PBR and/or Ray
cclesue
Posts: 420
in The Commons
I suppose there is a discussion on "PBR and why should I care." but I just can't find it So can somebody please explain what is going on here. Is PBR a replacement for IRay or what.
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Iray is a PBR (physically-based render) engine. The new PBRSkin shader used by (some) Genesis 8.1 characters is a shader that is designed to eb closer to the way real skin behaves than the base iray Uber base shader used on older geenrations - but that shader is still a PBR shader, and there are sets of avowedly PBR materials available that use it (as well as others that just eyeball things).
As PC+ member you get this PBR shader set atm for free.
Physically-Based Rendering is a technique to render images photorealistically. It uses roughness, normal, and bump maps to emulate the way light rays bounce off surfaces, in addition to albedo maps that provide color data. PBR can't "replace" Iray, Iray would (theoretically) be replaced by another engine that uses PBR techniques, in which case you can just plug the same old texture maps into the new engine's shader and get an approximation of the same material settings within the new engine.
If you get Nvidia's vMaterials 1.7.0 and 2.0.0 as well, and also get Omniflux's two freebies on ShareCG that allow you to use them in Daz Studio, you get a whole load of different shaders/materials..
Wow, thankyou @Ghosty12! The shaders seem to differ from the standard iray shaders though (e.g. glossyness), it feels like learning to use a different shader system...
BTW do you know if they are royalty free?
AFAIK, everything you buy in the Daz Shop is royalty-free aside from (I think) some extremely old, pre-Genesis figures modeled after real people which have commercial usage restrictions.
Thankyou @margrave, but I was referring to the Nvidia vmaterials Ghosty12 mentioned in his post. They can be downloaded for free from nvidia, and with an additional tool used in daz, I just tried them...
The primary difference between PBRskin and standard Iray PBR is that PBRskin has a setting for tiling that is independent from tiling the surface. To put another way, you can have a small detail map that tiles as many times as you want over a torso surface map, without the torso map itself being tiled at all. If you use other rendering engines you may have come across shaders that have similar options to this.
So the benefit in theory is that you can take a small detail map that gives skin character and have that tiled across the texture. In this detail section of PBR skin, you can have a bump and/or normal map, so it is flexible. And because this texture can be very small, even 50x50 pixels, it can potentially save memory over using large bump and/or normal maps to do the same thing. You can also do both here. You can have a regular normal and bump map on your surface and also have detail bumps and normals that tile many times over.
There are downsides to this shader. It does not offer every setting that standard PBR does. So you may notice a few of your favorite PBR settings may be missing. This shader does not have ANY opacity setting at all, because apparently opacity maps break it or something. IMO that is a pretty huge downside. So that might rule out several things, including geoshells. PBRskin does not work well with geoshells. Another downside is that you may lose some of the uniqueness of skin in certain spots, after all, you are tiling the same detail map over and over, that doesn't look so great on something like eyelids, ears, or fingers, ect. I do not like tiling on the face, I think it is better to have a proper texture that accounts for all the unique variations of skin detail. PBRskin works best when not up close to a camera where you might notice these things. If you have the VRAM, then I believe having a high quality texture with these details is better, even if that texture has to be 10K or so.
On the plus side PBRskin is just a name, it certainly does not have to be for skin. You can use PBRskin for anything you want, as long as you do not need opacity maps. PBRskin is fantastic for leather and similar surfaces, which is logical considering what leather is. It is good for all kinds of fabric, as you can tile a detail texture that greatly enhance the look of thread counts. It is a shame that Daz cannot figure out how to make opacity work with this shader, because being able to use opacity maps would greatly open up its utility. I personally feel that PBRskin is actually better suited to things like fabric which already have repeating patters in them. So you can have a tshirt with a painted logo on it, and then have the thread details tiled to your liking, while also still having a bump or normal map for the seams.
Reading the legal blurb on Nvidia's website it seems no they are not royalty free.. Not entirely sure what the actual allowed usage of them is..
Thankyou @Ghosty12! Seems to be rather for pros creating their own shaders on the basis of these then. But nevertheless it is an impressive collection!
@outrider42: Thankyou for your detailed explanation!
Yes seems to be that way as unfortunately the legal mumbo jumbo, is just that and makes it hard to understand if we are really allowed to use the shaders or not..
You are allowed to use the shaders for whatever you like. You are not allowed to include them, or any of their graphical components, in any sharable product.
The vMaterials library can be redistributed for free, but not commercially.
@margrave: so commercial use in 2d renders (pictures, animations) would be allowed, like with shader sets bought at the DAZ shop?
That's the confusing part.
A copy of the EULA is included when you download the vMaterials library from Nvidia. Look it over for yourself.
I did and had the same "confusing" impression, which means to me better safe than sorry, I can t use them that way, which renders these materials useless for me :-( will uninstall them again.