Wings Materials

[dgud]

I have implemented GL transfer format (gltf,glb) importer and exporter for the
next release.

And I noticed their (new) Brdf materials settings.

Basically they are using only 4 (5 with alpha) parameters
Diffuse: RGB basic color
Metalness: 0.0 - 1.0 where 0.0 non metal and 1 is a metal.
Roughness: 0.0 - 1.0 Very 0.0 is very smooth and 1.0 is a rough material.
Emission: RGB for lighting parts.

So I have read up on it, many are using the same parameters, Disney(pixar/renderman) and Unreal for example.

I think this simplifies the material construction and want to change
the current "OpenGL" material dialog, and I can make "light" shaders look
closer to what they would look like in a game engine or renderer.

Opinions?

[micheus]

Will we be talking about PBR?
It's something I have been interested since started to play with Substance Painter and I've seen it be used in many other 3D applications.

In that case, these article may be of interest:
- Physically Based Rendering Algorithms: A Comprehensive Study In Unity3D
- Let's Get Physical
and this two provided by Allegorithmic (I already linked it in off-topic three years ago and it was just updated):
- VOLUME 1: THE THEORY OF PHYSICALLY BASED RENDERING AND SHADING
- VOLUME 2: PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR CREATING PBR TEXTURES

regards to material settings:
- specular component would be useful sometimes:
"When you're editing a non-metallic surface material, there are times when you'll want to adjust its ability to reflect light, specifically, its Specular property" from Unreal Engine docs
- would be possible to use maps and not only ramp values?
- and about the transparency?

Diffuse => Albedo
Roughness => Microsurface

[Asticles]

If wings gets pbr, it would be awesome!

[dgud]

Specular will be calculated from Diffuse (Albedo) and metallic parameter, from (Unreal) there own paper they have said they will remove the specular property but kept if for now because their latest game already used it so they couldn't remove it.

My intention was keep hemilight as it is in 2.1.6, and do a simple PBR without background or maybe with a default prebuilt environment, for camera light or scene lights.
Will see how much work I have time to do?

[Asticles]

You need to find more coders

[Nova]

I think this is great. I work with PBR textures very often and being able to see models with their textures much closer to how they'll appear in a game engine would be super useful. I'm not currently working a project where I do modelling/texturing, but I would definitely check out the functionality whenever it'd come.

[slight]

Hi, new to the new forums, I used wings back in the 1.3 days, picked up the new version today and love all the new features.

I was trying to change the environment map but could not see where to do it, any help there would be appreciated?

Anyway, I found the shaders in the wings ProgramFiles folder... In Unity I use a shader that multiplies vertex colors with a MatCap shader.

If you are unfamiliar, MatCap is the type of shader ZBrush and Sculptris use, very simple and fast - they are like an environment map, but locked to the camera axis.

Anyway I am happy to provide this shader if there is any interest, I have no idea about Erlang or what needs to be done to implement a shader designed for Unity into Wings myself, but assume it would be simple for someone who knows their way around the new shaders in Wings.

[micheus]

I was trying to change the environment map but could not see where to do it, any help there would be appreciated?

It's still a W.I.P., that is why we still don't have an option for that available.

Anyway, if you want to change it once, then you can replace the image named grandcanyon.png that you find in texture under Wings3D install directory.
But, if you intend to change it many time while you are working on your project, then I recommend you to enable the development menu in Preferences dialog (last tab, look for Show Develop menu [ ]) and restart Wings3D. After that, when you replace the grandcanyon image you go to the Development menu and choose the item Recalc envmaps.

Everything else only dgud can comment/answer you.

[slight]

Thanks, and yep, I have already found and swapped out grandcanyon for another image, noticed it's mapped very differently to the Matcap textures I use. I have dozens of matcap textures, In the meantime I can make a .bat file to copy over grandcanyon.png and use the dev menu refresh, thanks again.

A bit off topic, but I am really, really happy to see Wings getting a bit of much needed attention, for context I was a Nendo user back when that was a thing, but now I code more often than model. As someone who doesn't know Erlang though, is there anything else I can do to help?

[micheus]

Thanks, and yep, I have already found and swapped out grandcanyon for another image, noticed it's mapped very differently to the Matcap textures I use. .

It's a Spherical Environment Maps. You can find a lot of them "Googling".