Yeah, the metalness map tags surfaces as either metal (white in the map) or non-metals/dielectrics/insulators (black in the map), generally you only want black and white values.
Non metals get a fixed, low reflectance value, and metals pull the reflectivity color/intensity from the albedo map.
so in that case the specular map is the albedo when it comes to metal? in which case any metal albedo should be mainly a flat color since it is the roughness that defines the surface. you'd also need to add dirt etc ontop then have that black on the metalness map as well as isolating it on the roughness.
seems more complex than it needs to be to me. it also sounds incorrect as well, since unless the albedo effects the specular intensity for metals then there is no way to define different types of metal (since as you say the metalness map is white or black?). doesn't sound physically based at any rate but then having not used it I may be wrong.
@ Kitty|Owl - It's technically correct in a PBR pipeline to make the albedo of a metal surface black since metals are 100% "specular" (that is, they have no subsurface interaction with incoming light). The goal of a metalness map is to make use of what would otherwise be wasted, empty black space in the albedo by allowing the storage of the metals specular color there.
This works nicely since non-metals (excluding gems) cover such a small range in terms of their specular color (0.02 - 0.08) that it's not uncommon for a PBR equation to just "bake in" an average specular value (usually 0.04) into the shading equation for non-metals. So if you know a surface is non-metallic then there's really no need to store its specular color anywhere (since you're just going to use 0.04 all the time). Hence, replacing a specular "color" map with a metalness map.
Incidentally, because both metalness and roughness are greyscale, they could be stored in the alpha component of an albedo and normal map, respectively, saving on GPU memory. [edit: I'm mistaken on this point. See EQ's post below ]
Hope that helps!
@ kimmokaunela - Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Localized IBL sounds like a really promising avenue; I'll have to read into it more. Looking forward to seeing more!
Yep, Argent's explanation is a good summary. There is more to it than that, namely the importance of energy conservation, but I don't want to detract from Kimmo's awesome work, so I won't go into a big writeup here. We (Marmoset) are coming out with a couple articles soon that will explain all of this in greater detail.
Incidentally, because both metalness and roughness are greyscale, they could be stored in the alpha component of an albedo and normal map, respectively, saving on GPU memory.
Actually, with compressed textures, saving into the alpha channel isn't efficient. You double the compressed size when you add an alpha channel, so saving a full color spec map or saving gray spec/metalness into the alpha channel is the same VRAM usage.
What you can do however, is pack a gloss, metalness, and ao or cavity map into the 3 channels of a 24 bit map, and get 3 inputs out of the same VMEM that a full color specular map takes up.
Actually, with compressed textures, saving into the alpha channel isn't efficient. You double the compressed size when you add an alpha channel, so saving a full color spec map or saving gray spec/metalness into the alpha channel is the same VRAM usage.
What you can do however, is pack a gloss, metalness, and ao or cavity map into the 3 channels of a 24 bit map, and get 3 inputs out of the same VMEM that a full color specular map takes up.
I had no idea, but that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the correction!
@ EarthQuake Thanks for the info about metalness maps. Correcting those made a huge difference!
@ Kitty|Owl Thanks for the very good feedback. You have opened my eyes I never really watched histogram and I just go with the flow but then I just pretty much killed the details. I went way too extreme with that setting but now I try to keep sure that the histogram looks more right. This is something that I need to learn more! You also made a good point about metals. I tried to convert some of those to plastic.
I watched Space Odyssye and I really liked the visual style that the movie has. Story itself is pretty boring tho My first idea was to go with very dark and cold feel but then I started to think that what kind of work astronauts do in there. It´s more like a science related so there should be a good lighting that they can see better. Also lighting will be yellowish because it´s early 80´s and leds were not that common. I also think that it´s much more pleasant for the eyes to have a bright environment.
Kiitos paljon! Nice to know that I´m not the only Finn here I´m 100% self-taught and it took about 5 years to get this point. It would be awesome to do this for living but the fact is that there are so few AAA studios here in Finland and I´m not a huge fan about mobile games. You have awesome stuff on your portfolio btw!
@ mats effect Awesome that you find this interesting. Your space station looks good btw! Maybe we can combine these together
@ Iciban Thanks
It´s been some time since my last update. I´ve been ill so the progress has been very slow.
One huge thing that I did was better overall structure. Correcting object names and making sure that everything snaps to the grid and so on. I took this shot that illustrate the modularity of the scene at this point. I think that I have the structure pieces done so I could build a pretty huge station without being too repetitive. Right now I need to start doing those small pieces that will make the final touch.
The hardest part of this project is lighting. I´ve been testing a lot different light setups. Now I understand that using too strong IBL sky is not the right way to light this scene. Space is really dark place and very different than the Earth. I want to use IBL to light just a very little and to give some nice reflections. Placing dynamic lights and tweaking those values will light 90% of the scene and that way I can have a very strong shadows from those light sources. Shadows are very important for the overall feel and to hide boring areas. Now I think it´s looking much better but I still want to tweak some parts of it. I also did some lens correction in Photoshop.
If I had to choose between the last 3, id definitely go for the first composition, the 2 last ones reduce the interesting parts in favor of the repeating ones
Talking about the last 2 pics now
the palette is kinda cheesy, but it seems to help the retro feel
the voltage measure meter is too big on the first shot , and the red cable just surpasses everything else in saturation
On the first pic, the orange box is very apparent but dosnt get negated by a second factor of this strenght. Usually you position atleast 2 things of equal visual power if they bring in a new color to the palette. If the red pipes and cable would be just bit more towards orange or vice versa, it would work a bunch better or if you just had somethine else thats orange aswell, even if its just a tiny cable
@ enoki Thanks! It´s just so easy with Marmoset Of course it would be awesome if TB2 would have more tools like UDK has but for rendering it´s awesome.
@ Pegbird Thanks! PBR is pretty nice and I´m still trying to create a fast and efficient workflow. You just have to watch world deeper and observe
@ Shrike Thanks. You have very good points there. I will keep those in mind and hopefully fix some.
@ janeil24kid Thanks, I will
@ stimpack Thanks! I´m glad you like it.
Here is the latest one. Not a big update and I´m still trying to make it look more real by adding small detail and playing with colors, lights etc.. I don´t want to add any more stuff because it´s going to start becoming too noisy for eyes.
EDIT:
I did some testing and found that adding simple letterbox effect will make everything look better. I also add some props.
Great progress!! Like the logo you made for it too.
I would suggest maybe some sort of translucent cover for the tube lights on the left and right walls. As much as I like them exposed I feel like they would get smashed quite quickly with people and objects floating around.
@ mats effect Your right! if those lights break then it´s really dark in there. Usually I just like to avoid any transparent stuff as much as possible but I think I can make an exception this time
@ Valliant Thanks! Marmoset TB2 will work great for environment stuff. I like how fast it is to get something awesome out of it. There is no useless stuff to slow down. For artist who just like to render their stuff out that is important. One thing that I would like to have is key-frame animations. It would be awesome to create camera movement.
@ Pegbird That would be nice That gallery is full of awesomeness!
@ polygoo Thanks!
@ EarthQuake I´m glad you like the details! I wanted to create a feeling that someone lives there.
I think this project is coming to a point where I want to take a little break from it and do some other things. I´m pretty happy with the results so far. I learned so much during this time. I would maybe like to do a little fly-through there and one part of me likes to use this scene and test some other engines out there (with PBR support of course).
I like to thank all of you for the awesome feedback that I received and thanks for taking the time to check the progress along the way.
I love pretty much everything about this scene! Really great work.
I have minor crits about material definition such as the coffee being too reflective, the bandaging/tape looking too rough (try softening the normal map) and the wrench looks too shiny despite the normals implying it's very rough. Other than small scale things I think you've nailed mateials overall, especially metal. The lighting is really great too, except for the fact that it looks like when a real world camera has its color balance set wrong. This may be an aesthetic choice on your part but I think the scene just looks overly split-toned.
@ somedoggy Thanks for the feedback. Your are right about those materials. Lighting is a bit too candy but I wanted to have that old feel. Maybe I went a little too far with that
@ kaikaisushi Thanks!
@ scotthomer Thanks! I´m a huge fan of your works so this means a lot to me
@ luthyn Thanks! I´m glad you like it.
@ enoki Thank you! I wanted to make better animation but right now Marmoset Toolbag 2 doesn´t allow me to animate camera like I want.
@ mediochrea I´m a huge fan of abandoned space stations too. I wish that some day I could do a game with this theme
Really fantastic work. Totally love this little scene. It has a great older retro sci fi feel to things which work great with the colors you have chosen. I love all the little personal details added as it makes it feel more like a real used space.
The only crit I have is that some metal surfaces seem too shiny/reflective. When you see them in motion and see the reflective on them its like, wow thats a bit to shinny. Especially when within that metal there is some heavy contrast in the areas that are not reflective.
Some time ago I made this heavily photoshoped version. I had this dream that one day I could be part of the 3dtotal.com gallery. It took over 5 years and now the day has come when I can share this link: http://www.3dtotal.com/index_gallery_detailed2.php?id=5901#.Uy6lmPl_uCk Without this forum or without you this wouldn´t happen so I want to thank all of you!!
@Muzz I´m glad you liked it. I wish I could have been there to hear what people think about it and to talk with fellow artist. Marmoset tech is just like your avatar, epic and mind blowing
@Brygelsmack Thanks! Usually I just crap what I see in my screen when using real-time engines. For that photoshoped version I render in pretty huge resolution so I had much more room to work with. Like I would do with V-ray. It´s just easier to upload smaller images here because you don´t have to scroll sideways.
Here is a "little" bigger version that hopefully don´t kill bandwidth
Now that Unity 5 is out I decided to fully port my PBR scene. I´m really impressed how good Unity 5 is. I made this scene first in Marmoset Toolbag 2, then with Unity 4.5 few months ago and it only took a day to port it to U5 with all the physically-based rendering elements. New lighting system is really good and the most important part is that the scene runs much more smoothly in U5 and it looks so much better than in U4.5/4.6.
I think this scene is going to be epic VR experience or a place for horror space game. It´s very modular like the real space station so it could be a nice place for some sort of astronault simulator game too. That´s why I put it to asset store. It could also be good for people who wants to learn more about PBR/PBS and test different Unity 5 features. Here is the link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/25579 (Note. I´m uploading this new version so there is that Unity 4.5 version but it will be updated once the review is done)
Replies
Non metals get a fixed, low reflectance value, and metals pull the reflectivity color/intensity from the albedo map.
seems more complex than it needs to be to me. it also sounds incorrect as well, since unless the albedo effects the specular intensity for metals then there is no way to define different types of metal (since as you say the metalness map is white or black?). doesn't sound physically based at any rate but then having not used it I may be wrong.
This works nicely since non-metals (excluding gems) cover such a small range in terms of their specular color (0.02 - 0.08) that it's not uncommon for a PBR equation to just "bake in" an average specular value (usually 0.04) into the shading equation for non-metals. So if you know a surface is non-metallic then there's really no need to store its specular color anywhere (since you're just going to use 0.04 all the time). Hence, replacing a specular "color" map with a metalness map.
Incidentally, because both metalness and roughness are greyscale, they could be stored in the alpha component of an albedo and normal map, respectively, saving on GPU memory. [edit: I'm mistaken on this point. See EQ's post below
Hope that helps!
@ kimmokaunela - Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Localized IBL sounds like a really promising avenue; I'll have to read into it more. Looking forward to seeing more!
Actually, with compressed textures, saving into the alpha channel isn't efficient. You double the compressed size when you add an alpha channel, so saving a full color spec map or saving gray spec/metalness into the alpha channel is the same VRAM usage.
What you can do however, is pack a gloss, metalness, and ao or cavity map into the 3 channels of a 24 bit map, and get 3 inputs out of the same VMEM that a full color specular map takes up.
I had no idea, but that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the correction!
@ Kitty|Owl Thanks for the very good feedback. You have opened my eyes
I watched Space Odyssye and I really liked the visual style that the movie has. Story itself is pretty boring tho
EarthQuakeArgent for their above posts, very useful info.
@ Iciban Thanks
It´s been some time since my last update. I´ve been ill so the progress has been very slow.
One huge thing that I did was better overall structure. Correcting object names and making sure that everything snaps to the grid and so on. I took this shot that illustrate the modularity of the scene at this point. I think that I have the structure pieces done so I could build a pretty huge station without being too repetitive. Right now I need to start doing those small pieces that will make the final touch.
The hardest part of this project is lighting. I´ve been testing a lot different light setups. Now I understand that using too strong IBL sky is not the right way to light this scene. Space is really dark place and very different than the Earth. I want to use IBL to light just a very little and to give some nice reflections. Placing dynamic lights and tweaking those values will light 90% of the scene and that way I can have a very strong shadows from those light sources. Shadows are very important for the overall feel and to hide boring areas. Now I think it´s looking much better but I still want to tweak some parts of it. I also did some lens correction in Photoshop.
PBR / IBL is awesome, and something I still need to develop my understanding of. Thanks for the useful links / explanations guys.
If I had to choose between the last 3, id definitely go for the first composition, the 2 last ones reduce the interesting parts in favor of the repeating ones
Talking about the last 2 pics now
the palette is kinda cheesy, but it seems to help the retro feel
the voltage measure meter is too big on the first shot , and the red cable just surpasses everything else in saturation
On the first pic, the orange box is very apparent but dosnt get negated by a second factor of this strenght. Usually you position atleast 2 things of equal visual power if they bring in a new color to the palette. If the red pipes and cable would be just bit more towards orange or vice versa, it would work a bunch better or if you just had somethine else thats orange aswell, even if its just a tiny cable
Oh and really big kerning issue in graAVity ; )
haha yeah that would be awesome!
@ Pegbird Thanks! PBR is pretty nice and I´m still trying to create a fast and efficient workflow. You just have to watch world deeper and observe
@ Shrike Thanks. You have very good points there. I will keep those in mind and hopefully fix some.
@ janeil24kid Thanks, I will
@ stimpack Thanks! I´m glad you like it.
Here is the latest one. Not a big update and I´m still trying to make it look more real by adding small detail and playing with colors, lights etc.. I don´t want to add any more stuff because it´s going to start becoming too noisy for eyes.
EDIT:
I did some testing and found that adding simple letterbox effect will make everything look better. I also add some props.
I would suggest maybe some sort of translucent cover for the tube lights on the left and right walls. As much as I like them exposed I feel like they would get smashed quite quickly with people and objects floating around.
I never think about Marmoset 2 being something you can render full scenes easily in now, great job.
@ Valliant Thanks! Marmoset TB2 will work great for environment stuff. I like how fast it is to get something awesome out of it. There is no useless stuff to slow down. For artist who just like to render their stuff out that is important. One thing that I would like to have is key-frame animations. It would be awesome to create camera movement.
@ Pegbird That would be nice
@ polygoo Thanks!
@ EarthQuake I´m glad you like the details! I wanted to create a feeling that someone lives there.
I think this project is coming to a point where I want to take a little break from it and do some other things. I´m pretty happy with the results so far. I learned so much during this time. I would maybe like to do a little fly-through there and one part of me likes to use this scene and test some other engines out there (with PBR support of course).
I like to thank all of you for the awesome feedback that I received and thanks for taking the time to check the progress along the way.
I also collect all the small prop together:
Some wires:
Your scene is fantastic, very inspirational
I made a small video that will show a little more.
[ame="
I have minor crits about material definition such as the coffee being too reflective, the bandaging/tape looking too rough (try softening the normal map) and the wrench looks too shiny despite the normals implying it's very rough. Other than small scale things I think you've nailed mateials overall, especially metal. The lighting is really great too, except for the fact that it looks like when a real world camera has its color balance set wrong. This may be an aesthetic choice on your part but I think the scene just looks overly split-toned.
@ kaikaisushi Thanks!
@ scotthomer Thanks! I´m a huge fan of your works so this means a lot to me
@ luthyn Thanks! I´m glad you like it.
@ enoki Thank you! I wanted to make better animation but right now Marmoset Toolbag 2 doesn´t allow me to animate camera like I want.
@ mediochrea I´m a huge fan of abandoned space stations too. I wish that some day I could do a game with this theme
The only crit I have is that some metal surfaces seem too shiny/reflective. When you see them in motion and see the reflective on them its like, wow thats a bit to shinny. Especially when within that metal there is some heavy contrast in the areas that are not reflective.
I think I went too far with that metalness. Going to keep that in my mind next time
It also made it´s way to CGTalk epic collection: http://galleries.cgsociety.org/gallery/forum/121 I learn so much in this project and it´s nice to see that people like that.
I guess it´s time to start another project. This time with something different
Looking forward to seeing what you do next.
Here is a "little" bigger version that hopefully don´t kill bandwidth
I think this scene is going to be epic VR experience or a place for horror space game. It´s very modular like the real space station so it could be a nice place for some sort of astronault simulator game too. That´s why I put it to asset store. It could also be good for people who wants to learn more about PBR/PBS and test different Unity 5 features. Here is the link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/25579 (Note. I´m uploading this new version so there is that Unity 4.5 version but it will be updated once the review is done)
Small video from the scene.
[ame]