Full explanation of what PBR settings actually do?

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I’ve been diving into rendering in Rhino only recently and am going through the learning material provided on Rhino website.
Just finished this great tutorial by @BrianJ.

After struggling for nearly two hours to match all the parameters and finally obtain something similar, I’m left with more questions than I had before starting :sweat_smile:
How is it possible to know which settings should be tweaked from scratch ??? I’m left to think that either you developed the engine and thus you know or… you don’t, and you must spend hours changing interdependent values until you reach something miraculously satisfying.

I know you can use simple material types, or import materials from different assets, but this is avoiding the problem. Rather, is there a ressource that defines clearly/explains the influence of all the PBR settings ?
And the same question could also go for all the lights properties and types… but I’ll leave that for another time.

In essence, I’m not asking how can I change the specularity or ambiant occlusion or whatever, but which I would have to change to reproduce a given material or achieve a certain effect.

Maybe the answer is “come back in 10 years and you’ll know” :roll_eyes: I guess it doesn’t cost anything to ask.

Thanks !

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I had a beautiful deck explaining PBR materials and I can’t find it now…

While this isn’t directly for Rhino this does cover the premise quite well:

white and black values are going to be something you’re likely to mess around with the most.

The biggest “oh” realization for me when starting with PBR is that something either is a metal or is not. Now, I’ll be honest, I’ve hacked this before to produce some weird metallic velvet effects but in general metalness should be thought of as a boolean yes/no value. Is it rusty? Still metallic, is it chrome? still metallic. but the roughness map values will define how “shiny/polished” it is.

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I’m glad that lighting tutorial was useful for you. Aside from the explanation on PBR posted above there is a description in the Rhino help docs that will add more details too… Materials | Rhino 3-D modeling

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Perfrect. I tried to access something like that directly in the Help window but couldn’t get anywhere !

Note : Subsurface could use more… some… any ? details :sweat_smile:

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