won't provide useful answers to those questions, with my current heavily limited experience with the standard shader), I'm just going to point out the one suggestion I have and hope you'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 it's as simple as exposing a GL property. I'd rather not use performance-draining workarounds if I don't have to.

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

 

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.

 

Who are you?
I'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?
I'm building Eastshade, which is a visually striking, non-violent, open world, first person game who'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. I'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?
I'm not using Unity 5's PBR yet because I will first have to wait until it has a terrain shader and vertex blend shader. I've heard it said that the standard shader will cover 80% of use cases. I'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 isn't merely a cool feature, its a bread and butter shader.

 

Who are you?
bit of everything for about 7+ years
etc...

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

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
i love PBR its what i'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 doesn'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, etc... 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 etc... 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 doesn't yield good art. its the wrong perspective.
example: Procedural textures sucked until substance designer made an artistic interface for it. you wouldn't want programmers making your art. same goes for if you are both i'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, etc...
its just kinda meh. its lacking the effects i usually use(Cloth Fresnel, Refraction, Vertex Blending, etc...).
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 don'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 doesn't matter if unity has all the graphical doodads of UE4 if they don't have the tools. i use unity because the API is the best i have ever worked with but the systems(Collision, Rendering, Gameplay, etc...) 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. that's how you make unity better.

keep up the awesome Unity!

 

Who are you?
I'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 Kôna that takes place in the 1970'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!

 

Just want them as tightly optimised as possible with perhaps a fastest setting for things that aren't so important on screen, to optimise. We'd switch to that one for distant lods too.

 

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?
I'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 doesn'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, I'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, I've been using PBR shaders before Unity 5 and I've understood how light works even before that.

 

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 "photorealstic" 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 Unity'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) doesn'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.
I'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 aren't visible in the editor.
1. Possible fragment interpolation errors. You can see this here: http://www.animechtechnologies.com/kinnarpsdemo/
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 isn'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. It's a mockup and that is supposed to be obvious).
2. Glossyness doesn't reach the same high values as in editor. You can'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. It'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. It'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 gamma..

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. I'm guessing I shouldn'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.

 

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.

 

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 Whippet's suggestion too.

 

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

 

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

 

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, it'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 get'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. That's how these Textures come out of something like Quixel, and it's faster to work with as seperate files. I know it'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. It's true I'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 there'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 it'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. It's time to update it, really. It's quiet cheap right now and with a lack of Tesselation there'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 I'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 cores... 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. I'm really not sure why i thought that, it just was very confusing at the time. I still don'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 didn'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 you're new to it, but may appreciate after mastering the workflow (adaptation to Environments is after all one of its nice features)

 

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

 

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 "fool proof".

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 don'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 didn'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.

 

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 wouldn't it conserve overall game size if we don'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 don'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 unity'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 don'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 that's no longer a problem. and of course trying to write my own is great fun.

 

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, it'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 'old' 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).

 

I forgot to mention in my piece of feedback that since almost every object in the scene is on a single "smart" shader. There'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 we're investigating but if unity natively supported something like this, performance (from a cpu rendering perspective) would come easy.

 

Who are you?
Maxime Charbonneau, main programmer on Kôna

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
A first person adventure game.

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Well, the large majority of the materials in our game uses the Standard Shader. We made a simple Terrain surface shader with PBR lighting.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Well, it's PBR. It's pretty and consistent. Also, the support of PBR lighting for surface shaders makes it simple to implement basic custom PBR shaders.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
The current default implementation wastes quite a few channels on the textures we assign to it. For example, the occlusion map uses only one channel of a full RGB texture. In the long run, this means a lot of wasted memory. See this thread about this topic.

Also, as of now, it doesn't support some of the features used in other PBR implementations, such as translucency (e.g. snow and skin) and anisotropy of specular highlights (e.g. brushed metals)

How can we make it BETTER?
Implementing advanced options of some kind to limit the waste of map. For example, for opaque materials with the specular workflow, the occlusion could be in the albedo's alpha. For the Metallic workflow, the occlusion and height maps could be in the G and B channels of the metallic map. Different options to change the source map/channel of different values could exist.

Also, the standard shader could support translucency and anisotropy. I know that this is a first pitch for Unity's PBR workflow, but it would definitely help push Unity's visuals further.

Lastly, I quickly made a surface shader for it, but the absence of a PBR terrain shader is a problem for people with a lack of shader knowledge.

Do you like the PBR workflow?
Certainly.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
I made a terrain shader and helped my artist colleague to get correct specular colors for different materials.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Not much, there are a lot of resources for PBR out there, even if a lot of those aren't specifically about Unity's implementation.

 

Agree, it would be great if unity could automatically pack opaque materials AO into the alpha channel of the diffuse. Or maybe just make it default for opaque materials. Huge waste of a texture when you're only using one channel.

Same with metallic - there's one map that only uses two channels. Put the AO in there, and support specular f0 in there as well.. Metallic shader currently looks pretty bad compared to spec/gloss because there's no way to control f0.

 

@philwinkel, it is quite easy to "bake" that yourself though. No need for any kind of "baking" even. Doable with an automatic editor script usign SetPixel operations. I wrote a number of more optimized versions of Marmoset shaders that use the texture channels more effectively, and I have an editor script that combines textures into combined versions.
But yes, it would be nice of Unity to do this automatically of course.

 

I understand how to edit textures... I meant "pack" instead of "bake". My point was the unnecessary texture data being used. For example, metallic material using all these maps:

1. Albedo (RGB) Transparency (A) - but opaque doesn't need transparency, 1 channel free
2. Metallic (R) Smoothness (A) - 2 channels free
3. Height map (G) - 3 channels free
4. Occlusion (G) - 3 channels free
5. Emission (RGB) - 1 channel free
6. Detail Mask (A) - 3 channels free

this metallic material using all of those maps takes up 6 textures.. with like 13 unused channels. You could pack them into 3 textures:

1. Albedo (RGB) Occlusion (A)
2. Metallic (R) Height (G) Detail Mask (B) Smoothness (A)
3. Emission (RGB) Detail Mask (A)

I know one of the big goals of the standard shader is "user friendliness", but I don't think it should be at the expense of having to use all these texture maps that aren't necessary.

It would be nice to not have to worry about packing the maps, and it would just take care of it during build. Otherwise I have no problem packing textures..

My second point, was that in UE4, Alloy PBR shaders, etc, they allow you to specify a specular f0 override as a grayscale map (or even a slider). There is no ability to change the f0 in unity's current metallic shader, and until there is, the spec/gloss shader is going to look better. No ability to change the f0 means all the dielectrics are using some default plastic-ish f0 value.

 

When you try to fix all the shortcomings of metallic, you end up with spec-gloss. Why not just use spec-gloss from the beginning? When you know the basic theory behind PBR, there is no point in using the limited workflow of the two. It's not rocket science. Metallic doesn't simplify anything.
I wish everyone would just stick to spec-gloss and not divide every tool related to PBR in two.

 

I was using spec/gloss work flow for a long while, and it became very cumbersome to have so many textures (6 or 7 textures is too many) and having them sit on my hard drive. The packed textures in Alloy really keeps this process simple since I use tools that give me a 1:1 and cuts down on the number of textures in Unity. (I'm also using 4k textures so this is important too.)

 

PBR needs Linear Space Lighting, But even selected Metal API , there still not have Linear color space selection in player setting on ios target ...

 

There is no linear color space on mobile platforms. They are supposedly going to implement it during the 5.x release cycle, but not for 5.0

 

Faster and simpler approximation PBS fallback for mobile with some variant of pixel lit and completely unlit PBS (only use Diffuse IBL and Reflection IBL).

 

Hi All,

One thing I noticed is that the terrain does not allow Physics based shading yet. Is this something that will be mitigated in the future?

 

A Unity official said that Physical terrain shading will be implemented in the later betas.

 

definently need more options for shape of the reflection area of reflection. I have slanted roofs right now with slanted ceilings.. and the current boxes make both sides take in effect from another.

 

Is the Standard shader meant to work well on mobile devices too?

If I change the 3 environment textures in my scene from Mobile/Diffuse to the Standard shader using Opaque with an Albedo Texture, my framerate drops from 40FPS to around 12 FPS.

This is on a Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini. Low end device, but still fairly recent.
I'm using Beta 18.

 

I recently bought a cheap NetBook 7 with Mali 450 GPU at because the Mali 400 GPU was causing Unity 4.6.1 big drops in Unity game processing due to issues with texture opacity.

 

Who are you?

3D Artist hobbiest for Now, but i want to work on videogame company later.

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

Open World with Time of Day lighting for realistic immersive adventure game.

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

it gives more realism to every scene, even if you try to build it

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

the simpliest way to use it.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

i.e. in specular map channel if i put a specular texture i can't decide wich 'part' of the model have more or less
specular/reflectivity tone (is only omogene specular/refraction/gloss etc etc), we have only a slider which you can decide the amount of specular the material is.
And to not have a glossines and other channel too,

How can we make it BETTER?

have the possibility to add some alpha (B/W) map to put in specular power channel to tell wich part of the model is more or less specular, and of course have a glossiness, Cavity, and Refraction Channel too to add more realism to character
or maybe have a sort of ShaderNode editor integrated in GUI which we can create our personal shader



Do you like the PBR workflow?

Yes, really a lot

 

Your not using it correctly, the specular workflow is RGB, spec, A, gloss

 

Ok thanks, it works correctly

 

We need a new terrain shader and we need GI to work with realtime point lights. We know you already have a terrain shader because you used it in your viking demo, so maybe share that with us. I really don't see the point in not doing that.

 

GI does work with pointlights being moved around.. not quite sure what your lookn for them to do? you can add more lights and they react with gi.. The baking doesnt bake the lighting.. it bakes how things react to lighting... Unless ur purposely baking lights with shadows.

 

Nope, it's planned feature. It works with point lights, but only with baked ones.

 

The project we are working on is World of Diving. And I should say that in Unity 5 looks it so much better!!

How can we make it BETTER?

It would be nice to have a lightmap\ambient occlusion slot in the standard shader which has an option to use the second uv set.
Right now the shader is really good for objects with a unique textures but in reality I use a lot of tiling textures on dynamic objects like really big ships.

 

I am an amateur tinkerer when it comes to gamedev, but I have a very strong background in physics (PhD in electromagnetism) and a long-lasting interest in PBR. I have one question:

The microstructure of the surface is encoded in the smoothness/gloss map, and the macrostructure goes into the normal map. These do not talk to each other. When viewed from far away, the fine details of the normal map are averaged out to blue and disappear, instead of being factored inside the smoothness map. It is of course possible for me to compute all my mipmaps myself and transfer the information the Normal map to the Smoothness map. Does Unity has any plan to do that automatically?

 

I was recently thinking the same thing. except in my head it was far less fancy than how you phrased it. its a minor detail when faced with the overall visuals though. i don't know how complicated encoding the mips is on their side either. workflow wise i would imagine you would add a slot for normal map gloss offset to the texture importer. weather this is worth the complexity in pipeline is up for debate but i personally wouldn't object to this feature if it was added. however i might like to see proper distance based roughness first as that is currently a very visible flaw in the shading at the moment.(ignores the fact light scatters in a cone and just blurs the reflections. looks horrible at contact points)

 

Who are you?

Indie videogame developer and Freelance .

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

I´m working in different games: 3D Survival horror, 2.5d adventure game, and for other people I working in a 2.5 platformer.

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

I used PBR before, for my Survival horror game are really usefull.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

Realistic materials, more fidelity and fluidity work between 3d sculpting/texturing software and game engine. About Unity 5 I like the GI and the normal map intensity control.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

what bad things I dislike from de Unity 5 standard shader: I don´t like the way you use for roughness and metalness, I don´t feel it natural.

How can we make it BETTER?

-Real roughness, reflectivity can be setting to zero if you like, I don´t like reflections everywhere.
-More control in the properties from the inspector.
-If you use a image for metalness, a slider to set the intensity is needed.
-What about gloss map?
-What about skin shader?
-What about fur shader?
-What about PBR Terrain shader?
-What about tesellation?
-A lot of developers use Unity3D for mobile devices, whats the point of PBR if it doesn't work in mobile devices, you need a mobile PBR standard shader, if reflection is the problem, use cube maps.

Do you like the PBR workflow?

I like PBR, but not Unity 5 PBR, I feel it need more improvements. At this point I prefer work in Unity 4.6.

 

you do realize there is a specular/diffuse variant as well right? even so everything should be reflective. that's how the world is. almost all materials stand in the range of 2%-4% specularity. even rocks, they are just really rough. also its not Metallic/Rough(much to my displeasure) its Metallic/Gloss(Called smoothness for some god-forsaken reason).

 

Yes, but if you try shaders like Lux pack (it´s free) in the 4.6 or 5, I feel this pack is better in terms of control about rough and metallic surfaces. I think, the standard shader of Unity5 is more "powerfull", but it is not intuitive and need to have more configuration options for developers.

 

Hi just got hold of the Scene Calibration asset and was wandering if it was possible to see a fix for the out of place occlusion map when using it with a height map. i did mention it before but the example i had wasn't that good as its only really an issue with textures that have defined lines in it, the scene you give though is perfect.

 

I'm not sure if this is the right place, but I thought I'd try.

Are there any plans to implement screen space reflections into the standard shader, as a high-end alternative to using reflection probes?

EDIT:

Apparently yes!

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wheres-the-render-settings-in-unity-5.297419/#post-1959341

 

First of all:
I suggest to put the user (and his/her time) more in focus, I feel the lack of it in many areas in Unity (compared to the old times).

Who are you?

CGI and VR generalist since 20 years from freelancing to technical directing/pipeline building, helped several apps in development, related to GUI design and usability.

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

VR applications, archviz.

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

This is a meaningless question to me. Like 'how lcd monitors fit to your work with computers'.
PBR fits the same way that legacy shader did, just offers better quality.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?

Offering better quality in various lighting conditions, better metallic surfaces, blurres reflections.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?

It is not PBR-related, although the lack of standards is a problem (just like everywhere in the CGI field).
But mostly it is a problem with the way the GUI and background technology was implemented in Unity5.

1. I can't see any logic in why you use 'Smoothness' instead of 'Roughness'. If you implement it as 'Smoothness', then at least put a checkbox there, called 'Invert'. It is the same non-user friendly implementation like when we had to deal with scaling up imported FBX files for years for every single model. (Did anyone count that the 600.000 active users of Unity how many years did spend with dealing with the scaling issue during the years?)

Developers should understand that studios use data in various pipelines, content creators build assets for different hosts.
The most uniform ways things work, the easier and quicker result comes. Unity has everything built-in to speed up processes, just need the will.

2. I can't see why we have to spend or time with preparing texture input for the shaders with dealing with channels. Any logical and user-friendly way is to feed the Metal shader input with cross-platform compatible data (eg. separate textures for 'metalness', 'roughness' and then make an automatic combine for them inside Unity. The current way makes my time (and all the time of the users who are binding with this) wasted.
Also different pipelines, 3rd party apps result separate textures for separate usage. Please make life easier and put automatism to these areas.

Let the user feed the inputs with any kind of texture data and let Unity to merge/combine them. Maybe a 'Merge' or 'Combine' button would be helpful.


How can we make it BETTER?

See the former text.
Other suggestions:
1. Show the values of the channel in RGB, too, not just the value between 0 and 1.
2. As Unity has the built-in feature to turn BUMP maps to Normal maps, offer an 'Export normal map' option.
3. It would be great to offer an option for zero reflectivity.

UPDATE: after spending time with Unreal 4 I have some additional suggestions, but technically these are a _must_ to keep up with the competition.

4. Integrated node based material editor. It would be great to make it as in 3ds Max works: with an option to use a simplified 'classic' approach and a node based one for speeding up the work.

5. Integrated presets (with editing possibilites) for special 'fx' materials from skin shading, subsurface scattering, vertex animations, etc.

Do you like the PBR workflow?

Offers better quality and it was definitely time to catch up with other engines.
So I feel less bad, when I compare Unity to Unreal 4 (but Unity is still far from the visual quality and the price of it).

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

I spend my time with guessing, why are we punished with non-logical solutions (see former texts).
Honestly I really-really hate that I have to deal with Alpha combining for Smoothness all the time.
It is simple terrible, I have no idea how the developers came with this solution.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
The most embarrassing thing was that I always has the feeling that Unity 5 is in public beta stage because of marketing purposes (Unreal has PBR, Lumion has PBR, CryEngine has PBR), not because Unity 5 is 'there' (and I know that not I'm the only one who feels this way). I miss the quality tutorials/sample content what Unity was famous about in the ancient times. Sorry guys, I didn't want to be mean, but this is how I feel.

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

 

Who are you?
I'm a freelance graphic designer mostly working on Unity.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
I work on archi-visuals and few simpler apps.

How does PBR fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Every cases benefits from better shaders.

What are the GOOD things about PBR that you like?
Big step forward in rendering, especially with metals.

Albedo used for GI: if I remember correctly, the old shader reflected white light even with a dark texture.

Nice new features like the normal map factor.

What are the BAD things about PBR that you dislike?
Right now, the standard shader is nice for your doll demo but seems to have been custom made for this use which is very frustrating when you want to do something else. For example: why is that albedo, metalness, normal, occlusion, have to share the same UV set and the same tiling? It works with a model like a character but won't when working on tillable materials that need different set-ups.

This is an arbitrary limitation that shouldn't even exist in the first place. As an artist, I don't want to worry about these things and need full control of whatever is possible. Don't forget we are professionals: we appreciate ergonomy but we don't want things to be simplified like an Apple product so put the UV/tiling choices on every maps.

An other thing is the use of alpha channels on maps like the smoothness or detail mask. Alpha channels are great for optimisation but they also are a pain in the ass to edit in photoshop an have to be added manually after a textures baking from a 3D modeller. This process should be automated to assemble RGB and BW files into RGBA.

The option for UV0/UV1 is a good idea but incompatible with lightmaping since UV1 is used for lightmaps. In the end, we can't use this other channel...


Bottom line, I lose way to much time adapting to this workflow while I should have the tools to make Unity working with mine once and for all.


How can we make it BETTER?
A node system is the way to go: it would allow us to add maps and effects without being limited.

Glass refraction: we had it in the legacy shaders, I don't get why it is not in the standard shader.

More control over Fresnel reflections: the intend may be "realistic" but sometimes, they show more fake reflections while this would look fine without it.

Anisotropy for brushed metals and hair.

More UV sets.

Slider on maps like smoothness so we can adjust it in the editor instead of editing it in photoshop.

Do you like the PBR workflow?
No because I need to adapt to that workflow while it should adapt the user: it's like driving a car without being able to change the seat settings. It is really frustrating because PBR gives great results but I could do much better.

How do you spend most of your time working with our PBR features? Anything bogging you down?
Yes. As I explained, I lose to much time fighting over arbitrary limitations.

When you learned to use our PBR, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
The specular vs metallic set-up was a bit confusing since they seem give the same results.

A more universal approach would have been better.


Thanks for listening to our feedbacks.