Tutorials series: How to achieve PBR-like shading in Blender 2.78
Cfirwin3 uses the new Blender 2.78 viewport options to achieve PBR-like lighting effects. Remember that Blender has no true PBR support yet, but with these techniques you can achieve some good results already.
Tutorial 1: Viewport PBR Lighting
This tutorial will focus on creating “Box” environment maps from equirectangular images. We will create a reflection map and a diffuse map and learn how to apply these images to objects in a scene. This tutorial requires Blender 2.78 or later.
Tutorial 2: PBR Viewport Shading Shadows
This tutorial focuses on diffuse world lighting and shadows.
Future tutorials will be shorter… there is a lot of “theory” to cover in this one.
Tutorial 3: PBR Viewport Reflections/Shadows
This is the third part of a tutorial series on creating materials that are influenced by environment map textures in the viewport. We will review the node group for shadows from the previous tutorial and divide the group into two separate groups (one for environment map influence and one for shadow mask influence)
This is exacly what CGCookie done already. Almost stolen: https://cgcookie.com/2015/05/20/pbr-in-blenders-viewport/
This is Carl Irwin, the author of the tutorial series featured here. (Thanks for the shout out Bart!).
That’s the first time that I have seen that cgcookie demo. But I can confidently say that neither my demonstration nor the cgcookie tutorial provides techniques that have not been used in OpenGL material creation for several years. The cgcookie tutorial there (which I would highly recommend) does not utilize shadeless box maps in the viewport (because they have not been available until just now). Otherwise, the material compositing techniques in both demonstrations are rudimentary, with respect to OpenGL materials.
The comment about an “exact” replication is simply not true… and the suggestion of theft is worse than untrue. Certainly check out that cgcookie post! It’s very useful for dealing with classic OpenGL material creation and OpenGL lighting. Thanks for pointing us to it, John.
JOHN,
The CGCookie tutorial (in Blender release 2.74) that you are referring to there (which is the first time that I have seen it) is dealing with classic GLSL material composing using OpenGL light sources. Many of us have published tutorials on that topic over the years… I have several that pre-date that particular demonstration. The series that is referenced in this thread is dealing with shadeless GLSL material compositing using environment map textures to emulate light sources and color. This is a completely new concept for the blender viewport with the release of 2.78. Your comment is more than misleading… and is quite frankly defamatory. I would strongly encourage readers to view both demonstrations and see for themselves.
I suggest you get your facts straight before accusing people. https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMuVWx3uuscQsqt_PMdzAv45yomaUFbxz
Carl has been hacking the viewport for quite some time now. His techniques are quite interesting and his presentation is excellent
I do wish that anyone who creates a tutorial based entirely around the Blender Internal renderer SAYS SO AT THE BEGINNING! A great many people like me gave up with BI years ago, so it’s really annoying to sit through 4.5 minutes of very verbose pre-amble until “Cycles” is heard, and you realise the whole tutorial is irrelevant. I last used that sort of six-sided texture mapping thing (I forget what it’s properly called) about ten years ago!
This isn’t a tutorial for the BI. It is a tutorial for the default GLSL viewport (which I stated immediately, as did Bart also indicate in the first line of the post description). Other than the conversion of equirectangular maps to box maps, the BI is not used here… nor is Cycles (which is not nearly 10 years old… to my knowledge)… nor have you ever been able to apply environment maps in the viewport shaders prior to the release of 2.78.
What’s up with all of the negativity guys?
Ignore the haters.
Claiming you stole it or complaining about not understanding that it’s for GLSL just proves they’re daft…
Love your tutorials and really like this tutorial series, please keep it going!
I really do not wish to be negative, but simply pointing out that the tutorial takes 8:36 before you start using the Blender interface, and then none of the panels/controls you describe are available for somebody who uses Cycles. These users will be mystified by a GLSL option in the Shading panel, a texture panel in the World options, or a ‘Real sky’ option.
Box mapping of 6 textures onto each side of an object (perhaps it was technically ‘baking’, I forget) to save render time was available as far back as I can remember in the 2.4x series, although obviously not something that was visible in the viewport.
I take the time to address everything that you mentioned concerning 2.4 options and box maps (I even reference a wiki book on the subject) in the 8 minute theoretical intro for this series that is now approaching 4+ hours and 5 parts (and growing). I even reference a build that accomplishes this type of shading in the Cycles viewport (with a capable GPU, if you are interested). All of this is on a topic that is has been sorely lacking support and development in relation to proprietary software counterparts (real-time photorealistic rendering via gaming conventions).
These aren’t outdated concepts… they are completely new to Blender. Imagine rendering a photorealistic and material-accurate animation mock-up or production ready project at less than a second per frame on a modest computing system. That’s what this is about.
“Imagine rendering a photorealistic…” I am really with you there! A few months ago I asked the devs if there was not some easy way to output the [Cycles] Ctrl+Z preview to a video (much like the ‘OpenGL render active viewport’ button at the bottom of the 3D view) to create very quick but very high quality preview videos. They said that would be no quicker than doing a full render, but this is evidently wrong. Moving forward one frame in preview mode causes an almost instant redraw of the scene with none of the massive setup/build time of a full render… but they just closed my request.