DarkWatch Rifle - PBR Materials
polycounter lvl 3
Hi All,
I've been dabbling with some PBR materials, trying to work out the correct values for aged wood, metal, leather etc. I've checked out the awesome Cerberus freebie from Andrew Maximov, but where he's used a metalness map I've gone down the spec map route instead.
It's been weird not putting my detail in the diffuse, instead concentrating on the spec and gloss/roughness, but hey it's the future right?!?.
Anywho I've done a fair bit of fudging to get it to look right, but I'm not quite sure if that's the right approach. If anyone has any feedback I'd love to hear it if you have the time.
I've been dabbling with some PBR materials, trying to work out the correct values for aged wood, metal, leather etc. I've checked out the awesome Cerberus freebie from Andrew Maximov, but where he's used a metalness map I've gone down the spec map route instead.
It's been weird not putting my detail in the diffuse, instead concentrating on the spec and gloss/roughness, but hey it's the future right?!?.
Anywho I've done a fair bit of fudging to get it to look right, but I'm not quite sure if that's the right approach. If anyone has any feedback I'd love to hear it if you have the time.
Replies
Oh and what was the reason to give your wood dark blue specular colour? Shouldn't non-metallic materials have their spec values done in a grey scale?
Was it as easy to do as advertised?:)
I'm sure you know how to do this already but I found the quickest way was to add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer in PS and wack the hue slider to the far right. This will then set your spec to the neutral colour of your albedo
Some great reading material here:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
https://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/materials
Hope that helps. Good luck with your RX8
I've got my sliders set to 1, and have been tweaking the maps to achieve the aged look. I've tweaked the values quite a bit, but perhaps I've managed to fudge the result by eye rather than use the correct values. I'll take another look at them.
There are couple of things that I would maybe do differently.
1. When you are using specular maps in PBR you want to use very dark colors on metal parts in your albedo map. Metals will reflect almost all the energy so doing this will keep the metal feel alive. Metalness maps are much easier to do and I would recommend to try those out when doing models like this. When using metalness map you need to add metal reflectance colors that you would use in your specular map to albedo map. It´s much faster to do just a black and white map to tell what areas are metal and what not.
2. Right now I think there are too much information in your specular map. I would hide all the baked AO and use basically just a simple colors and not doing any scratshes unless there really need to do that example painted metal where paint has worn off in some areas. Also your wood has a blue tint in the specular map so I would try to stick with the right values. A good way to pick right ones is to use some chart that can be found online.
3. Your gloss map is looking good and has pretty much the same information that you have in your specular map so I would erase details from there and keep them in gloss map. You don´t need colors here.
4. Basically you don´t need to add any baked information into your maps when using PBR because those will conflict with the lighting in engine but real-time SSAO is indeed a very inaccurate way to do this. I usually add a very slight baked AO into my alpedo. AO is basically just a way to fake the places where light rays will not bounce so much. If your scene is very bright this will mean that there will be more light rays that bounces around so AO should be almost invisible on some cases. If you have a very strong baked AO then it would not be physical based anymore.
Care to share some of your Marm2 settings? Sky Preset/Extra Lights/Sharpness/Bloom?
I'm going to have a play with my maps and remove the lighting to see what kind of result I can get. I'll post my results soon (hopefully).
Hey kimmokaunela, thanks for the feedback. I'm going to go back over my maps and see what I can do based on yours and almighty_gir's feedback.
Perhaps you can clear something up for me though, regarding my wood spec. I read that if I'm using a coloured spec map I would need to neutralize my non conductive materials by using their opposite colours, in this case the odd blue tinted wood. This is meant to give me a correct spec (being white). Is this the case or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
Hey Pegbird, thanks for the kind words. I'll certainly post my settings, once I've finished my maps
In a PBR setting, no you don't need to do that. Your spec texture should be the color you want the reflections to be.
The specular color for wood (and other non-metallic materials) should be the complement of the material's diffuse color. So, yes, it should be bluish for your wood. Metallic materials, on the other hand, should have a color similar to the diffuse color.
You could add some grime around the raised pieces, most notably the cross on the stock.
Unless it's a critical part of the design, I'd take a serious look at both the fore sight and the cross hairs; as they are they'd cover up a considerable amount of the target. There's a reason iron sights are simple and cross hairs are literally hair-thin.
Gun is looking pretty awesome though, just needs some map changes as outlined above for a pure PBR asset
if you choose metalness, anything non-metallic will default to a dark grey value by default.
Finally got some time to implement your feedback so I've stripped out the AO + Cavity contribution from my Albedo and Spec. And as a result had to tweak some of the values to retain what I think are the right mats. So here's my maps - before on the top, after on the bottom.
I've also done a before and after render:
It seems to look more lively than it did before but it's fairly subtle, so I not sure if I've done it right or I got lucky fudging my results before, if anyone has any feedback I'd love to hear it. Thanks.
This was something I toiled over, my thoughts were that the wooden stock underwent a oil & wax process whilst it's being made which makes it shiny, then as that wears off you'd be left with base wood being less shiny. But then I got thinking about the natural oils from your hands.... [Feedback loop of madness]. So not really sure
When I get some time I will give that a go, thanks.
I know what your saying, in reality this would be a useless gun, except for clubbing people with, but the design is based on the DarkWatch Rifle concept:
http://i734.photobucket.com/albums/ww341/HellMark7/IMG_0004.jpg
I liked the quirkyness, and was originally going to do a hand painted piece, but then I got sidetracked by this PBR stuff and decided I'd give that a go
Hey Pegbird, here's the setup I'm using:
The three spots are all using roughly the same settings.
Still learning though and it defo needs tweaking.
Also please name your maps when you show them, it's very hard to tell what you're doing and trying to do without knowing what maps they are supposed to be.
How, then, do you get convincing metal? I find that my diffuse has to be that dark, or else I get too much diffuse contribution, and it feels lifeless. How else would one approach it?
The fact the lights are set to >6 (ie. 600% brightness increase on the textures) is an indicator.
I too have found myself cranking up the brightness and it was leading me to wonder if I was doing something fundamentally wrong.
In my opinion the old maps looked better though, especially the wood.
Do you mean in general the entire Albedo is too dark or are you referring to a specific section?
I've been using a few refs for my mats, but this one is a good guide:
http://www.marmoset.co/wp-content/uploads/materialref01.png
I've then tried to gauge what values age, and wear would contribute.
Yup my bad! I'll get some labels on them asap.
there's a wood material on there that demonstrates pretty much exactly what we're saying (in fact all of the materials do). notice how, with the exception of coal) all of the albedo values are fairly light on non-metallics, and how their reflectivity is incredibly low. also notice how the opposite statement is true for metallics.
What i'd suggest doing for the wooden portions of your texture, is take the value used for the wood in that reference image, and just give it a hue shift to the more orange/brown tone you're going for, so you keep the same brightness value.
this will allow you (hopefully) to turn the lights down to ~1, which is where you'd ideally want to keep them. at the moment you're having to compensate for dark albedo by cranking up the lights.
I'd suggest giving these a read too:
http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/feeding-a-physical-based-lighting-mode/
http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/dontnod-specular-and-glossiness-chart/
almighty_gir, or whoever...
Do you know of any examples of people using pbr that are definitely doing it the "right" way? I would be interested to see actual clear cut examples of models and textures using pbr.
especially the textures, clockwise from top left: diffuse, spec, normals, gloss.
Notice how the diffuse has almost no baked in shading, and what is baked in is still coloured rather than multiplied down. And again with the specular, it's almost entirely flat colours defining the reflectivity of the material, with the gloss map holding all of the information to really help push authenticity.
Hi BradMyers82 I couldn't agree more, Hijack away :poly136:
Thanks for the breakdown almighty_gir. I'm gonna have a crack at stripping out more stuff in my spec, and tweak the values.
Thanks carmar4, & kaikaisushi, hopefully it will look better soon
Also I'm only using the IBL to light the scene now and that's set to a value of 1. (Less compensation for my previous incorrect PBR maps
Appreciate any thoughts on my progress so far.
the wood is looking a lot better. It looks like you've tinted the specular for the wood a little? i'd leave it grey, personally.
since a lot of your metallic surfaces are quite rough, you could possibly put a little (not too much) back into their diffuse. Also think about the colour values for your specular, what metals are you trying to portray? gold or brass? you need to have a much more saturated colour for the most part.
I would really suggest you spend some time in making your roughness as detailed as you can imagine.
Think stains, scratches, smudges, tarnish... the whole lot.
Most detail will come from the normal map and roughness information and this is where most time should be invested.
That does not mean the albedo should be neglected of course but with just the normal and roughness and a black diffuse, you can make stuff look good already.
Although up for debate in terms of style, in a realistic setting some of these specular values are incorrect.
From what I understand you are trying to achieve an older, tarnished metal.
This practically means that the metal is not pure anymore thus more diffuse colouring should come through from the non-metallic tarnish that gathers over time.
Pure metal has no diffuse and should remain black in your albedo map but the closer it gets to something non-metal, you will have more diffuse coming through.
For example, rust is not a metal anymore and should be considered a grey value of 40 between 60.
Anything that isnt a pure metal should be a value of 40 between 60 with a few exceptions of specific materials like diamond which is 115 if I remember correctly.
Hope all is good with you at the big J!
Hayo
Hey Hayo, thanks for the tips. Your right I'm trying to get an old tarnished metal look to the main body and barrel, and the scope is old tarnished copper, and the butt and cross are old silver. I like a challenge
Once I've got these nailed I'll be going to town on the dirt and grime.
You are doing something similar in the gloss. The dark areas should represent where the area is getting rough and the spec is spreading out. You currently have it in the cavities of your wood which makes no sense. If anything you corners and edges would get rougher (darker on your gloss), because that is where the most wear is happening.
Also should be noted that adding color in to the spec messes with the energy conservation ( unless it is a metal). So as soon as you put a color in the spec you will get the opposite color spread across the model to conserve the total energy. I would really caution against it with PBR systems.
Cast iron, especially aged and worn as this looks to be, is probably closer to a dielectric than it is a metal in the sense of reflectivity. I think its important to think beyond "is this a metal or not" and "what type of metal is this?" not all metals behave the same, and then there are various stages of wear, oxidization that can make even a raw metal not reflect in the manner that you might think. For instance a very rusty unpainted metal is basically a dielectric in terms of reflection.
Cast iron tends to look more like this:
Hi Pegbird, this is the first time I'm using M2, and PBR, IBL. So I can't really comment. Just tweaked the lights until I was happy with the shot.
Turns out though that my map extreme lighting was an bi-product of incorrect map values, so back to the drawing board for me. All good fun though
Your right EarthQuake the metal is all over the place atm but it's only placeholder, as I thought it best to get each section looking right, before moving on.
For the main body I'm thinking it more like a tarnished steel, so not quite as dark as old cast Iron.
I imagined the rifle to be someone's pride and joy so it's more like a well looked after object with natural weathering than a neglected piece.