Benefits of using PBR Textures

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) is an acronym for Physically Based Rendering. PBR materials have become increasingly popular in recent years. This is most likely due to modern graphics hardware’s increased power and versatility, which now allows for the effective implementation of such models in real-time engines.

There are numerous compelling reasons to use PBR materials, including:

Ease of use

PBR textures are exceptionally strong and user-friendly, allowing you to describe almost any material type, even a mix of them, with a single texture.

The format is quite compact, with only a few parameters needed to accurately represent all possible materials. A single material type can now be used to define all common materials (diffuse, glossy and specular dielectrics, as well as metals). It’s suitable for real-time applications because of this. Depending on the texture of the item, each parameter can change (generally through the use of UV-mapped textures, which are well suited for real-time engines). This enables you to utilise a single PBR material to mimic a variety of different materials.

Quality

PBR materials are simple and compact, and in addition, they provide excellent shading quality. In various lighting circumstances, a diffuse/spec/bump shader does not accurately depict a material. It simply performs a diffuse calculation followed by a specular calculation before combining the two. This could result in a higher energy return than if the light were to fall on it. Whereas, PBR texturing, an energy-saving shader can never return more light energy than it receives, which is split between the reflecting and diffuse components. This is more realistic in terms of material behaviour. It has a more natural appearance and performs well in a variety of lighting conditions.

Time-saving

PBR textures are indeed designed to simulate realistic surfaces. Simplifying the effort of defining realistic surfaces will undoubtedly save up time for other areas of the production process, such as lighting, modelling, animation, compositing, and so on. For our PBR textures, we have plugins that allow you to import several maps at once.

Photorealistic effects

Physically-based rendering attempts to produce visuals in a way that mimics the flow of light in the real world by simulating how materials absorb and reflect light. Because of their photorealistic effects, PBR textures are increasingly being used in modern game engines. They are claimed to be the best representation of real-world scenarios for real-time rendering.

Compatibility

In addition to photorealistic quality, exporting your project to another software becomes simple. To create an effect, most render engines have their unique workflows. However, PBR textures create the same effects in different software. Because they are physically based, they easily and naturally integrate into more general physically based rendering workflows. It allows artists to work consistently, as PBR materials should appear the same in all conforming offline or real-time renderers.

Scalability

While their description is fundamentally simple, it can be enhanced at will, even procedurally. Despite being based on texture maps, the format allows for more elaborate parameter declarations (such as procedural functions), making it versatile and scalable in terms of complexity.

And this list goes on, and on, and on…