One thing to notice about the Ambient Occlusion. The option you turn off in games usually is the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion that is calculated in real time. The Ambient Occlusion maps on a shader are not expensive to process so don't be afraid to use them. ;) Great video btw!
welp i like to save every frame I can, and If I save .25 frames here and those other 3 places that's one total frame I didn't have. I will always appreciate the time and effort put into creating games. I'm so glad I decided to learn how to use blender because now I can truly appreciate and look at how much work was put into each individual object.
Hello George. Normal map will look like 3D surface if you will use proper shader for it. Look into steep parallax mapping documents to understand how its working :)
Good video but there is incorrect info imo. Metallic map does not define how reflective the surface is, the Roughness map does! Metallic determines whether the surface is metallic/conductor or non-metal/dielectric. In practice it shows if the reflections of the surface will be tinted or not (metals do tint their reflections according to the albedo color, dielectrics reflect the environment as it is). So with low roughness you can have very reflective surfaces that are either metallic or dielectric - the metallic ones will look like smooth metal and the dielectric ones will appear as smooth plastic :)
actually... roughness, or glossiness (inverted roughness map) has nothing to do with reflection-strength (specularity) but with reflection-distribution. the same silver material, polished (not rough) or sanded (very rough) have the same reflection strength. you can visualize this by assuming a black environment and a single small lightsource. on a polished silver-ball we'll see mostly black plus a small and intense reflection of the lightsource. if we roughen the ball, we now see less black ares and a very spread out and less intense reflection of the lightsource. if we would add together the intensities of every pixel per ball-image and then compare those two, they would be identical. -> energy conservation. in some way, if you would look at just one point on the surface, then you could say that rough means a drop in intensity, but that would be the wrong way to look at in a PBR sense. i often use this simple explanation: specular/reflectivity is a property of the atoms, it IS the material. roughness/glossiness is the SHAPE of huge amounts of atoms. polished silver or rough silver are both the same silver-atoms, but with different "landscapes". :-)
I think that's a great technical explanation. I didn't say anything about intensity. I said low roughness will give the impression of a reflective surface (in pain everyday language). Here is an experiment: render a sphere with 0 roughness and then with high roughness, show the two images to someone who isn't a shader programmer and ask them which one is more reflective/shiny :P That's what I mean and I mean it as a general rule that holds in most practical scenarios. I am sure you can fiddle with IOR settings or whatever and get all kinds of wacky results... Anyway, I like your atom analogy. Would be even cooler if it was visualized somehow :)
+Todor Nikolov (ToshiCG) glad you like my atoms :-) everyday use of certain terms can be quite fuzzy when it comes to science. many people would consider the color of a mirror intuitively somewhat grey or silvery, or glass as more reflective than brushed aluminum, hehe
This comment cleared my doubt as a newbie to all this 3D stuff! I had this particular doubt in mind how these maps differentiate between plastic smooth or metal smooth, and I found it on top comments! Thanks!!!!!
Your comment and the following responses from @dumpsky to it clarified and taught me useful things that I didn't know , that will help me make my own decisions better and faster when I am trying to create a texture.
Hello Zeracheil! The video is well done, but I gotta rectify some things here, cause people might get confused. 1. You wouldn't use a SSAO-Map. SSAO means Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. It is dynamically calculated as a postprocessing effect and can't be saved in a texture for a model. 2. Bump Maps and Displacement Maps contain the actual height displacement(1d), Normal Maps contain the Normal(3d). You wou can use all of them in different stages, the use of bump maps and normal maps in the pixel shader has pretty much the same effect (bump maooing or normal mapping). Displacement Maps (the term) are usually used, when you want to really displace the geometry (tesselation) or at least fake the effect more authentically (parallax occlusion mapping) . 3 The procedure here has nothing to do with PRB (Physicl Based Rendering). PRB is "Blurring" the environment map in the way, that the blurred resulting map represents the ensemble of environment fragments that is to be expected to exit the observed surface from a specific angle (texcoords of the map) for a specific roughness (paramater for the blur calculation).
Still useful including the contributions and discussions of others who commented below :) . One of the best features of your tutorial is that it's very well structured, has examples to demonstrate the differences, and it's well paced and to the point. Thanks again.
All these haters saying the information is wrong. Yes some may be but it still gives us a clear representation of what these textures do. I learned a lot from this video than a lot of other 30 minute videos. Very well edited and clear.
This is the best video that explained to me the role of texture maps in a simple way through oral speech and visuals , in a shot period of time, great job and style, anybody can make a complicated, technical and nerdy tutorials, but a few can make simple and easy to understand techniques, helpful for beginners, keep up the good work, and ignore bad comments !
dude i was asked to make a model with the metalness workflow and i was absolutly lost, thanks for this video, its my first time modeling for video games and you just saved me the embarasment
Thanks for the video. One thing though. Enabling or disabling in games is not the AO texture but the SSAO effect. The AO texture does not use much power. Definitely less than the height map when using parallax, POM, or tessellated displacement.
Thanks a lot for this, it was extremely helpful, especially your comparisons to older methodology as it's been a few years since I worked with 3D and this is a perfect crash course into PBR and newer texturing methods. Great job.
The first thing you say is already incorrect. Albedo and diffuse is not the same. In simple terms albedo is the color of an object without any lighting properties, whereas diffuse is the color of an object with some lighting properties.
do you know a software that could make an albedo map from and diffuse one? because i was very introduce into the specular workflow and don't know how to make the roughness and reflectivity map
*Metal/Rough PBR Workflow* Color = Albedo Reflectivity = Metallic Specularity = Roughness Lighting = Normal 0-1 Height Range (Depth) = Height/Bump Shadow Depth(?) = Ambient Occlusion *If you are given the option for specularity in a Metal/Rough workflow, it's referring specular levels and not a mask, leave this at the default level (in most cases). i think :'|
marmoset.co/posts/physically-based-rendering-and-you-can-too/ marmoset.co/posts/basic-theory-of-physically-based-rendering/ These resources were a lot better for understanding pretty much all physical properties
it's been 3 years and I don't know what the fuck I was smoking when I wrote this. I guess being in Uni made me think I was a little smart arse. All insults thrown at me are fully deserved please accept this more informed apology. God I sound like a smarmy cunt in the comment
This is frighteningly informative! You should rename this into "Beginner's Guide to Texture Maps"! Edit : Lots of people say informations here are incorrect. but is it really that terrible?
lol... reading this chat! artists at their finest :P , a quick google search will reveal all the documentation you will ever need to know on pbr shaders, or old shader models. one thing I do agree with you on is some artists really dont go into the technicalities of how shaders work and how each map is implemented, which I would have to stress is becoming more of a must have knowledge as time moves on, not less needed. thats not to say artists who have little technical knowledge procuce bad art, but a artist with knowledge in both areas is usally better off!
For sure! I encourage all artists to go into further research as they develop their art. This is basically just "custom" definitions that helped me better wrap my head around what the maps do when I started. The aim was to help people who could benefit from a quick and dirty explanation.
@@zeracheil3902 Honestly I really appreciated this video, and it actually cleared up a lot of things that I was a bit iffy on. For just under 10 minutes, I learned a good deal about all the different material layers. Also I would love more of these videos k thx
I'm using unity. is there a particular order I'm suppose to apply these textures and materials, and after I'm done do I click render or something in unity because some of my models never look as sharp ands shiny as they do in sketchfab. I'm just using premade models I didn't make any of them myself. I just get them then have to apply textures and materials sometimes, but I can never seem to get them to look like they do in the preview window of Sketchfab while in Unity. So what am I doing wrong?
I'm pretty sure the kind of ambient occlusion you can turn on and off in games now adays is screen space ambient occlusion, which is probably different from ambient texture maps. SSAO is done in real time.
I use an older game engine with no PBR materials - in this case I create a single texture with AO and roughness baked into the diffuse and then just apply the nomal map - its not great but its something....I can get a slight shine from Embossing the texture in GIMP/Photoshop.
Great video! I've been wanting to get into modding for Fallout 4. How do all these texture maps combine when you use them on a model in Blender? And how are they enabled/disabled via the options menu in the game?
Hiya Zeracheil, really nice explanation video! Just one question, though. Using Maya, where should I plug in Metal and Roughness maps? There are a lot of inputs in a normal Blinn shader, so I am confused where to plug in.... Thanks.
This video is old but good, but I need to point out that "Metallic" is the most misunderstood maps, folk have it black for non-metallic and white if the thing is a meteall, but this shall be seen as how metal like something is, like bricks can have some small reflective specs in it and some parts of a butterfly wing can look like metal, so to just have it black or white without use the range in between in a metall map is a waste of resources and it should often be used more often than folk think.
There are spec/gloss and metal/rough workflows in pbr. If you work with the first one your combination of basic textures will look like this: Albedo, Specular, Glossiness, Normal, AO. Specular determines the amount of reflected light(reflection strength) for metals and nonmetals. And also it determines the color of reflection for metals(gold will be yellow on spec map for example). Glossiness determines how rough or polished the surface is. The more white the more polished, the more black the more rough. Albedo in spec/gloss workflow is just a diffuse map. One exception - there shouldn't be any light information in it in pbr. No shadows, only colors. And metals are completely black in it.(in spec/gloss workflow of course) If you work with the second one your combination of basic textures will look like this: Albedo, Metalness(or Metalic, sorry for my English), Roughness, Normal, AO. Metalness shows where is metal and where is non metal. Black is nonmetal, white is pure metal. There are some gradients in semi metal materials or transitions between metal and dirt on it for example. Roughness is just an inverted Glossiness. (it determines how rough or polished surface is too). Albedo in metal/rough worflow is almost the same thing as in spec/gloss workflow but with one exception - albedo determines the color of metal reflections. Just as specular does in spec/gloss workflow. Also you can use specular map in metal/rough workflow to better adjust the reflection power of nonmetals. ONLY nonmetals. I hope I helped. There are little nuances, but in general, this is all you need to know. Also PBR requires physically correct values for all textures. So if you need gold or aluminium in your material then you should find color values of it in the internet and use it in your textures. You may not do it of course but it is actually what pbr requiers
Specular and gloss maps is a workflow that replaces the roughness and metallic maps. The difference being that gloss maps work in a fashion similar to roughness maps. White determines how glossy a surface is and how much it will shine (aka glossy) while black determines if a surface is not shiny at all. The specular map is different from metallic because this map can contain color which influences the brightness and colors of your highlights.
Nice, easy to understand explanation of the basics of all of these maps. I'm always getting confused with the naming of these maps, especially when the effect they produce is so similar. My daytime job is not CG so I have never gone into these issues in depth. I'm just starting to render in colour and your short tutorial has been of immense help. I hope you make more. John
Thank you for your video it's really helpful and straight to the point. However I still have question since I'm a newbie on this matter. How are you supposed to create these maps ? I know how to bake diffuse and AO from Maya as for the normal I usually use Zbrush. But the other maps are completely unknown to me. Any tips / good tutorial for this ? Again thanks a lot. I was taught about the old process of texture creation and PBR workflow is pretty new to me.
If you're just starting out, I'd recommend creating the maps individually with a software like Photoshop. You'd start with using the UV unwrap of your model as a guide to where your texture will be placed. Color generally comes first, placing brick or whatever where you want it. Then you can generally start something like roughness and metallic by desaturating your color map and using it as a guide. Don't just straight up use this though. You'll want to paint where the texture should be rough and smooth, etc. So tl;dr, it's all manual work. Alternatively, newer software such as Substance Painter and Quixel have materials built into them that contain all the maps already. You plop them onto your model in real time 3d in the viewport and then adjust from there. This is great, the issue is sometimes you can get yourself in a lot of confusing when dealing with all 5 maps at the same time. Good luck!
Hello Zeracheil. I tried my hand at doing these maps by hand because I found nothing else relevant for this job (Except Substance like you said, but i don't have any licence yet). So far so good even if it can be tedious or time consuming to say the least but now I now im doing it right so I think I just have to train and improve my skills in order to do it faster. Thanks a lot for your time I really appreciate your help.
No problem. It can definitely be tough at first, especially doing it manually but I think you'll find you better understand the values (black and white and in between) you'll want when you move onto software like Substance Painter or Quixel. Good luck!
Thank You! I was looking for such are informative video for so loooong time! Just a question when you showed up a height map, the right square has height map, right? Because to me the left side looked more dimensional, and the right looked more plain.
What makes me mad is that there is no explanation to what are materials and maps in detail. This intro video is great for a beginner game artist like myself. Thabk you for this video
Few corrections: For gold you don't use "a basic yellow colour" you use a very specific colour. If you use any different colour you are not following a proper pbr workflow and the material will be outright wrong. Metallic means reflections are coloured by the albedo colour while dielectric does not. Roger dictates the reflectiveness. Roughness dictates diffusion or direct reflection. Your attempts at elaborating are wrong. Height maps don't always fake geometry, they dictate geometry that can be added in shaders through tessellation. AO is basically baked lighting. If the renderer already has a solid shading algorithm using the height and normal map, AO is redundant. That's why it doesn't show much. In a less advanced renderer it would be more apparent. And AO is NOT pbr, it's a compromise because of limitations in rasterisation and compute power.
I'm confused, the first texture base / albedo / diffuse, this is the image isn't it? Just the base with no shadows or lighting. The regular texture? Or is this the map that tells the texture how much of the actual texture you want? lol that's complicated. So your texture would be faded if your diffuse map was grey.
I don`t really get why ambient occlusion is put in a seperate map? What is the reason we don`t put it on our diffuse map as an overlay? (you know.., when you`re still in photoshop..)
Hi Thank you for this answer. I get it. I`m working on this game with a very dark atmosphere and I painted the ao on my albedo map. I guess it works for me because those parts are meant to be dark and will never be enlightened. Is it also correct, I should remove shading on existing textures (like in between rocks on a brick wall, the bumps and crevices, you know like ALL of it.) ? So that those shadows can be picked up by the normal/bump map?
shadows will only be casted from geometry or displaced geometry (height/displacement map). You dont have to really take it all out. Just take hard shadows that will look out of place.
I know, I was talking about the shadows on a diffuse texture, by shadows i meant black parts on my texture image, I am not modelling every bump in for example, a rock. So therefore we use bumps and displacement maps. So a bump or normal map draws shadows and/or light on the texture, I figured this would make it kinda logic to remove all lighting from the albedo map. So the shadowing on these "fake bumps" will always display correctly.
Some things you should have explained instead: Metallic: It's either 1 or 0. Metallic in PBR has no value in between. An object/surface is either 0 or 1 metallic. Roughness: Doesn't just control white light, also controls reflections and any type of light bounce. Ambient Occlusion: Does *NOT* take up additional space as it's multiplied onto the albedo texture and thus does not influence performance. You confused it with the generated ambient occlusion between objects in game engines.
You kind of bumbled the explanation here. Replying to the comments of people saying the video is confusing and saying "I'm sorry YOU were confused" is a bit condescending. That being said, I'm sorry your comment section is a cesspool of people being jerks and then people insulting the jerks... All in all this is pretty standard for RUclips I guess. I'm betting you're a lot more experienced now than you were when you made this video, and could probably do a much more accurate description. That would shut up haters. If not, a couple annotations to correct the descriptions of at least Metallness and Roughness might at least suppress any more sassy comments telling you to remove a video which has obviously been helpful to many.
Well, I think being sorry that I confused someone is legitimate. All in all, as I've responded to other people, this is definitely not the "by the book" definition of the maps. This is simply how it helped me understand them when I was learning. I could make another video but I'm busy a lot. I appreciate the condolences none the less. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion even if it's negative, that's just the internet.
Something about your mic that when you stop speaking it does this phasing out sort of thing. I don't know if I've ever noticed it in any other video but something about it detracts/is distracting. For your health.
I've got a ton of photorealist texture maps here: matthornb.itch.io/ Seamless photography-based stuff. It'll be all bundled together 91% off for $1.25 during this Halloween 2020. Thousands of seamless texture maps, hundreds of 3d assets and VFX video elements. All bundled for about a dollar.
Jessus i hate the naming and PBR in general :-)... So "Roughness" is essentialy "Reflection glossines" in renderers like Vray? (in non real time engines)? And "Metalness" as i understand is simple "Reflection" in Vray? Correct? If yes, why the fuck invent new names for already existing "maps"? (but i have to be wrong... there has to be some difference)...?
Basically, roughness determines how rough the surface is (yes like how glossy the surface is) and metalness simply tells the software if the object is metal or not. I couldn't tell you why they named it what they did, but it's a different way of calculating the maps all together so I'm sure they named it differently to differentiate between the two.
So sad, great video!, but i tougth this video will explains how to map a texture in a surface, which is no the case :/, i still can't found some information about...
One thing to notice about the Ambient Occlusion.
The option you turn off in games usually is the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion that is calculated in real time.
The Ambient Occlusion maps on a shader are not expensive to process so don't be afraid to use them.
;)
Great video btw!
nice!!!!
@@VatchGaming I was just gonna post this, so neat lol
Yup. Worst they do is take up VRAM and realistically not a lot of it.
welp i like to save every frame I can, and If I save .25 frames here and those other 3 places that's one total frame I didn't have. I will always appreciate the time and effort put into creating games. I'm so glad I decided to learn how to use blender because now I can truly appreciate and look at how much work was put into each individual object.
Hello George.
Normal map will look like 3D surface if you will use proper shader for it.
Look into steep parallax mapping documents to understand how its working :)
Good video but there is incorrect info imo.
Metallic map does not define how reflective the surface is, the Roughness map does! Metallic determines whether the surface is metallic/conductor or non-metal/dielectric. In practice it shows if the reflections of the surface will be tinted or not (metals do tint their reflections according to the albedo color, dielectrics reflect the environment as it is). So with low roughness you can have very reflective surfaces that are either metallic or dielectric - the metallic ones will look like smooth metal and the dielectric ones will appear as smooth plastic :)
actually... roughness, or glossiness (inverted roughness map) has nothing to do with reflection-strength (specularity) but with reflection-distribution. the same silver material, polished (not rough) or sanded (very rough) have the same reflection strength.
you can visualize this by assuming a black environment and a single small lightsource. on a polished silver-ball we'll see mostly black plus a small and intense reflection of the lightsource. if we roughen the ball, we now see less black ares and a very spread out and less intense reflection of the lightsource. if we would add together the intensities of every pixel per ball-image and then compare those two, they would be identical. -> energy conservation.
in some way, if you would look at just one point on the surface, then you could say that rough means a drop in intensity, but that would be the wrong way to look at in a PBR sense.
i often use this simple explanation: specular/reflectivity is a property of the atoms, it IS the material. roughness/glossiness is the SHAPE of huge amounts of atoms. polished silver or rough silver are both the same silver-atoms, but with different "landscapes". :-)
I think that's a great technical explanation.
I didn't say anything about intensity. I said low roughness will give the impression of a reflective surface (in pain everyday language). Here is an experiment: render a sphere with 0 roughness and then with high roughness, show the two images to someone who isn't a shader programmer and ask them which one is more reflective/shiny :P That's what I mean and I mean it as a general rule that holds in most practical scenarios.
I am sure you can fiddle with IOR settings or whatever and get all kinds of wacky results...
Anyway, I like your atom analogy. Would be even cooler if it was visualized somehow :)
+Todor Nikolov (ToshiCG) glad you like my atoms :-) everyday use of certain terms can be quite fuzzy when it comes to science. many people would consider the color of a mirror intuitively somewhat grey or silvery, or glass as more reflective than brushed aluminum, hehe
This comment cleared my doubt as a newbie to all this 3D stuff! I had this particular doubt in mind how these maps differentiate between plastic smooth or metal smooth, and I found it on top comments! Thanks!!!!!
Your comment and the following responses from @dumpsky to it clarified and taught me useful things that I didn't know , that will help me make my own decisions better and faster when I am trying to create a texture.
Hello Zeracheil!
The video is well done, but I gotta rectify some things here, cause people might get confused.
1. You wouldn't use a SSAO-Map. SSAO means Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. It is dynamically calculated as a postprocessing effect and can't be saved in a texture for a model.
2. Bump Maps and Displacement Maps contain the actual height displacement(1d), Normal Maps contain the Normal(3d). You wou can use all of them in different stages, the use of bump maps and normal maps in the pixel shader has pretty much the same effect (bump maooing or normal mapping). Displacement Maps (the term) are usually used, when you want to really displace the geometry (tesselation) or at least fake the effect more authentically (parallax occlusion mapping) .
3 The procedure here has nothing to do with PRB (Physicl Based Rendering).
PRB is "Blurring" the environment map in the way, that the blurred resulting map represents the ensemble of environment fragments that is to be expected to exit the observed surface from a specific angle (texcoords of the map) for a specific roughness (paramater for the blur calculation).
Great! This should be the first video people watch on PBR.
Still useful including the contributions and discussions of others who commented below :) . One of the best features of your tutorial is that it's very well structured, has examples to demonstrate the differences, and it's well paced and to the point. Thanks again.
All these haters saying the information is wrong. Yes some may be but it still gives us a clear representation of what these textures do. I learned a lot from this video than a lot of other 30 minute videos. Very well edited and clear.
A lot of people don't know all of this. This is good refresher info!
This is the best video that explained to me the role of texture maps in a simple way through oral speech and visuals , in a shot period of time, great job and style, anybody can make a complicated, technical and nerdy tutorials, but a few can make simple and easy to understand techniques, helpful for beginners, keep up the good work, and ignore bad comments !
btw in blender if you have the node wrangler addon(which comes with blender) enabled, you can hit ctrl+shift+T and select all your maps to auto PBR
dude i was asked to make a model with the metalness workflow and i was absolutly lost, thanks for this video, its my first time modeling for video games and you just saved me the embarasment
Excellent job! This has been a very long-awaited explanation, thank you!
Thank you so much, is the only video out of a hundred i've watched that explains exactly what i need. Finally a good video. Damn
Thanks for the video. One thing though.
Enabling or disabling in games is not the AO texture but the SSAO effect. The AO texture does not use much power. Definitely less than the height map when using parallax, POM, or tessellated displacement.
Had to sort through a lot of videos to find this one. But this is just what I was hoping to find. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Casey!
Really like this vid that you put out, straight to the point and easy to understand for 1st timer!
Good video. I didn't expect to become an expert from watching one video. I did pick up some info that was helpful to me. THANKS!
So helpful, better than many I've looked for! Thank you!
Thanks a lot for this, it was extremely helpful, especially your comparisons to older methodology as it's been a few years since I worked with 3D and this is a perfect crash course into PBR and newer texturing methods. Great job.
Excellent guide, subbed even though it looks like this channel has not had anything uploaded for a couple of years now.
The first thing you say is already incorrect. Albedo and diffuse is not the same. In simple terms albedo is the color of an object without any lighting properties, whereas diffuse is the color of an object with some lighting properties.
so albedo is a map without any false textured shadow/light and diffuse is a colour texture with false shadow and diffuse painted on?
Jacodaify You are correct! I wouldn't however call it "false".
Man thats really good to know, until reading your comment I thought it was one in the same but with a nicer sounding name haha.
Jacodaify I thought so as well just a half year ago, and I thought that was correct for years.
do you know a software that could make an albedo map from and diffuse one? because i was very introduce into the specular workflow and don't know how to make the roughness and reflectivity map
*Metal/Rough PBR Workflow*
Color = Albedo
Reflectivity = Metallic
Specularity = Roughness
Lighting = Normal
0-1 Height Range (Depth) = Height/Bump
Shadow Depth(?) = Ambient Occlusion
*If you are given the option for specularity in a Metal/Rough workflow, it's referring specular levels and not a mask, leave this at the default level (in most cases).
i think :'|
Great video! I would love a video about setting all the textures in blender!
Not gonna lie, you're explanation of roughness and metalness weren't accurate at all
Darkroom - Matt finally - someone who knows jack shit in these comments
marmoset.co/posts/physically-based-rendering-and-you-can-too/
marmoset.co/posts/basic-theory-of-physically-based-rendering/
These resources were a lot better for understanding pretty much all physical properties
it's been 3 years and I don't know what the fuck I was smoking when I wrote this. I guess being in Uni made me think I was a little smart arse. All insults thrown at me are fully deserved please accept this more informed apology. God I sound like a smarmy cunt in the comment
@@MattyewMashew Just based on this comment alone I'd probably vote for you if you ran for president
@@Daniel_WR_Hart lol
Thank you, this is excellent to help understand in a simple & visual way
not the best explanation video, but hey, you did your best! Really great video
This is frighteningly informative! You should rename this into "Beginner's Guide to Texture Maps"!
Edit : Lots of people say informations here are incorrect. but is it really that terrible?
lol... reading this chat! artists at their finest :P , a quick google search will reveal all the documentation you will ever need to know on pbr shaders, or old shader models. one thing I do agree with you on is some artists really dont go into the technicalities of how shaders work and how each map is implemented, which I would have to stress is becoming more of a must have knowledge as time moves on, not less needed. thats not to say artists who have little technical knowledge procuce bad art, but a artist with knowledge in both areas is usally better off!
For sure! I encourage all artists to go into further research as they develop their art. This is basically just "custom" definitions that helped me better wrap my head around what the maps do when I started. The aim was to help people who could benefit from a quick and dirty explanation.
@@zeracheil3902 Honestly I really appreciated this video, and it actually cleared up a lot of things that I was a bit iffy on. For just under 10 minutes, I learned a good deal about all the different material layers. Also I would love more of these videos k thx
Abdolutely great video! Learnt a lot from it.
I'm using unity. is there a particular order I'm suppose to apply these textures and materials, and after I'm done do I click render or something in unity because some of my models never look as sharp ands shiny as they do in sketchfab. I'm just using premade models I didn't make any of them myself. I just get them then have to apply textures and materials sometimes, but I can never seem to get them to look like they do in the preview window of Sketchfab while in Unity. So what am I doing wrong?
I'm pretty sure the kind of ambient occlusion you can turn on and off in games now adays is screen space ambient occlusion, which is probably different from ambient texture maps. SSAO is done in real time.
I use an older game engine with no PBR materials - in this case I create a single texture with AO and roughness baked into the diffuse and then just apply the nomal map - its not great but its something....I can get a slight shine from Embossing the texture in GIMP/Photoshop.
very informative and well explained... thanks a lot man...
Thanks for the clear video explanation
Are ambient occlusion and specular maps needed in physically based renderers that use raytracing?
Great video! I've been wanting to get into modding for Fallout 4. How do all these texture maps combine when you use them on a model in Blender? And how are they enabled/disabled via the options menu in the game?
Thanks!
This was awesome!
Hiya Zeracheil, really nice explanation video! Just one question, though. Using Maya, where should I plug in Metal and
Roughness maps? There are a lot of inputs in a normal Blinn shader, so I am confused where to plug in.... Thanks.
Did you find them? :D
is the rough map also called Gloss or Reflective? I downloaded PBR materials, and the roughness map is missing.
Are "Roughness" and "diffuse reflection" the same thing? Thx
Yes.
Simple and perfect. Thank you.
Props to you man.. I was wondering what those are in metarials.
Fantastic ma friend
This video is old but good, but I need to point out that "Metallic" is the most misunderstood maps, folk have it black for non-metallic and white if the thing is a meteall, but this shall be seen as how metal like something is, like bricks can have some small reflective specs in it and some parts of a butterfly wing can look like metal, so to just have it black or white without use the range in between in a metall map is a waste of resources and it should often be used more often than folk think.
Can you please possibly explain differences between the glossiness map and specular map? and how the roughness map affects the specular map?
There are spec/gloss and metal/rough workflows in pbr. If you work with the first one your combination of basic textures will look like this: Albedo, Specular, Glossiness, Normal, AO. Specular determines the amount of reflected light(reflection strength) for metals and nonmetals. And also it determines the color of reflection for metals(gold will be yellow on spec map for example). Glossiness determines how rough or polished the surface is. The more white the more polished, the more black the more rough. Albedo in spec/gloss workflow is just a diffuse map. One exception - there shouldn't be any light information in it in pbr. No shadows, only colors. And metals are completely black in it.(in spec/gloss workflow of course)
If you work with the second one your combination of basic textures will look like this: Albedo, Metalness(or Metalic, sorry for my English), Roughness, Normal, AO. Metalness shows where is metal and where is non metal. Black is nonmetal, white is pure metal. There are some gradients in semi metal materials or transitions between metal and dirt on it for example. Roughness is just an inverted Glossiness. (it determines how rough or polished surface is too). Albedo in metal/rough worflow is almost the same thing as in spec/gloss workflow but with one exception - albedo determines the color of metal reflections. Just as specular does in spec/gloss workflow. Also you can use specular map in metal/rough workflow to better adjust the reflection power of nonmetals. ONLY nonmetals.
I hope I helped. There are little nuances, but in general, this is all you need to know. Also PBR requires physically correct values for all textures. So if you need gold or aluminium in your material then you should find color values of it in the internet and use it in your textures. You may not do it of course but it is actually what pbr requiers
Specular and gloss maps is a workflow that replaces the roughness and metallic maps.
The difference being that gloss maps work in a fashion similar to roughness maps. White determines how glossy a surface is and how much it will shine (aka glossy) while black determines if a surface is not shiny at all.
The specular map is different from metallic because this map can contain color which influences the brightness and colors of your highlights.
Nice, easy to understand explanation of the basics of all of these maps. I'm always getting confused with the naming of these maps, especially when the effect they produce is so similar. My daytime job is not CG so I have never gone into these issues in depth. I'm just starting to render in colour and your short tutorial has been of immense help. I hope you make more. John
Thank you for your video it's really helpful and straight to the point. However I still have question since I'm a newbie on this matter. How are you supposed to create these maps ? I know how to bake diffuse and AO from Maya as for the normal I usually use Zbrush. But the other maps are completely unknown to me. Any tips / good tutorial for this ?
Again thanks a lot. I was taught about the old process of texture creation and PBR workflow is pretty new to me.
If you're just starting out, I'd recommend creating the maps individually with a software like Photoshop. You'd start with using the UV unwrap of your model as a guide to where your texture will be placed. Color generally comes first, placing brick or whatever where you want it. Then you can generally start something like roughness and metallic by desaturating your color map and using it as a guide. Don't just straight up use this though. You'll want to paint where the texture should be rough and smooth, etc. So tl;dr, it's all manual work.
Alternatively, newer software such as Substance Painter and Quixel have materials built into them that contain all the maps already. You plop them onto your model in real time 3d in the viewport and then adjust from there. This is great, the issue is sometimes you can get yourself in a lot of confusing when dealing with all 5 maps at the same time. Good luck!
Hello Zeracheil. I tried my hand at doing these maps by hand because I found nothing else relevant for this job (Except Substance like you said, but i don't have any licence yet). So far so good even if it can be tedious or time consuming to say the least but now I now im doing it right so I think I just have to train and improve my skills in order to do it faster.
Thanks a lot for your time I really appreciate your help.
No problem. It can definitely be tough at first, especially doing it manually but I think you'll find you better understand the values (black and white and in between) you'll want when you move onto software like Substance Painter or Quixel. Good luck!
Thank You!
I was looking for such are informative video for so loooong time!
Just a question when you showed up a height map, the right square has height map, right?
Because to me the left side looked more dimensional, and the right looked more plain.
Thanks for the vid great and simple explanation
What makes me mad is that there is no explanation to what are materials and maps in detail. This intro video is great for a beginner game artist like myself. Thabk you for this video
you forgot to mention one very important step in the PBR Workflow, metals only use a base color, never give them an actual diffuse map.
So when I'm uploading a BPR texture into C4D where exactly in the material tabs do i place each different texture? Sorry Im fairly new at this
Most of them are going to Reflectance channel!
Few corrections:
For gold you don't use "a basic yellow colour" you use a very specific colour. If you use any different colour you are not following a proper pbr workflow and the material will be outright wrong.
Metallic means reflections are coloured by the albedo colour while dielectric does not. Roger dictates the reflectiveness.
Roughness dictates diffusion or direct reflection. Your attempts at elaborating are wrong.
Height maps don't always fake geometry, they dictate geometry that can be added in shaders through tessellation.
AO is basically baked lighting. If the renderer already has a solid shading algorithm using the height and normal map, AO is redundant. That's why it doesn't show much. In a less advanced renderer it would be more apparent. And AO is NOT pbr, it's a compromise because of limitations in rasterisation and compute power.
Nice video. Also I don't wanna sound ignorant as I am still learning but why not use a specular setup?
Can you please explain the slots this maps can we add in vray 3dsmax?
What's the difference between roughness map and gloss map are they the same
which workflow is this?
metallic or specular?
i knew all this, just didnt know it was called PBR workflow. :P
thanks for the video, super helpful.
I'm confused, the first texture base / albedo / diffuse, this is the image isn't it? Just the base with no shadows or lighting. The regular texture?
Or is this the map that tells the texture how much of the actual texture you want? lol that's complicated. So your texture would be faded if your diffuse map was grey.
It only takes the color from this map. Nothing else.
I don`t really get why ambient occlusion is put in a seperate map? What is the reason we don`t put it on our diffuse map as an overlay? (you know.., when you`re still in photoshop..)
diffuse does not equal base colour
Because, some people like ambient occlusion. some don't.
Putting it in the diffuse texture doesn't provide the option.
Hi Thank you for this answer. I get it. I`m working on this game with a very dark atmosphere and I painted the ao on my albedo map. I guess it works for me because those parts are meant to be dark and will never be enlightened.
Is it also correct, I should remove shading on existing textures (like in between rocks on a brick wall, the bumps and crevices, you know like ALL of it.) ? So that those shadows can be picked up by the normal/bump map?
shadows will only be casted from geometry or displaced geometry (height/displacement map). You dont have to really take it all out. Just take hard shadows that will look out of place.
I know, I was talking about the shadows on a diffuse texture, by shadows i meant black parts on my texture image, I am not modelling every bump in for example, a rock. So therefore we use bumps and displacement maps.
So a bump or normal map draws shadows and/or light on the texture, I figured this would make it kinda logic to remove all lighting from the albedo map. So the shadowing on these "fake bumps" will always display correctly.
Very helpful!
Thanks, Zeracheil.
Great video--thanks
Amazing, ty!!
Thank you man¡¡¡ very well done
Thank you so much for this video it was really helpfull!
so in vray, metallic = reflection color , roughness = glossiness ??
essential guide, thanks!
Good stuff, thanks.
Praise the Pixar for inventing normal map!
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
very wonderful thank you
I want to try and make this cube. Can I do it with Maya or Substance painter pls??
How do I apply all these textures? :( I can't find how
You have a lot of learning left
thanks for sharing was helpful :)
Thanks for this tutorial, it's really helpful~!
Good video.
Some things you should have explained instead:
Metallic: It's either 1 or 0. Metallic in PBR has no value in between. An object/surface is either 0 or 1 metallic.
Roughness: Doesn't just control white light, also controls reflections and any type of light bounce.
Ambient Occlusion: Does *NOT* take up additional space as it's multiplied onto the albedo texture and thus does not influence performance. You confused it with the generated ambient occlusion between objects in game engines.
You kind of bumbled the explanation here. Replying to the comments of people saying the video is confusing and saying "I'm sorry YOU were confused" is a bit condescending. That being said, I'm sorry your comment section is a cesspool of people being jerks and then people insulting the jerks... All in all this is pretty standard for RUclips I guess.
I'm betting you're a lot more experienced now than you were when you made this video, and could probably do a much more accurate description. That would shut up haters. If not, a couple annotations to correct the descriptions of at least Metallness and Roughness might at least suppress any more sassy comments telling you to remove a video which has obviously been helpful to many.
Well, I think being sorry that I confused someone is legitimate. All in all, as I've responded to other people, this is definitely not the "by the book" definition of the maps. This is simply how it helped me understand them when I was learning. I could make another video but I'm busy a lot.
I appreciate the condolences none the less. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion even if it's negative, that's just the internet.
can you do a tutorial like this on unity?
try using shader graph
How can I use hieght maps in UE4?
Something about your mic that when you stop speaking it does this phasing out sort of thing. I don't know if I've ever noticed it in any other video but something about it detracts/is distracting.
For your health.
Very helpful
no roughness map?
I've got a ton of photorealist texture maps here:
matthornb.itch.io/
Seamless photography-based stuff. It'll be all bundled together 91% off for $1.25 during this Halloween 2020.
Thousands of seamless texture maps, hundreds of 3d assets and VFX video elements. All bundled for about a dollar.
Please, come back
Jessus i hate the naming and PBR in general :-)...
So "Roughness" is essentialy "Reflection glossines" in renderers like Vray? (in non real time engines)?
And "Metalness" as i understand is simple "Reflection" in Vray?
Correct?
If yes, why the fuck invent new names for already existing "maps"? (but i have to be wrong... there has to be some difference)...?
Basically, roughness determines how rough the surface is (yes like how glossy the surface is) and metalness simply tells the software if the object is metal or not. I couldn't tell you why they named it what they did, but it's a different way of calculating the maps all together so I'm sure they named it differently to differentiate between the two.
0:40
albedo doesnt have shadows, while diffuse has.
they mean the same thing
very accurate tutorial, thank you!
what is an edge map?
You swapped the roughness and metallic map results
What about spec map?
Thanks.
You don't turn AO form textures, its screen space AO, that is resource hog, not his, which barely takes any performance impact.
My man
So sad, great video!, but i tougth this video will explains how to map a texture in a surface, which is no the case :/, i still can't found some information about...
Thanks
Thanks! Subscribe for the good work you've done mate!
Your voice sounds like Steel from CS GO.
informative
yuno?