Contents
Why is PBR important?
Its benefit is it can give you more control over the reflectivity of the metal surface. This is turn can give materials a more realistic feel. Its main downside is it can be more memory intensive as the specular map requires an additional color channel to the base color.
Whats the difference between albedo and diffuse?
Albedo is the proportion of incident light that is reflected away from a surface. Diffuse reflection is the reflection of light in many directions, rather than in just one direction like a mirror (specular reflection).
Why does diffuse shading occur in a shading system?
This is easy to enforce in a shading system: one simply subtracts reflected light before allowing the diffuse shading to occur. This means highly reflective objects will show little to no diffuse light, simply because little to no light penetrates the surface, having been mostly reflected.
What makes a physically based shading system different?
Much of what makes a physically-based shading system different from its predecessors is a more detailed reasoning about the behavior of light and surfaces. Shading capabilities have advanced enough that some of the old approximations can now be safely discarded, and with them some of the old means of producing art.
Why is energy conservation important in physically based shading?
Energy conservation of this sort is an important aspect of physically-based shading. It allows the artist to work with reflectivity and albedo values for a material without accidentally violating the laws of physics (which tends to look bad).
Why are shading capabilities important to the artist?
Shading capabilities have advanced enough that some of the old approximations can now be safely discarded, and with them some of the old means of producing art. This means both the engineer and the artist should understand the motivations for these changes.