PBR Materials

An entirely new material resource is available to display better materials.
PBR materials open a new world to realism thanks to the channels being not only colours for reflection, transparency and roughness channels for example, but allowing designers to use a wide range of ready to use textures for these too from extremely rich and continuously growing online sources. PBR means Physically Based Rendering and allows to simulate existing materials as realistic as possible under all lighting conditions.

How are PBR Materials different from other material definitions?

The biggest difference is the details and variance you can represent using PBR materials. As PBR materials support fine detailed textures to be set for glossiness, roughness, transparency you will be able to represent breath-takingly realistic surfaces wihtout having to sacrifice a whole lot of resources of your computer - in fact rendering time won't be too much different, but the result will surely be!

Rendering of a coffee shop interior with PBR materials and warm color temperature in lights - You may notice the variance of the rusty metal decorative wall which is only a flat surface having a PBR material with detailed texture channels for roughness and reflection.

Common PBR material properties:
These properties are common to all PBR materials:

- 2D texture bitmap or color

- Roughness:
It defines how smooth or rough the surface is. Rough surfaces scatter the light in more directions than smooth surfaces, which make reflections blurry rather than sharp.

- Metallic: 
this property affects how much a surface reflects the surrounding environment.

- Normal map :
Normal map is a type of Bump map. Normal map provides surface detail such as bumps, grooves, and scratches to a model which catch the light as if they are represented by real geometry.

- Ambient Occlusion (AO)
Ambient occlusion map defines how much of the ambient environment lighting is accessible to a surface point.

Example:

The scene with PBR materials on the floor and tables - ARCHLine.XP 2022	The scene without PBR materials - ARCHLine.XP 2021

Use of PBR materials:

For some styles, there are channels that are not used.

We use the following channels from the Zip file:

• Albedo
• Normal
• Ambient occlusion
• Roughness
• Metallic
• Opacity
• Or if you have ARM, it replaces the Ambient occlusion, Roughness, Metalic channels.

The render style determines which of these channels to use. It is therefore recommended to put the PBR material in the General or the one that clearly corresponds to the channel, e.g. the one with the Metallic channel in the Metallic.