[Modular] PBR SciFi Pack

Hi, my name is Jakob, i am a young artist from austria. This is my first post, so hello everybody
I am currently working on a modular environment pack, i will use this thread to document the progress. I guess there are going to be a lot of images and maybe some videos to see. I hope i can post regulary and some of you guys will follow along. I would be happy to get some feedback.

Time for the some screenshots!



These are screenshots directly from Unity with just a diffuse IBL shader and some SSAO. The buildings are made out of many parts and it will be possible to arrange them in countless ways. I will show some PBR materials when i am further with the modelling of all the modules. I hope you like what you see and again, i would love to get some feedback!

Here is an example of a texture from my pack:



+ stay tuned for updates!

Jakob

 

Looks Nice!

 

Glad to see some PBR assets coming to the store!

 

Hello Jakob,

That looks awesome! Can't wait to see more screenshots .

Nathaniel

 

reminds me MSG2 petrol platform, looks good. What tools do you use ?

 

Looking great, glad to see some PBR assets rolling into town (then of course I'm biased).
Gonna steal/save a few of those into a sci-fi inspration folder I've got going

 

Looking good! I look forward to seeing it all textured up

 

Yes, looking really good! You should show the modularity of it, how things fit together and so on...

 

That's pretty nice screenshot, but how come i see CEAO....is that custom ao?

 

What is CEAO? Looks like a Beast lightmap to me.

 

Thanks!

Yes PBR is the future. Thanks for yor coment!

Thank you Nathaniel!

I love MGS I use XSI, PS, xNormal.

Hehe, i look forword to see my work shaded with Jove, thanks!

me too. Got some already but not yet to show.

Thanks! in the next post i will do so! Snazzy is really awesome by the way. Saved me countless hours already!

Thanks! I never heard of CEAO. Its just the standard SSAO of Unity.

No there are no lightmaps, just SSAO over a diffuse IBL shader.

 

Hello there, i actually made a little animation with the small building from the screenshots above, to show the modularity of the pack.

The meshes in the pack are also separated (inside and outside) to get full modularity and better performance. For the moment i still use the same shaders like in the screens (Diffuse IBL) and some standard camera FX like SSAO. The pack will also contain various shaders made with ShaderForge but for the best results i recommend to use a proper PBR solution (i.e. Jove, Lux,...).

Keep up the feedback, it really keeps my motivation high
Jakob

 

The movie presents blocks only, but they are pretty promising. Definitely high quality modelling. I believe modularity of the system makes it perfect solution to quickly build environment for any sci-fi game. And the textures. I guess I saw them already in SnazzyGrid thread. I'm I right ? Very elegant .

 

Thank you Tom! Yes some textures are used in the demo of SnazzyGrid. Becoming provided SnazzyGrid for testing and i also gave feedback during its development. I have to say its invaluable for all modular stuff, also its not really just a grid but more full level editor solution. My highest recommendation for everybody!

 

Here is an example of a texture from my pack:


All textures are made out of high resolution meshes and backed into maps and then textured following PBR guidelines from Séb Lagarde. The pack will contain more than 20 textures(variations not counted).
If there is some interest i can also include curvature, cavity and matID maps for each texture, so people can make their own variations. Just let me know

 

Another one:

 

Looks quite good. It's professional approach that you deliver all textures used by modern shading pipelines (PBR like Lux, Jove, Skyshop) not only diffuse and normal. Such approach will be fully appreciated when Unity5 with its PBR rendering will come.

For most users seeing is believeing so even if your textures are first class you need to provide them with high quality screenshots, example scenes and videos to catch developers attention.

I experienced this many times. Nice pictures is what convince people. After that they buy your product and don't feel disappointed when content is of expected quality, judged first only by examples.

All the best with your package !

Tom

 

Thank you again Tom, i gladly take advice from you. I look forward to see some of my modular buildings on a terrain shaded with RTP! I hope i can come up with some convincing screenshots soon

 

In the meantime another texturesheet:

 

Here you can see the pipe system which will be a part of my pack. It will be posible to connect them easily to floors, ceilings and walls, you can use it for sewers, pipelines or as tanks...

Also you can see the useful SnazzyGrid in action.

 

Looks great ... love the reflected light inside. Would make an excellent ductwork for a large, futuristic lab or military complex.

 

Hello Jakob,
Really professional stuff, I think this will be really helpful to facilitate the developing time in creating complete scenes.
Nice presentation with the video effect!

Can't wait to see final results.

Best regards!

Ferran

 

Love the pipes, will be interesting to use them in different scales, small ones as decoration on ceilings or huge ones as rocket silos and big bunker air vents. I can totally imagine infiltrating a milltiary base through the pipes

Also thanks for showcasing snazzy a bit, i am so glad you find it usefull!!!

 

progress...

 

It's not real PRB until you propose metal and roughness maps, that's a different way shader works, specciall metal using environment reflection.

 

Looks awesome dude.

 

Lux (free in opposite to Alloy or Skyshop) handles env maps. Specular term use env/cube map with specularity from mirror down to dull material - it's placed in mip maps of cube specular texture. And roughness is basically the same as gloss but inverted (simply make negative gloss mask). I believe that above examples can be closely approximated in Lux.

But Modular package is not rendering solution but environment/art package. In my opinion it doesn't miss anything necessary to make it looking professional. Renderer used (free or comercial) is the thing you can simply choose.

Tom

 

sorry zenGarden but that is wrong... gloss maps have the same purpose as roughness maps... they are in fact the same thing with a different name. as long as the albedo and spec color is correct and the shader is capable of PBR its ... PBR, Its just a different workflow.

 

Thanks Tom and Becoming for replying, yes its true that it is just a matter of the workflow. However i will include textures also for the metalness/roughness workflow.

Here is the next texturesheet(Spec/Gloss):

 

Very cool. So metalness/roughness would be ready to plug into Alloy and specular/gloss would be ready to plug into Lux (or even non-PBR shaders like the Skyshop stuff). Is that right? Do we know yet which method Unity 5 uses?

 

Think Unity 5 will use one of the two workflows, so i guess providing spec/gloss and metalness/roughness should make this pack pretty futureproof...

 

My goal is to make it work with any PBR solution, i dont know what unity 5 will use but if its neccesary i will make an update to make the pack worke with it. Though i assume that it shoud work out of the box. I also want to include variations for non PBR shaders.

For semi PBR shaders like SkyShop it already works pretty well:

 

hi there,

so many words and abbreviations…

let’s start with this post’s title: PBR
that might be a bit over the top as all currently available shader frameworks only support PBS which means physically based shading. physically based rendering would probably include area lights and all the fancy stuff which still is not available in unity ;-)

gloss/roughness/smoothness: all those names should simply describe how smooth or rough a surface is.
the best way to describe this property in shader code is probably to map a value of 0 to rough and a value of 1 to smooth surfaces (otherwise you would get one more instruction: (1-value)). but as tom has already written: in worst case you would have to invert the texture.

specular reflectance vs. metalness workflow:
as far as i can say from this paper: http://aras-p.info/texts/files/201403-GDC_UnityPhysicallyBasedShading_notes.pdf
unity 5 will go with specular reflectance.
metalness however would have the advantage that you could sample a detailed ambient occlusion map for free packing it with Metalness (R) Specular (B) Roughness (A) --> AO (G).
on the other hand metalness needs some more instructions to get the right values extracted from the textures – and what is the value of a detailed ambient occlusion map compared to a large scale ambient occlusion map which would have to be sampled using uv2 anyway?

lars

 

btw: the images look beautiful – may be the lower edges and deeper parts of the pedestal show too much "shininess": i hardly can imagine how those parts should be scuffed over time. and in general: those marks of usage are a bit overdone and to uniform...

lars

 

It'd be nice if there was a standard. Though I suppose within the Unity world, the specular approach will be the de facto standard after Unity 5.

So what's the difference between PBS and PBR? I kind of assumed that physically-based shading is just what you used in order to do PBR.

Anyway yeah, I agree, the screenshots are really nice!

 

Hi thanks, glad you like it.
The pedestal is made like the rest of the room out of pieces and that is just a weakness of a modular workflow that things can be placed anywhere but this is also its strength. About the title: my thought behind it is that the pack could be used in any PBR enviroment, think Jove 2.0 is going in to that direction but it can also be used in a 3D program for example. Basicaly the title should suggest that the pack is ready for PBR.
About the wear and tear i think its also a matter of taste, think of a surface that gets cleaned often, the edges will loose the paint first revealing the underlying metal. But i get your point, maybe its a bit overdone.

 

Hey, in the meantime i have made a build of the little room seen in the screenshots above. It's shaded with SkyShop(i know its not a real physical based shader but for showcase its fun seeing it working so well with the pack). The scene is not performance optimized at all(e.g. with meshcombining) but it works pretty well any way.

Enjoy:

Download for Win:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e4u7meg3qu4oiho/Modular PBR SciFi Pack TestSkyshop_Win.zip

Download For Mac:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/683p0vhgsbbt4j8/Modular PBR SciFi Pack TestSkyshop_Mac.app.zip
(May not be working, i will look into it)

 

Wow the build looks awesome! So Unreal 4 quality can be adhieved in Unity after all ...Looking forward to see more .

Nathaniel

 

it is a bit like hair-splitting, but i would call physically based shading to be a subset or just one part of physically based rendering. unity talks about "physically-based shading" when it comes to unity 5.

btw.: the mac built does not work for me: the screen stays completely black (mac book pro, nvidia 9600m).

lars

 

I love the range of textures with these assets, as opposed to just a standard texture/normal map, and would be really interested in trying these assets with an alpha build of Unity 5's PBR. When would they be available on the Asset Store?

 

These look nice! And thankfully thematically a tad different to my own plans, although they may complement, i'm attempting to provide a free pack of similar sci-fi modules mainly for asset devs to help with their systems. Keep up the good work and if you havent seen them yet, have a good look at quixel suite and substance painter, they make pbr/s texture generation a wonderful thing

Re: metalness textures - a metalness map is pretty much a mask so I consider them not nearly so essential as the others, but it might be worth either throwing one in or offering the textures as .psds so folk can make one themselves from the layers (assuming you're layering up with photoshop)

 

Thanks again, yes i think Unity is capable of just the same quality and with unity 5 it should become even easier to achive AAA results.

 

Sorry for the build i am working on PC so its a little bit hard to tell what went wrong. Maybe i'll rename it to PBS in the end, but not sure yet.

 

Thanks, all texures(over 25 sets + some color variations) are made from high poly models and with xNormal its relatively easy to bake all kind of maps so it would be a pity if i would not include them. I would like to provide you with my pack (or a part of it) before the release. Could you tell me what you exactly need for the Unity 5 shaders? I want to label my pack as "ready for Unity 5" and it would be a great help to know that it actually works out of the box instead of having to update later on.

I am targeting the release within august.

 

Thank you, yeah i am testing Quixel and really like it but its still a little bit buggy so i'm not relying on it yet. I will look at substance painter.
I also want to include my workfiles but i have to strip them down as each PSD is easily over a GB in size.

 

You might consider at some point doing another asset which is geared toward demonstrating PBR texturing workflow. I imagine there are a lot of folks that aren't well-versed in that. My interest in your sci-fi pack is more about seeing a real application of PBR techniques and learning about it in general than needing the assets for any games I'd make.

 

Actualy its a good reason to get the pack and i'm hoping more people are interested in getting it for educational purpose as not everybody is doing SciFi stuff. I include that its also a reason way i include so many resources. It sould be helpfull to see how the textures are composed.
Do you think there is a market for strictly educational assets?

 

How difficult is it to turn older styled materials into PBS-styled ones? Can there be an automated process that does it?