[Official] Specular vs Metallic workflow

Yes metallic would be nice just like Antonov Suit which is a great shader

 

Antonov Suit supports both workflows, I hope Unity 5 will have them both too.

 

One of the following Chroma Nodes helps with obtaining albedo but not currently for metals:
- http://shop.variableinc.com/products/nodechroma-widebundle
- http://shop.variableinc.com/products/nodechroma-narrowbundle

 

I would consider it "one shader inspector to rule them all"

They explained the logic behind it in the unite videos... apparently artists get confused or something with all the different shader variations (according to them). The standard shader abstracts away all the different variations of shaders. It provides a more user friendly interface where you plug in the maps you want to use, and it will automagically use the shader variant that can use all those maps. So if you plug in a height map it'll switch over to a parallax shader, etc. It's one interface, and a lot of different shader variants under the hood. I am messing around with the beta, I agree it is kind of a weird concept but after using it, it's kind of cool. For most shaders it's great, like they claim. I understand why people might not like it though.

I would personally much rather have a completely node based system like Unreal Engine's material system. Although that's obviously nowhere near as user friendly as just drag/dropping textures onto slots in the standard shader. For advanced users though, node based system would be a dream come true for custom shaders. Shader Forge is great, but it's just one guy developing it.

The more I work with spec/gloss, the more I don't mind that either. After playing around with spec/gloss over the last few days I think I'm actually making textures that look better. It's just kind of a weird slightly annoying workflow, even with substance designer. I'm getting used to it though. At this point I would probably have to say I'm okay with either workflow. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.

 

After fumbling around with the specular shader I think I understand it a little better now but I feel that the metallic shader approach is just that much more intuitive to use. I would give it another vote if I could.

If I understand it correctly the specular channel in the standard shader now utilizes the alpha map for the specular strength (black being rough to white being smooth) while the color information simply uses the color. This also means that dielectric parts need to be colorless but still have a brightness value (which I don't exactly quite understand yet but It's only been a few hours so far). The more metallic a surface is the more color information has to be in the RGB values as well.
The remaining slots use textures with RGB values only and do not utilize the alpha channel. Did I understand that correctly?

 

I think it's interesting there is no "BOTH" option. They should both be supported!
Actually, this is already easy to accomplish, as it's dead simple to have a shader convert metalness into specular color.

On the other hand, if you didn't want to do it in shader, you could have an option for this in the player settings. Maybe Deferred (PBR Metalness) and Deferred (PBR Specular) as different options.

 

I'd rather use specular/gloss, as that gives you more fine control, even if you might not need it 90% of the time. If both shaders are implemented, I hope there will be an option to set one of the shaders to be the default, so you don't have to change the shader manually for each material you create.

 

What type of game(s) are you trying to make?

I am making The Rise of Dagon a classic dungeon crawler in the style of Eye of the Beholder or Legend of Grimrock.

Do you use on "scanned" data?
No.

Do you hand author textures?
Yes.

Which tools do you use?

Substance Painter
Substance Designer
Mudbox
Silo 3D
Blender 3D
Adobe Photoshop
Xnormal

Do you have a preference for specular or metallic or is this all new to you?

It is new to me, however after reading I believe I prefer specular. Since I'll be using Substance Designer changing between the two isn't a big deal for me which is why I voted "either one" above.

Here is how the Rise of Dagon looks in Unity 4x without PBR shading right now. I have downloaded the 5 Beta and will be testing it out over the next week to convert to PBR and see how it looks! Very excited about this feature (PBR)!

 

What type of game(s) are you trying to make?
Virtual reality medical trainer

Do you use on "scanned" data?
Not yet but this area intrigues me

Do you hand author textures?
If you want to call it hand authoring. Probably more similar to my 2yo daughter trying to draw.

Which tools do you use?
Substance Painter, Designer, Bitmap2Material, Gimp, Blender, Inkscape

Do you have a preference for specular or metallic or is this all new to you?
All new to me.

Does anyone have a good link that describes all this stuff? I just picked up the Substance indie pack but I'm not really sure how to convert their spec/gloss workflow to Unity 5 since Unity doesn't have a glossiness map.

 

Most of the stuff I used to get vaguely up to speed was either rather long or heavy (e.g. long videos), and I don't have links handy right now. In any case most of them go into depth about the theory, which is useful to know but often won't answer your specific tool/workflow questions.

My ultra quick start guide to getting some kind of result in Unity, for those with Substance Painter is along the lines of:

Play with substance painter, and don't worry about the fact it presently defaults to (and has lots of substances setup for) the metal-rough workflow.
Figure out how to export stuff from substance painter, and note there is a unity 5 preset which will handle conversion to the appropriate format for unity 5's standard shader.

What it sounds like is throwing you off track is confusion about Unity not having a glossiness map. It does, they call it smoothness, and it lives in the alpha channel of the spec map. Painter should know that already if you use the right export option, and in designer I believe there is a node that can be used to whack what you need onto the RGB and A channels of an output.

edited to say - as for general PBR knowledge, I believe the page Marmoset have about it is considered a good starting point....

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice

 

I have attached a simple PBR Substance below for people to play with. This substance has a workflow dropdown switch for Unity5 (spec/gloss) and (metal/roughness).
It also has a dropdown for Preset Metals, Plastic, Paint and Emissive material.

Currently you can only use it with the Unity5 (standard shader) Spec/Gloss workflow.

To use:
1. unzip and import to Unity 5 beta.
2. Select generate all outputs. This is required because the output for Specular is not currently working between Substance Designer and Unity5 beta. Once this is fixed you would only see the outputs required for your workflow.
3. Drag the generated specular output into the Shaders specular slot.
4. If people could request UT to add support for the "visibleIf" feature in Substance Designer you would only see the controls based on your Material selection, ie the color picker would not display for preset metals. Also this would prevent non required outputs from generating based on your workflow chosen.
5. The microsurface slider simply adds custom control for glossiness/roughness to your material.

If you could lend support to have UT/Allegorithmic fully support the features from Substance Designer to Unity like "visibleIf" please like this post.

Cheers,
Neil.

 

My opinion on the matter is that they should support both, specular color AND metalness. I'd say this could easily be done via a dropdown in the Universal shader, where you could pick between Metalness and Specular Color (similar to how you can pick Opaque, Cutout, and Transparent already)

 

Below is a screenshot my sbsar above shown in Substance Designer using a PBR shader to display each of the workflows. I built in a simple dropdown selector as part of my substance controls to choose which workflow I choose to use. This selector is available in the Unity inspector. So if Unity add both workflows it is not a big deal to use either.

 

End users can customise their materials in the Unity Inspector currently for substances. The image attached is the same sbsar in Unity. I just change the Inspector selections between the two.

The coloured squiggle and stripe designs can also be changed by swapping the black/white masks in the Inspector. Endless options really.

 

For all of you who are not really sure what this whole thing here actually means: To clear up confusion in merely about two hours of your time there are two pretty extensive talks from Unite 2014:
Best Practices For Physically Based Content Creation
Mastering Physically Based Shading

The best practises content creation is probably what you want to watch first because in the last part the differences between metallic and specular workflow are explained in detail. The short version is: both can produce the same results if fed with the correct data. Specular can achieve a wider range of variations while metallic workflow pretty much can only make physically plausible surfaces. Metallic is probably much more intuitive but different while specular is closer to the traditional maps setup but easier to break visually.

The second video explains the physics and theory behind the new master shader in much detail.

 

A 3D, Space-Based, RTS. (think Homeworld)

No, nothing is scanned in, even my sky. That is a particle star field behind a translucent sphere defining the clouds of a nebula.

Yes. I make all the textures by hand.

I go from Sketchup to Blender to Photoshop to Unity. Blender to finalize the model then generate the UV map. Then Photoshop to create all the textures. Combine in Unity. Repeat.

New to me!

 

I'll be deleting pointless conversations. This is an official thread for feedback on the specular vs metallic workflows. If you have other things to say, make another thread, and feel free to ask questions here regarding Spec/Metallic but don't bicker with one another.

 

Those videos are still pretty theory heavy. I'm looking for a little more directly what my texture artist needs to produce texture wise. For Unity 5 pbr is the specular texture just brightness = more reflective so less reflective surfaces need to be darker in the specular texture? Nothing tricksy needs to go in the alpha channels or whatever?

 

Your texture artist really needs to understand at least some of the theory behind PBR, as well as the detail as it applies to the standard Unity 5 shader right now. That marmoset page I linked to earlier is a good start, although it won't explain the Unity 5 specific stuff.

As for that Unity 5 detail, no I'm afraid you are wrong, the alpha channel of the specular texture is very important. It defines how rough/smooth/glossy the surface is, which is pretty crucial to PBR. And although the RGB specular texture should be greyscale for non-metal's, some metals will contain some colour information in this map, e.g. the colours we see from gold or copper, and I believe in the real world these are always on the red side of the colour spectrum. Your texture artist also needs to understand how the diffuse/albedo texture will vary from how it would be in a non-PBR approach, and again thats where a need to grasp the theory comes into it.

 

The theory behind PBR is INCREDIBLY important. You MUST understand what is going on and WHY, otherwise your PBR textures will not look quite right and you'll have no idea why.

The basics of it is this:

1.) Diffuse map contains the color of your surface, as usual. However, it must contain as little lighting information as possible! Your ambient occlusion, for instance, should be placed in a separate map. When in doubt, consult a chart or a material library.

2.) Specular map contains the color of reflections viewed head-on. For almost all non-metallic surfaces, you can pretty safely flood fill a 4% greyscale value. HOWEVER, for a metallic appearance, you instead put the color of the reflection here (for instance, a silvery metallic appearance would have a near-white specular color). Note, when using specular color workflow, that the diffuse color of metallic surfaces should be black, or at least very nearly so, because metals do not absorb and scatter any light whatsoever (it is all reflected instead).

For diffuse and specular color, you almost certainly will want to reference a chart (for instance, the DONTNOD chart is a pretty popular one) or a material library of sorts (for instance, Quixel's DDO has presets for all sorts of different materials, GameTextures has a ton of PBR textures available as well)

3.) Roughness is very, very important. It is stored in the alpha channel of the specular map, and it defines how rough or smooth a surface is. A rough surface will have large diffused highlights with blurry reflections, a smooth surface will have small intense highlights with sharp reflections. The roughness map can be used to express a huge amount of detail (scratches, wear, etc) and is where you can get really artistic. For this one, you don't really need to consult a chart at all - just eyeball it.

 

Wait the gametextures textures aren't already configured correctly are they? I looked at some of them hoping to get an example to study and I see nothing in their alpha channel. I imported them into Unity and they all sparkle like glass so I'm assuming the roughness alpha isn't set at all.

On that note are there any textures ready to go for Unity 5 pbr available to download anywhere? Just be nice to have something done correctly as an example.

 

Nope, roughness is a separate map, you'd have to combine them yourself (specular is *_s.tga, roughness is *_g.tga)

 

Aha I just did that and they look great. Well this is helpful as an example. Thanks

 

Hi,

We will be releasing an update to Substance Painter to include our PBR Specular/Glossiness shader. It should go live soon (next week timeframe). This allows you to work directly within the Specular/Gloss workflow with no conversion needed for Unity 5. Substance Designer already supports both Metal / Rough and Spec / Gloss.

Here is a quick example asset, rendered in the Substance Painter viewport, that was authored the using Specular/Glossiness workflow. There are different lighting setups in Painter and Unity in the following examples. The Unity example has added AO as well as directional lighting, but the maps are behaving the same.





Here is the asset imported into Unity 5 using the Standard shader with the spec/gloss maps exported from Substance Painter.

We are also releasing Bitmap2Material 3 on the Unity Asset Store. B2M3 for Unity allows you to author Physically Based map types for use with the Standard Shader using the Spec/Gloss workflow.

Cheers,

Wes

 

A potentially silly question from me, since I've only owned Substance Painter for a few days...

Do the various materials (substances) that come with painter also need to be changed so that they generate the spec and gloss channels in order to support that workflow, or do the ones in the current version already do that?

 

Hi,

The Substance Materials should already support Spec/Gloss as we support both formats in Substance Designer. If needed, the materials shipping with Substance Painter will be updated to accommodate both workflows similar to Substance Designer.

Cheers,

Wes

 

What type of game(s) are you trying to make?

Trying sounds a bit weird. Maybe what games are you making is a better question. In any case, I made a point and click adventure. Graphically it had heavy emphasis on Lighting.

Do you use on "scanned" data?

Currently experimenting with it.

Do you hand author textures?

Yes.

Which tools do you use?

Looking into Substance painter recently.

Do you have a preference for specular or metallic or is this all new to you?

Either is fine. I'm more used to specular and I like the extra flexibility. Although with a semi-pbr shader I wrote, it was (somewhat) closer to the metallic workflow.

 

I posted a sample sbsar for you above http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/official-specular-vs-metallic-workflow.274612/page-2#post-1825464

It will give you the outputs you need to play.

 

The link of the video is dead.

 

What type of game(s) are you trying to make?
Many different types

Do you use on "scanned" data?
Sometimes

Do you hand author textures?
Yes

Which tools do you use?
Blender, Gimp, Paint.net, it would be nice to get some more asset translators working, perhaps Unity could expose an interface that allows us to define what to do with certain file extensions (open and resource compile) then have a 'default unity' setting and a custom path to executable with custom arguments. Command line exports should be possible with most software, because thats what the translator plugins do anyways.

Do you have a preference for specular or metallic or is this all new to you?
Either or, best case scenario would be both through different shaders.

 

Now you are making this survey, and it´s quite obvious, what your clients prefer, and then you write something like this?? Nobody knows what "likely" means, and how long it will take.

 

I'm sorry, I needed to make a change in the video. I will upload and post it again.

Cheers,

Wes

 

I'm making a TPP action game with semi-realistic graphics. I am already using a third party PBR framework.

I don't use any raw scanned data besides a lookup chart for albedo/specular/roughness values of different materials. (assuming photo textures don't count)

My textures are a combination of photosourced, painted and baked detail, lazily slapped together by hand.

I have a preference for specular+roughness, as I'm used to it and my existing textures are already in the specular RGB + roughness A format.

I voted Specular but I don't think there is any reason not to support both, as in any other case you'd just lock out people who have already made their art for use with the other workflow.

As an off-topic remark, I find that Unity's own shader is still lacking many features and looks really "off" and quite unrealistic compared to the one I'm currently using, at least when I'm using my existing assets. I might as well stick with 4.x for the rest of this project until your shader can replicate the look I've got now, or until the author of my shader of choice makes it compatible with the new renderer.

 

Why would anyone want the specular workflow? Almost everyone else has gone with metallic for pbr, so most supporting tool sets would require workarounds. Just bow to peer pressure and go with metallic.

 

Because specular is the most flexible. Believe it or not, there ARE people who are actually using specular color. If the renderer itself uses specular color, it becomes dead easy to support BOTH specular color AND metallic. But if the renderer internally uses metalness, you lock out everybody using specular color and force them to either go with a completely different solution, or convert all of their assets.

 

I thought exactly the same when I found out Unity 5 would only have spec/gloss workflow given I had soley focused on the metallic/roughness workflow at that point... But, after spending very little time playing with the spec/gloss to understand it, it really makes very little difference in difficulty using either one. Now I actually prefer spec/glossiness.

Tools like Substance Designer and Substance Painter make it easy to switch between the two workflows so I would presume any other authoring tools would do the same eventually.

 

I have my doubts about what you say. Why would Unity make this such a big deal about it, if it would be "dead easy" to add metallicity/roughness model?

 

When I say "dead easy", I mean this:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. specular.rgb = lerp( float4( 0.04, 0.04, 0.04 ), diffuse.rgb, metalness.r );
3.  

That's it. That's how you convert metalness to specular (well, one way at least). It assumes 4% reflectance for non metals, but lets say your metalness map contains R metalness, G base specular (so that it doesn't assume a 4% reflectance value):

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. specular.rgb = lerp( metalness.ggg, diffuse.rgb, metalness.r );
3.  

Still dead simple.

 

From an authoring standpoint, visual quality and general sanity, Metalness all the way.

 

This is a good point.

Spec/gloss and metal/rough are just workflows. What really matters is the BRDF. Personally, I prefer to use Metal/Rough, and as @artzfx mentioned, Substance uses both workflows (same GGX BRDF). You can produce the exact same results with either workflow. Its just a matter of how you get there. Because we use both workflows, I have to switch back and forth between metal/rough and spec/gloss often. The overall concepts of PBR are the same between the workflows and its just a a matter of implementing these same concepts in one way or another.

We felt that the best option is to give the artist and studio the choice. Understanding the core principles of authoring physically-based content is what is important. The workflows (metal/rough or spec/gloss) are just the implementation of those principles and how the artwork is created should be decided by the artist and studio.

Bitmap2Material 3 Now Available

We have just released Bitmap2Material 3 on the Asset Store. B2M3 is geared toward creating physically-based content from a single source image directly in Unity. B2M3 is designed to work with the Standard shader. You also get B2M2 so you can create non-pbr content using the legacy shaders or with Unity 4. B2M3 supports both metal/rough and spec/gloss as well. The b2M3_unity.sbsar is designed for spec/gloss workflow and when Unity adopts the metal/rough workflow, we will update B2M3 to reflect this change as well.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Hi Wes,
not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but i bought B2M3 pro from the allegorithmic website and there does not seem to be a "b2M3_unity.sbsar" file included. Only "Bitmap2Material_3.sbsar" and "Bitmap2Material_3_UE4.sbsar".
Will the "b2M3_unity.sbsar" file be included in the official website download sometime soon, too?
Haven't tried the _UE4 one, but the default one seems to have issues giving me spec gloss maps in unity when "generate all maps" isn't checked.

 

I can't describe how I love your work men, just congratulations! Working with materials in Unity5 and Substances will be pleasure because of your awesome software. I love also your approach in applications, to make everything just works together, and be compatibile with most popular software of other developers( Autodesk, Unity, Epic, Adobe etc ) instead of trying to make own standard as many developers do, keep up great work

 

I am in the same situation and wrote them a mail. They are going to update it on their site in the coming days. The version number in the asset store is 3.0.2 while the one on the allegorithmic website is still 3.0.1.

 

Hi,

I will confirm here as well that we will be updating B2M on our website as well for those who purchased from allegorithmic or steam. It should go live either today (Oct 31) or Monday (Nov 3).

Cheers,

Wes

 

Yeah. Thanks for the video.

 

What type of game(s) are you trying to make?
Small PC standalone and web-deployed arcade games and puzzle games (usually the product of a jam).

Do you use on "scanned" data?
No. Though, I did base my PBR model off of scan data available in the Disney BRDF viewer and the MERL material scan data you can view there.

Do you hand author textures?
Yes; almost exclusively. Any photo-textures I use are used piecemeal and sparingly. I've never used maps from one of the online databases

Which tools do you use?
Photoshop
After Effects
Maya
3D Coat
Xnormal

Do you have a preference for specular or metallic or is this all new to you?
I have a strong preference for the metallic workflow. I find the maps to be much more human readable and hand authorable. I often use a hand-painted style, and it is much easier to author full color main map, and black and white microfacet and metallicity maps than it is to do a color diffuse, a color spec, a black and white microfacet, and a black and white reflectivity. It's also much easier to pack a set of metallic/rough textures down small since most of the maps are black and white.

I used a metallic/rough model when I was designing the Simple Physical Shader I wrote for use in Unity Free, and I've found it very easy to author maps for and sufficiently performant. The simplicity of troubleshooting alone makes metallic my preferred workflow, and that doesn't even get into how much easier it is to do stuff like calculate radiocity color (since you only have to check the main map), or LOD down to a single map (again, using the main color map), or the advantage fewer maps have in deferred rendering.

 

In Unity 5 I read somewhere I just forgot the link. They said that you need to add a couple of code in the shader if you want to use a custom shader so that it can be affected by the dynamic GI. I'm looking into getting Unity 5 however, I'm using a custom shader which is metallic workflow.

 

the standard shader is a lot of different shaders variations (including fallbacks for mobile etc) under the hood, you make it sound dead simple but they'll have to make a separate version for each variation of the shader, update the standard shader interface to allow you to use metal / rough maps, then update the standard shader code to use the correct shader. Right now the standard shader is kind of a foolproof interface - you drag textures into the slots, and there's no validation or anything required. If they were to support metal/rough and spec/gloss it would call for some user experience considerations & user interface changes. I guess point in case is that it's not just a matter of switching around a few values in code and pushing it out to production.

I do agree to an extent though, I was expecting to see metal/rough in 5.0 and I guess that's not the case. Hopefully that means 5.0 has an aggressive launch date of nov/dec.

 

Making a different variation isn't rocket science. It's still dead simple, tedious maybe, but it's not like it complicates anything.