Real PBR tool for raytracing rendering is definitely one of the most difficult tools we are working on. The task of extending the PlaySys Interaction Framework features to function as a layer underneath is surely as much challenging as it is technically fascinating, but takes time both for the architecture and implementation.
In this new video I am showing how Real PBR works, introducing for the first time a real preview of our upcoming tool for real-time ray tracing rendering.
One of the relevant aspects of this video is the lighting workflow that is using part of the PlaySys Interaction Framework control features that we developed for Real HDR tool.
There will be a major revamp of the Material Settings that looks pretty limited at the moment, and a massive amount of time is going to be invested in the Render Settings panel.
Unfortunately the development of Real PBR is not quick as planned at the beginning of this journey but we are doing our best to guarantee efficiency of the tool keeping its cost as much contained as possible. In any case I think that the goal that we achieved is impressive for our development team.
Photometric Light Graphs!
The release of Real IES 3.2 is imminent and among the various upgrades and changes described in this article, we added a new user-requested .CSV file exporter for the LightList. This way you can easily export all the candelas per angle generated with Real IES, and use this data to plot graphs in other software such as Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc, Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, and so on.
a photometric light created with Real IES 3.2 and exported as a .csv file.
We are sure that this new feature will be quite useful for all the experienced light designers. In fact, the possibility to plot graphs is going to be an excellent way to communicate how the lighting model will work in your project. Our thanks go to Gerald K. for pointing out the necessity to implement such a feature.
If you already own a license of Real IES go on, grab the latest version of Real IES from the Releases page, try this new .CSV exporter, and let us know what do you think about it.
While working on Real IES 4, we decided to add some improvements to the Real IES 3 life cycle too, and here is a list of some features you should expect in the next few weeks.
Of course, any upgrade comes at no cost if you already have a license of Real IES 1, 2, or 3. We appreciate your support in our tool that recently had its 5th birthday, and we want to express our gratitude with lifelong updates even if the price changed in these years.
Anyway, first of all, the LightCone display has been upgraded and the rendering is now much, much more consistent with what you will have in your render.
The “display mode” option on the right end of the user interface is going away In Real IES 4, there won’t be the preview or inspector anymore.
Second, you will find a smoother visual experience thanks to the improved anti-aliasing both for the Full HD and 4K UI mode.
Although this feature may feel less important, we all know how stressed can be our eyes after an intense production period. My wish is that Real IES can be as light as possible for your eyes.
Now for something, you all asked many times and I always promised but never integrated: the LightList manual input
Hack your IES files to the bone with the manual override. You asked me for better granularity and this is the second step in that direction (the first one is the “granular light spikes” in LightGraph but that is already there for two years).
There will be other features for Real IES 4 like a mixer, a node system, load file with drag and drop, and more. All of this thanks to your continuous feedback: you asked it and we did it!
This is a short version of the in-house presentation about R&D activities related to the development of Real PBR software (aka Real-time Physically Based Rendering) tool, by Luca Deriu for PlaySys in 2019.
The software aims to offer a complete yet intuitive workflow for 3D Artists involved in the game development.
Thanks to the new computational possibilities offered by technologies such as Nvidia RTX – real-time ray tracing – the tool may also integrate features interesting for product and automotive rendering.
Real PBR is in development and there is no release date yet while PlaySys efforts are focused on the release of the first version as an open beta during 2020.
If you are looking for an HDR generator tool you are in the right place, and at the right time too.
During the next week, we are going to launch Real HDR 1.7 with updated features and new tools and in this article, I’d like to cover two of them: Real PBR Link and the Satellite System.
REAL PBR link
As you probably already knew, I am working on a new real-time raytracing physically based rendering tool named Real PBR. I cover most of it on its own website and blog.
What links Real HDR to Real PBR is an option available in the Options Window that will enable a connection between the HDRI you are generating and the realtime rendering in the other tool. This way Real HDR won’t need to include complicated extra features for rendering and this won’t change its price, after all, you are looking for an HDR generator and Real HDR will keep and improve this as its main goal.
Satellite System
It is time to say goodbye to the “Click&Go” feature that I introduced in v 1.4 of Real HDR and to say Hello! to the new system I developed to place lights in a 3D space: the Satellite System.
This decision has two reasons: the first reason is that I recently discovered that there is a patent that constrains the way a light is placed by using a reflection ray from a normal. In my naive development approach, I was researching a way to offer you a good way to place a light and indeed, the Click&Go seemed to be a nice way: you click on a surface and the Click&Go detects its normal to define the position where a light should be to lit that precise spot (Click&Go was a little different in reality, but the final experience was somehow the same). Too simple to be real and I am sure many of us already developed such common knowledge for experienced users.
Somehow it is like to warm water before having a shower, too basic to be patented but anyway, I am here to research, develop and offer better solutions for my customers and not to fight on patents.
Say Goodbye to the Click&Go. Now deprecated
By the way, if you also think about this, the Click&Go – as well as the similar mentioned patent – both suffer from a problem: the user must see the polygon that will reflect the ray and this requires control manipulation of both object and the point of view. And this is the second reason that pushed me to research something better. The story is very long and romantic and starts from my Black Hole test – I won’t write it here but we can talk about it on the Discord channel if you like.
To make it short I can describe myself as a technical 3D Artist and my goal is to provide an automated way that may speed-up or enrich the final output of a 3D Artist. So I thought about my approach when lighting a scene: I place the camera first, then the object, then the lights and so on. Point of view first THEN illumination… and this is the thing: sometimes I don’t have access to the polygon I need, simply because it is occluded. And here is where the Satellite System comes in, providing an orbital preview of the light direction all around the 3D mesh combined with a static rendering viewport.
Simply put: you look through the viewfinder and you place the lights around your object as you were a photographer. Cool right? In my old manual about 3dsMax for the Italian publisher Hoepli (back in 2008…wow!) I underlined a similar approach to customize the viewport of the software since the times of Kinetix and Discreet.
Say hello to the new Satellite System in v1.7!
There are also so many other improvements in Real HDR 1.7 and I invite you to read them all in Releases Notes page here on this website.
Thank you all for making Real HDR so great with your suggestions!
Luca
PS: I am code-signing the release in this very moment and my colleagues from marketing and Render Academy are preparing something cool for Black Friday -> Cyber Monday. Stay tuned.
The possibility to have realtime HDRI updates in Real PBR is now possible thanks to a new option both in Real HDR and Real PBR.
Starting from version 1.7 of Real HDR, the 3D artists will find a new flag in the options window that will expose a temporary buffer to Real PBR. By using this new option it will be then possible to precisely adjust the lights by using Real HDR while watching the realtime HDRI update result in Real PBR.
The 3D scene management has been the focus of this development week of Real PBR. The results are great both for the user and for the hardware.
For instance, you can now navigate the scene using the camera and the focus points activated by selecting the various nodes.
In this scene of my colleague Elena Kartseva, you can see a prototype of a room for a VR game, where I moved the focus from the entire container to a detail.
There are no materials applied and the models are approximated since the small interior is just a prototype, but the 3D Scene Management and the camera movement are great. I have to add some parameters related to the sensitivity and the flip of the movement axis though.
In this picture below you can see the usual model I received from my former colleague Ville Niemi for testing purposes. Ville is also supporting me with insiders’ requests so I prepared for him the Master Texture slot. I am sure this will be appreciated by many users since it will let import the AO, metalness, and Roughness by using a single texture. I kept the Emission in a separate Map (my thoughts about that here). As an alternative to the Master Texture, I left the previous individual slots. I strongly suggest using one or another since the result is practically a sum.
There are new settings for the camera position in the space. They are still “one-way” in the sense that they are updated by moving the camera with the mouse, but my plan is to receive a numerical input and adjust the camera position.
This is off topic but I couldn’t resist from using my very old assets from a first-person shooter videogame I was developing back in 2008 using the amazing Unigine…can’t imagine that this is what was happening at PlaySys 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DCA3rZMIs4
Display and Lock are two new features I finally manage to complete. They look and behave similarly to many other tools such as Photoshop for example and they let the user hide a certain node or lock it, preventing accidental mistakes.
Finally a stress loading test by using an asset from a videogame for PS4 I am currently coding with my team. We packed a massive map composed of almost two million polygons and the load result is very stable and somehow fast.
Today there is some news on the User Interface of Real PBR. You can surely spot the glossy style like in the good ol’ times.
There are also new slots in the material including a Metalness Map that in future will be derived by a single channel of an RGB map like a Red channel of a Master Texture. I am not sure I want a Master though since I don’t like the idea of the Emission Map packed in a single channel and multiplied by a flat color. These days I am playing with the super-duper Borderlands 3 and there are so many blinking lights of different colors…”Unreal Engine” you’d say, fair enough, but still, I don’t want to limit the 3D artists to a single luminosity value * color value. So, long story short, this is why in Real PBR there is a Map for the Metalness and an RGB Map for the Self Illumination.
There are few changes in the Camera Settings as well, where I have now obtained a more suitable range of the parameters. The Shutter Speed will drive the Motion Blur behavior while the Aperture will manage the Depth of Field. Everything is on my list and is a matter of priorities and free time now.
The new User Interface style is visible in the Scene Structure. This is an important part of Real PBR since the user can find here all the meshes in the project. I added a show/hide command as well as a lock to prevent accidental mistakes. Once again, common functionalities, but somebody has to do them.
Behind the scene – even if I have a long road in front of me before being able to publish the first open beta – I am also working on the licensing system that will be similar to Real HDR and Real IES. Thanks to Ville Niemi for borrowing me his 3D model for my development experiments!
Real PBR will ba a new realtime rendering tool supporting real-time raytracing and various features for 3D artists involved in video game development and realtime rendering techniques in general also for architecture and design…and finally, I can disclose this new project I am restlessly working on.
I developed many internal tools for the projects and commissions at PlaySys Software Development and with this new tool, I want to extend the creative possibilities of 3D Artists all around the world – as I did in the past with Real IES and Real HDR.
This new project is quite ambitious and is going to take me a lot of resources for research and development but I am confident in the fact that this upcoming tool will payback.
As a difference from the past, I am going to introduce this tool during the development, before the official release. Also, my plan is to start selling the tool with a very accessible price that will help both me and users to join our forces with the aim of having a more robust instrument. So I invite you since now to join my efforts on this blog and my Discord channel here.
And now, finally, some pictures of Real PBR Beta
This is how real PBR Startup Screen looks like.
This is how Real PBR looks on a new scene. Is it too essential? I am planning to add a wizard to “break the ice” and help the users to move the first steps.
A quick preview of the drop-down menus of Real PBR. As a difference from Real IES or Real HDR, this new tool has a redesigned UI engine that helps me with the layout of the various commands. Real PBR window can also be resized or used in fullscreen. Sounds common possibility but it is not so obvious from the layout perspective…at least for me.
Here is an example of how I managed the division of the various tools available in Real PBR: Scene Structure, Scene Properties, Camera Settings, Material Editor, Animation Tools and Render Settings.
I had previous experience on 3D mesh parsing from an OBJ file on Real HDR, but I am very happy I moved to Assimp. Real PBR can import all the imaginable 3D file formats now (actually for the moment OBJ, FBX, and Collada). Within the mesh data, there are UV, tangents, normals, smoothing groups and all the useful elements to work efficiently. However, for personal tech reasons, I changed the post-processing structure in favor of my needs.
Here is how an imported object looks in Real PBR’s Scene Structure. The parsing process reconstructs the meshes and their hierarchy as it was in the modeling 3D software. This model – for example – has been modeled by my friend Ville Niemi using 3dsMax (and ZBrush I think?). The import and reconstruction phase is also very quick. Now I have to figure out how to structure a save file for Real PBR projects, so the user can resume its work. I will probably create a project folder where I will copy files on import…byte by byte
And here we go: the Material Editor! This is the fundamental part of Real PBR since the importance of the shading models in use. From here you can assign a color to the meshes, apply Albedo textures, Normal Maps and emissive texture. Two sliders are affecting the metalness and the roughness and for the moment that’s all I have, but in the next weeks, I am going to add many more Map containers. There is also the possibility to save and recall materials for fast material application and – more importantly – for instancing of memory content. Lot has to be done to avoid excessive RAM consumption and this is the first step.
Here are few camera settings for Real PBR. I am recreating a workflow that can be as much similar to what happens in real photography. Physically Based rendering means this too and it must be provided by my tool. Also, these features are appearing in V-Ray, Maxwell-Render, Corona, Arnold, and many more back to my times of Brazil and finalRender. Anyway, whatever, these settings are a must and here they are
OK, for today this is enough but much more will follow very soon. To ambitious? too crappy looking? share your thoughts with me.
Imagine if you could procedurally create infinite Animated HDRI Sky. This was my idea some time ago while watching a trailer we made to present the SkyLight module, and since then I started working on a keyframe tool. I spent part of my summer vacations collecting some timelapse and hyper-lapse videos to evaluate the atmosphere and cloud speed during the transition of time. The big part, however, is the flow of the data, since Real HDR 1.5 was not capable to store extra values…obviously since it was not meant to.
So here is the first version of our Real HDR SkyLight Animator to generate Animated HDRI Sky
There are a timeline and two keys, one on the left and one on the right. The animation process is not so different from any other 3D or video software: set the values of time, sun, atmosphere and clouds as you like and press on of the keys; set again the values as you like for the destination of the transition and click on the other key.
Every time you click on a key, its data is overwritten (so think twice before doing so – I mean – there are no hundreds of parameters, but still…).
The timeline is defining the interpolation between the two states and if while sliding you find a more appropriate sky condition for your creations, just press one of the keys to trim the transition.
There is also an editable timeline range and this may be used to refine the “resolution of time”, meaning you can have a higher or lower frame rate.
The EXR exporter does its job as usual, so this new timeline can be used to find a proper mix between two SkyLight states. Anyway, I suppose most of the artists are going to use this new feature for animations so I added two more buttons inside the animator that will manage the exported sequence’s format: PNG or EXR (both are linear, so PNG should be gamma converted later to see the appropriate colors). The sequence exporter exports the frames from the selected one so if you have, let’s say, an animation of 30 frames total and you are on frame 15, it will export only the remaining 15 frames to reach the end. This is cool to resume the process later on.
Lastly, I extended the RHD file format, adding new chunks for the animator values.
So now it is your time: This is the first integration of the animator and I really need your feedback on how you perceive it, the usefulness, what you don’t like and what you want to see next in it. Have fun!
