PBR Materials & Advanced Texture Processing

In this tutorial, we are going to use RapidCompact CLI to process and optimize materials suited for PBR (Physically Based Rendering) in form of textures of an input mesh. We will also quickly review the PBR workflow in general and apply metallic and roughness values to our output meshes. Physically based rendering is a philosophy in computer graphics that seeks to render graphics in a way that accurately describes light behaviour similar to the real world. Many PBR pipelines have the simulation of photorealism as their goal (although PBR workflows for real-time applications cannot make practical use of all theoretical implementations yet). Even without all the benefits of a completely photo-realistic approach, the PBR concept still delivers more consistent and predictable rendering results than ever before in real-time graphics, and the parameters are pretty intuitive and plausible.

The materiality of 3D content will behave realistically in different lighting environments such as in Image Based Lighting scenarios.

PBR Basics

At first we will have a look at the basic principle of the PBR workflow for real-time graphics and how it can add value to 3D visualizations; real-time PBR materials mostly make use of three main areas of research taken from the general approach of physically-based rendering:

In the practical real-time use case, those areas are simplified and described as values from 0 to 1, or as greyscale RGB values from 0 to 255 per pixel, on a texture map.

As a result, we distinguish between Metallic and Roughness maps, describing how metallic a material is (usually 1 or 0) and how light will be diffusively scattered or directly reflected depending on the roughness or smoothness of a surface. In addition, the albedo map describes the color of the diffused light. The following image shows a visual representation of metallic and roughness values:

Upper row (left to right): Roughness values of a metallic sphere from 1.0 to 0.0
Middle row (left to right): Roughness values of a non-metallic sphere from 1.0 to 0.0
Bottom row (left to right): Sphere with roughness 0.0, transitioning from non-metallic (0.0) to fully metallic (1.0)

Creating PBR Materials from Values

In this section we will apply basic PBR values to a mesh using the RapidCompact CLI. To get started, just download the sample mesh here. We will create four different material versions for the model.

The example Model with the four custom PBR material values applied.
Top left to bottom right: Blue polished metal, white half-metal, white porcelain, blue rubber.

These materials are just examples which do not necessarily exactly represent the materiality of real objects. However, they illustrate well how the different values interact with each other. Further PBR material parameters for real-world materials such as gold, copper or chrome, can be found here.

For achieving the different materials we have two options:

1.) Writing a config file and entering the different PBR values for each material

2.) Directly adding the values as a part of the CLI command itself

For method 1), just type the following command and write the file into your desired directory:

      rpdx --write_config
	 

After that simply open the config in an editor and find the following lines:

	   
     "material:defaultBaseColor": "1 1 1",
    

     "material:defaultMetallic": 0.2,
	 

     "material:defaultRoughness": 0.4,
    

Replace these standard values with one out of the following chart corresponding to the four sample materials:

We will now decimate the mesh to a sample count of 5000 faces and output it in the glTF format with the new materiality applied. Run the following command with the config file in place:

  rpdx -i dragon.obj -c f:5000 -e dragon.glb
	

For method 2.), where we directly add the values as part of the command, you can simply ignore the config file creation and insert those commands at the beginning:

  -s material:defaultBaseColor "0.1 0.1 1.0" -s material:defaultMetallic 1.0 -s material:defaultRoughness 0.1
	

The full command then looks like the following:

  rpdx -s material:defaultBaseColor "0.1 0.1 1" -s material:defaultMetallic 1 -s material:defaultRoughness 0.1 -i dragon.obj -e dragon.glb
	

Additionally here is a list of the material settings which you can find in the json config file:

Material Settings

PBR Materials from Texture Maps

A more advanced approach to display PBR materials can be achieved by using Texture Maps instead of simple values. The different material properties can be stored in pixels as described in the first section.

The RapidCompact CLI will handle all PBR Texture Map Inputs and is able to convert multiple maps into one UV Atlas. In addition, the glTF formats Roughness/metallic and occlusion Textures will be stored in the respective RGB channels of the Texture file (Red=occlusion; Green=roughness; Blue=metallic)

To illustrate these functions we will go through the whole process of optimizing a mesh with several PBR Texture Maps applied and also cover real time web visualization in a PBR shading environment.

First of all we need the input mesh to start with, it can be downloaded here.

As you can see the file consists of a .gltf and .bin file with four different maps applied.

As a next step, we will create a compact glTF 3D Model for Web presentation purposes. In order to achieve that, we simply have to get our config file ready and then execute our optimization as a command in the RapidCompact CLI. At first, we will simply create a config file with the following command:

     rpdx --write_config

In order to create the best possible visual outcome while still reducing the file size significantly, some values can be altered. In this case, the most important changes are the file format change for the normal map in addition to the setup of the sample count for the baking process, which enhances the quality of the output normal map quite significantly. To compensate the increase of size due to the chosen png format, we can set the resolution of most maps to 1024, as RapidCompact already uses the available UV atlas space quite efficiently. In the following you can see specific settings of the default config file which we will further optimize for the example model:

Now that we identified the most important settings we can start to replace the default values with the custom values from the following table (Alternatively you can find the custom config file within the zip here):

After the config file is set up and in place, we can go on by simply typing in the following command in the RapidCompact CLI:

     rpdx -i BoomBox.gltf -c f:50% -e Output/BoomBox_compact.gltf

In case you have the already prepared custom config file in place, simply use this command:

     rpdx -i BoomBox.gltf --read_config custom_config.json -c f:50% -e Output/BoomBox_compact.gltf

The resulting output files should now look like this:

The four maps are rebaked and share one newly created UV Atlas. The Occlusion, Metallic and Roughness Texture Maps were rebaked and preserved in the RGB channels (so-called RMA) into one light-weight jpg file.

To further ease the handling of the model, we can simply output a single, self-contained .glb file instead of .gltf. The result will only be about 1MB in size, which is roughly 10x smaller then the input file, and you'll be able to directly view it in Windows 10 (using the mixed reality viewer, or inside applications such as MS Office), for example. If desired, rendered thumbnail images of the new model can be directly created with the RapicCompact CLI. The respective Tutorial can be found here.

In addition, the compact glTF model can be exported as a Web-ready HTML5 viewer, using the following command:

        rpdx -i BoomBox.gltf -c f:50% -w web
    

To have a look at the result in 3D, you can either embed the Web container into your site, for example as an HTML iframe, or zip and upload the web directory to any Web server that will deliver it as static HTML content. The result should look similar to this version:

Channel Packing (RMA)

You will have noticed that the example glTF file comes also with an RMA Texture Map, containing the metallic, roughness and occlusion map in the RGB Color Channels. In real time graphics this is a common approach and the RapidCompact CLI supports working with that kind of Texture Maps. We will now have a very brief look on how to get the individual Texture Maps from an RMA and how RapidCompact uses this approach for example for the gltTF file format.

To unpack the RMA map of the BoomBox.gltf file, simply convert it to the .obj format by using the following command:

    rpdx -i .\BoomBox.gltf -e channel_unpacking/BoomBox.obj
    

As you can see, the occlusion, metallic and rougness maps were unpacked from the channels to enable editing or further processing of the maps individually. On the other hand if you export back to the glTF format the files would be repacked into the respective Color Channels (for glTF: R: occlusion G: roughness B: metallic) to ensure the most compact filesize.

Baking generic Maps

The RapidCompact CLI is not only capable of baking Texture Maps it supports internally, it also bakes Generic Textures with arbitrary naming conventions specified by the user. To give an example you can download the Nefertiti Mesh, used in the last Tutorials here.

The difference is that this file comes with a total ammount of 8 Texture Maps containing also 5 generic maps in addition to the base color, normal and occlusion map. After extracting the .zip file you can execute the following command:

        rpdx -i nefertiti.obj --read_config baking_config.json -c f:50% -e baked_generic/nefertiti_baked.obj
    

This should result in an output mesh containing 50% of the input faces and the rebaked 8 input maps:

Note that to make use of baking generic maps with obj files the mtl file has to be altered by adding an arbitrary map category name and after that entering the filepath and name of the generic map. The content of the nefertiti.mtl file can serve as an example in this case:

    newmtl generic_maps
    map_bump normal.jpg
    norm normal.jpg
    map_Kd basecolor.jpg
    map_Ka occlusion.jpg
    map_height heights.jpg
    map_thickness thickness.jpg
    map_translucency translucency.jpg
    map_cavity cavity.jpg
    map_curvature curvature.jpg