PBR Validator Overlay
Any chance we can get a PBR material validator display mode? it would be very usefull when working on texture painting or creating a PBR material.
Basically what it do is to check for the Albedo, Metalness, specular and roughness color/value, and validate each of them if it's follows or using a safe value from any known PBR material color charts.
It's almost similar to the Face Orientation Overlay visually, for example when validating Albedo Color, a good color value would be marked as blue/green, while a bad color value (either too high or too low) it would be marked red.
Most PBR texture painting software and game engine editor are have this display/debug mode feature to validate the final material .
(and no, i'm not going to include a screenshot from other apps)
6 Comments
Noob question, what is considered a good or bad value in this case ?
Well this is a personal experience though so i might be wrong, from what i find albedo value shouldn't go bellow 3-5 or exceed 250. Using those range giving me a good result "generally".
I guess that's only valid on 8bit/channel textures, though.
That would be super helpful for pbr material creation...
We can sort of preview base color by using diffuse color render pass but it's not exactly the same thing (it doesn't show base color of materials with metallic for example) and there is no way to see roughness / metallic passes.
Not sure if this should be implemented as an overlay, but as a shading option. A PBR overlay would be render engine specific. Each render engine would need to implement this as they can have use different PBR functions. Similar to render passes a shading option would fit better.
Currently this can be done via AOVs but that a lot of work for the artist to setup.
PBR texture painting software normally do that as they use a deferred shading approach where the data is stored in textures. Eevee uses a forward shading approach where we don't store the data in itermediate buffers. Adding this needs to be done carefully as we don't want eevee to become slower or less maintainable.
Don't get me wrong I do see the benefit and would like this to happen. Just pointing out some challenges that needs considerations in adding this to for example eevee.
This is actually also my main concern when creating this proposal, i'm not really sure if this should be an overlay or another AOV or maybe even a new display mode? Last part might be too far, but since the purpose of this mode are too analyze the PBR Color/Value just like False Color transform i think.