PBR Practice: Making Beautiful Textures With Little Effort

I knew that PBR was the new method of texturing in the Industry, but I had NO idea how incredibly satisfying it is to use. Physically Based Rendering, or PBR uses an albedo map (similar to a diffuse but without a lot of the lighting information), a roughness map, and either a metalness or specular map, depending on the material you're making. Its quite a simple method, although it does take some adjusting when you've been using diffuse and speculars for two years.

For our first week of University, our brief was an introduction to PBR. We had to make 9 set materials. Engine work and I don't get on quite as well as we could, so this was somewhat of a challenge, but I learnt a lot of interesting techniques, as well as finally getting hands on with Unreal 4.
(I've changed my mind from my previous blog post , I like it much better than CryEngine) 

I've got to say I'm pretty pleased with results. The 9 different materials we were set were pretty diverse so I learnt a lot from them. Also, I learnt a huge amount about the material editor in Unreal 4. Fresnel, subsurface scattering, and displacement maps are just fantastic. I spent a lot of time reading through this blog post, and learnt a huge amount from it. The chart they provided was really informative and shaped a lot of my textures.

DONTNOD PBR Reference Chart for Unreal 4

I managed to get all of this done in the space of 2 days, getting into labs at 10 and leaving at 9. An 11 hour day works wonders, and is the perfect way to get on top of my time management issues. The plan for this year is to do all of my work on the weekdays and then relax on the weekends, and so far it's going well.

Considering, however, I managed to get everything done in time, I decided to work on some other materials and play about with surface properties.

I have to say, the one I'm most proud of is the wool, it really came together with that displacement map. The velvet was an interesting one to work on as well and, although I'm not entirely happy with it yet, it was interesting to attempt to simulate velvet's surface properties; it's a really weird material.

All in all, this project went pretty brilliantly. I kept on top of my work, learnt a new texturing method, and produced some really good results. Lets hope the rest of the year goes just as well.