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Physically Based Rendering Book

pbr-book.org

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Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#41

Post by aspaceman »

I truly adore physically based rendering.

Seeing the concept become adopted in modern video games over the last couple generations has been an absolute joy. I look forward to replaying games and seeing the progression of the field.

Just look at the difference from

Gears of War -> Arkham Asylum -> Mass Effect -> Dragon Ball FighterZ -> Fortnite

That's all the same engine. And it shows the shift from the "old way" to physically based techniques.

On Playstation, you can show a similar progression

Uncharted 1 -> Uncharted 2 -> Uncharted 3 -> Last of Us -> God of War -> Uncharted 4 -> Last of Us 2

PBR really starts showing up in U3 and Last of Us, but kicks off big time in God of War on the PS4.

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#42

Post by marvindanig »

cinntaile wrote: post #28
marvindanig wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. They last a long time has zero significance because the content is outdated in a year or less. 2. You don't need studies to know the difference between a natural habitat and cultivated land. And that the former is non-renewable. It looks like this comment is coming from one of those pulp-farming ambassadors spreading misinformation/whataboutism. This happens every time when a case for online publishing with direct…

1. This isn't a fast moving web framework, the underlying mathematics are forever. But maybe the code implementation gets outdated after a couple of years. 2. You need something to base your opinion on though, preferably peer-reviewed scientific studies. You read way too much into my comment.

You need a peer-reviewed research to know the difference between natural habitat and cultivated land?

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#43

Post by cinntaile »

marvindanig wrote: post #42
cinntaile wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This isn't a fast moving web framework, the underlying mathematics are forever. But maybe the code implementation gets outdated after a couple of years. 2. You need something to base your opinion on though, preferably peer-reviewed scientific studies. You read way too much into my comment.

You need a peer-reviewed research to know the difference between natural habitat and cultivated land?

I refer to my original comment, not the one where you moved the goal posts. Environmental impact is of course much more than just the difference between cultivated land and natural habitat, almost everything we as humans do has an impact on the natural habitat.

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#45

Post by jmoak »

I LOVE this book - this is one of those books I recommend reading just for the joy of programming. It explains the concepts so well that you can hop in even without a background in the subject!

Back in college I ended up making my own tracer after reading this for fun, implementing features and tweaking it until I got bored.

Here's some pictures if you're curious to see how it evolved as I made my way through the book:

https://imgur.com/a/e5kgZ

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#46

Post by ghosty141 »

mattpharr wrote: post #21
mkl95 wrote: post #3

> January 15, 2021: A fourth edition is in the works. Progress on the text is coming along well and the source code is available on github. We expect that the printed version of the book will be out in Summer 2021. https://www.pbrt.org/

Yeah, about that prediction... Progress continues, but Fall 2021 is more likely for an online edition and then printed copies in the first half of 2022. (I suppose we should update the website.)

Thanks for the clarification. Cool to see that you are on here too :)

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#47

Post by djmips »

ggambetta wrote: post #17

This book is excellent, and it's aimed at relatively advanced practitioners. > This book assumes existing knowledge of computer graphics at the level of an introductory college-level course For people looking for such an introduction, I've written Computer Graphics From Scratch, available in its entirety here: https://gabrielgambetta.com/cgfs (and also from https://nostarch.com/computer-graphics-scratch )

> This book assumes existing knowledge of computer graphics at the level of an introductory college-level course

It also assumes existing knowledge of calculus and physics.

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#48

Post by djmips »

chrsig wrote: post #34
arduinomancer wrote: post #12

Is this book for real-time or offline rendering? Because I think PBR is used in both now days

PBR describes an offline render. Online renderers will use the same principles for materials -- modelling them as Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Functions (BSDF), though I'm not really sure how platforms like unreal implement them in the absence of full path tracing. I'd love to learn more in that regard.

From the user perspective, they are implemented as various texture maps to define base color, roughness, metalness and specular. Base color map is as it sounds. Roughness map is a map that goes from full reflective to dull. In practice it can be calculated similar to and stored the same as Mip Map. Metallic map can go from mirror like to non mirror in degrees. The lesser used Specular map lets you control the specular light property in a non metallic surface. From non reflective to full reflective. Specular is called Cavity in the linked document and also explained as typically an Ambient Occlusion map with a very short distance. "Used for small-scale shadowing."

From the real-time light equation that runs in the GPU shaders, all the details can be found in the 2013 Siggraph talk by Brian Karis of Epic Games. https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/Resources/files/2013SiggraphPr...

The shader code is on Github, however you have to sign up first to get access.

Re: Physically Based Rendering Book

#49

Post by ur-whale »

While physically based rendering is a very nice idea, one has to be careful not to turn it into an ideology.

Specifically, in production, you very often have a situation where the artists wants to produce a specific effect and are simply prevented to do so by the rendering system because it strictly adheres to how light would behave in the real world.

This very severely constricts creative freedom and is one of the reason why these types of renders are used sparingly in actual VFX production.

The luxcore PB render, which someone mentioned in another comment, is a very good example of what I'm talking about: produces really nice realistic images, but it is darn near impossible to get it to do what you want when tweaking a shot.

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