UNREAL Advanced

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UNREAL Advanced BRDF by The Foundry & Jens Kafitz








Unreal Advanced is a BRDF Shader resembling Unreal Engine's BRDF in look and handling.

This allows for material development for Unreal Engine inside of Mari with a close result

to what you will see in-engine.


The Unreal Advanced Shader is a progression from the Unreal Shader included in Mari 3.0 with additional

features such as




PBS Illegal Value Warning


The Unreal Advanced Shader can automatically check if your Base Color is compatible with a

Physically Based Shading (PBS) approach and give you a visual warning for values outside the

recommended range.


Various guidelines exist to maintain energy conservation on BRDF shaders and to represent materials

correctly so they behave predictably under different light conditions:


The following checks are performed for metallic surfaces



The following checks are performed for non-metallic surfaces




Node Overview



Node Properties





Input Slot vs Slider


Most inputs of the 'Unreal Advanced' Shader have a corresponding slider.

If the Input Slot is not mapped with a channel, this slider will be used.

As soon as you map a channel to the input the value of the slider will be ignored.


This does not apply to the 'Emissive' Slider. The Emissive Slider will control the

glow intensity of the mapped 'Emissive' Color.



Main



Maps the diffuse color, i.e. the main color of the material.


The Roughness input literally controls how rough the Material is.

A rough Material will scatter reflected light in more directions than a smooth Material.

This can be seen in how blurry or sharp the reflection is or in how broad or tight the specular highlight is.

Roughness of 0 (smooth) is a mirror reflection and roughness of 1 (rough) is completely matte or diffuse


The Roughness Progression (samples taken from Unreal Engine Documentation)


The Metallic input literally controls how "metal-like" your surface will be.

Nonmetals have Metallic values of 0, metals have Metallic values of 1.

For pure surfaces, such as pure metal, pure stone, pure plastic, etc. this value will be 0 or 1, not anything in between.

When creating hybrid surfaces like corroded, dusty, or rusty metals, you may find that you need some value between 0 and 1.


The Metalness Progression (samples taken from Unreal Engine Documentation)


Specular is a value between 0 and 1 and is used to scale the current amount of specularity for non-metallic surfaces.

It has no effect on metals. It should be left at its default value of 0.5 for most cases.


Allows you to map a cavity map to your shader.

Small scale geometry, especially details only present in the high poly and baked into the normal map, will not be picked

up by the renderer's real-time shadows. To capture this shadowing, we generate a cavity map, which is typically an AO map

with very short trace distance. This is multiplied by the final BaseColor before output and multiplied with 0.5 (Specular default)

as the Specular output. To be clear this is BaseColor = Cavity*OldBaseColor, Specular = Cavity*0.5.


Determines which parts of your material are emissive ('glowing' in simple words).

Emissive Color will remove specular and shading from the affected areas and make it less

affected by light changes


Tangent Space Normal Map


Bump Map (optional)


Maps a vector Channel. Refer to page 129 of the Mari User Guide for more information.


Displacement Channel



PBS Illegal Value Warning


Turns the automatic Warning on and off


The warning color that will be used if your Diffuse/Base Color is too bright to be used correctly with physically based shading


The warning color that will be used if your Diffuse/Base Color is too dark to be used correctly with physically based shading


Sets the time in seconds inbetween each warning blink. Set to 0 for a continuous overlay of the warning colors without blinking


Sets the time it takes in milliseconds for the warning colors to fade out to 0.0 inbetween the blink interval



Displacement


Midpoint (0 disp) of your dispacement


Intensity of your displacement


Intensity multiplier of your displacement


Quality and detail of the screen space tesselation


When on, new normals will be calculated after displacement.


Bump


Scale of your bumpmapping


Defines Accuracy vs. Performance Mode of the Bump Mapping.




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