[Official] 5.0 PBR Calibration Charts

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!

 

Awesome! Thanks!

 

Really thanks but I can't download from asset store for some reason can you please put a direct link for that?
I really need this.

 

It's a problem caused by my windows 7.
Thanks but isn't there any download link for the whole that 160MB files on asset store?

 

It's a lot of favor
Thanks

 

Thank you very much for this.

 

Thanks a lot for this! It would be good to get steel on there as well if it's not too late.

 

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.

 

Cool - especially the charts looks very useful.
Thank you very 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.

 

Thanks, these are great.

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?

 

Yesterday I was working on creating a few non-metalic materials with the metalic shader workflow. I had some pre-existing diffuse, normal, and specular maps. The specular map was greyscale and I was having some issues that maybe Unity could help with.

With help from the calibration charts, I understand that I need to move the specular greyscale values into the Alpha(A) channel and the Red(R) channel should be all black (0) to be non metallic. With photoshop, this is trivial to do but it seems like a common task that maybe could be automated in the asset importer. I see that there is an "alpha from greyscale" option which, at first, sounds exactly like what I'm asking for. Unfortunately, it doesn't clear the greyscale value out of the Red(R) channel so my metallic values are incorrect.

Should there be a "alpha from greyscale and clear RGB" option?

Or a more robust solution I was thinking/dreaming of would be some sort of built-in texture builder that allows creating one RGBA texture from several greyscale textures or values. It would look similar to the standard shader UI but with different slots for R, G, B, and A. when a texture is not applied to a channel, a slider could be available to set the channel value for all pixels.

 

@peteorstrike - thanks for the response. Your note about texturing the roughness makes sense, as seeing white as smooth while authoring a texture is actually more intuitive. I think I'm just used to seeing a roughness slider, instead of a smoothness slider and it was giving me weird convulsions.

I had expected the channels of the Standard Shader inputs to be packed a little more efficiently, as having an entire texture for "metal/roughness" is wasting 2 channels for that texture right out of the gate. Sure I get you can use these for special fx down the road, but common PBR function such as occlusion and gloss currently go in a different texture. And sure, I understand that you can put these 2 into the metal map right now... BUT it makes more sense to me to have this as standard behavior.

So then you'd have diffuse, normal, and mask0 map... with the mask0 map having all 4 channels utilized for common pbr functions. If you need special fx down the road these could be added in a mask1 or mask2 map.

I dunno, maybe I'm just splitting hairs? Maybe none of this really matters? I'm likely going to scrap the standard shader anyway and write my own custom PBR Shader to use in my own projects instead... because I have control freak tendencies... and because Unity is so awesome and let's me write/use write any shader I want

--- Edit --- I just wanted to add, that the ability to pack the channels into one texture is one of the main benefits of using the metallic workflow over the specular workflow, as it saves 3 rgb specular channels and the addition of a second map. To not have this texture packed in the metal shader is a pretty large oversight.

 

@mtalbott - we're both talking about the complete opposite. I want them all packed together and you want the option of them being all separated!

 

@chingwa actually I think we are saying the same thing, just with opposite approaches. I agree that the textures used by the standard material should be efficiently packed, all channels should be used and your diffuse, normal, and mask0 setup makes sense.. I think the difference between what you're saying and what I'm saying is that the packing of the textures should be something done under the hood in unity, with the artist supplying separate grey scale masks. That would align closer to "years of industry texture convention" and existing texture assets. While most artists can combine and pack the separate masks in photoshop, it makes for unintelligible image file that clouds a clear understanding of what's going on. Also, while most studios have some image editing software, if unity wants to support the free-indie community, they should not assume that everyone has access to software to easily move masks to different channels.

 

Hey peteorstrike, in regards to the arrangement how about:

-Diffuse/Albedo
Base (RGB) Alpha (A)

-Metalness(R) AO (G) gloss/roughness (B)
or
-Metalness(R) AO (G) spec(dielectric spec color accuracy)/ (B) gloss/roughness (A)

As an artist, there doesn't really seem to be a point to have a 0-1 slider for Occlusion logically. Although it could become useful as a multiplier?

 

There's a lot of way to do that, and i believe that everyone behind unity team are aware or already have some idea about it. For example maybe Unity can use some kind of industry standard texture layer arrangement like another engine/realtime renderer (Marmoset Toolbag) that use PBL so people can author the textures and it's still compatible with every engine, Or Unity still use the same setup as the current standard shader (multiple texture) but add a "compile material" button in the material setting for material that using standard shader and it will combine all of those textures into completely packed textures and assign it into the material with a new Optimized material just like how Unity packed the textures for the Old tree creator material.

 

I once had a setup that worked something like this:
R: Metalness
G: AO
B: Emissive (color from albedo)
A: Roughness

Worked nice at that time.

 

Nice explanation! now we see that u choosed channels carefully, and i think this is worth for blog post? with specular setup explanation?

 

Thank you @ReJ, that does help clarify. I wasn't thinking of the consequences of compression.

Although, while the reasons are more clear now, the UX is still a little "muddy". Would it help if, in the shader inspector, after the property name you gave us a hint to what channel(i.e. Albedo(RGB), Metallic(R), Smoothness(A), Normal(RGB)). Also, why is Smoothness a sub-property of Metallic. It seems like it should be it's own thing with it's own texture slot even if we use the same texture for both, metallic and smoothness.

I second the idea that this would make a good blog post.

 

I always figured the R channel had the best compression fidelity (at least from my experience using the camera depth buffer). But I take it a pre-compressed image has a different profile than the camera buffers. I also take it that the B channel is absolute crap, since you barely mentioned it

In all my research about PBR workflows and texture channel combining, this is the first I've heard about these compression issues. I would have thought it would be better to have fewer texture lookups, but what you're saying about compression makes sense.