One of the big issues that had been holding me back from seriously updating my store both in SL and Kitely is the looming PBR update.
PBR itself is an exciting update that I am looking forward to playing with one it hits Opensim. However, I do also foresee some issues.
As Adobe defines it - "Physically based rendering (PBR), sometimes known as physically based shading (PBS), is a method of shading and rendering that provides a more accurate representation of how light interacts with material properties. Depending on which aspect of the modelling workflow is being discussed, PBS is usually specific to shading concepts while PBR refers to rendering and lighting. Both terms describe the process of representing assets from a physically accurate standpoint."
You can read more here - Adobe Official Site
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| Image from Adobe |
Currently in SL/OS, we tend to "bake" lighting detail into our colour maps, and then shade and highlight them further with Normal and Specular maps if desired. We also fairly recently (a few years ago I think) got the ability to use Emissive (glow) maps.
However with PBR, correct practice is to make your colour/diffuse maps with only colour and noise information. All lighting and shading should be handled by the new PBR material types.
To illustrate what I mean in a more visual way, here is a quick example taken from my new Sim Surround kits.
