PBR (material) skins
tracked
Thornotter Resident
The 'Skin' body part inventory type should support PBR materials. In other words, add PBR to the skin baker.
Many of my characters have non-human skins such a fur, scales, metal (robots), stone (statues), wood, or other interesting and fantastical materials. Opening up avatars to PBR materials would allow these to be used directly without relying on appliers.
As an initial release, PBR could be added to just the "skin" rather than clothes, tattoos, and the 'universal' clothing type. Any "legacy" clothing worn layers worn over top would be treated as "Base Color" and set the normal, roughness, metalness, occlusion, and emissive maps to "default" values (where not transparent) so the skin material doesn't shine through. Alternately, PBR skins could disable all legacy clothing. Whatever gets us PBR skins fastest.
Later on, PBR clothing could be added with different blend modes. A "robotic" or "doll" tattoo, for example, could blend a normal map onto the skin to create different looks for the base skin.
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Thornotter Resident
Geenz asked for some feedback on PBR BOM, so here's some additional detail on how it could work and different blending modes
- Create a new inventory type, similar to the existing "Universal BOM", that allows for PBR Materials resources to be slotted for each UV map type (Head, Upper Body, Lower Body, Skirt, Hair, Eyes, etc)
- The alpha channel ("A" of base color) would dictate the transparency of the material overall. In other words, an A value that's fully transparent would not blend/bake any of the PBR maps (metallic, roughness, AO, Emissive, normal, etc).
- Color tint, alpha blending mode, metallic factor, roughness factor, and emissive tint would all be controlled by the 'slotted' material itself and don't need to be on the Universal PBR BOM resource.
- The Universal PBR BOM resource should have a "Normal map blending mode". At minimum, the normal map blending modes should include "replace" and "reoriented normal mapping" (equivalent to Substance Painter's Normal Map Detail Combine).
- I don't have a personal need for blending modes on other maps. I could see some basic options for a Base Color Blending Mode being useful (e.g. multiply). Adding a wide variety of blending modes could hold up development with marginal usefulness - so I'd only add ones with obvious usefulness. Normal map is the only one definitely needed - there are cases where I'd want to override the base normal (e.g. clothing layers) and cases where I'd want to combine (e.g. doll seams or water droplet effects).
- Should support new PBR maps are they are added, such as IoR. I've seen some avatars made of water, ice, and other creative things!
- Not sure how to combine existing 'diffuse' BOM layers with PBR layers, but using 'diffuse as base color', accounting for any color system differences, is probably good enough for 99% of use cases. Once a PBR BOM layer is added, it would switch over to the new "PBR-Enabled" bake pipeline.
Spidey Linden
tracked
Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.
elfteam6redleader Resident
If you go with this, I recommend also looking into subsurface scattering.
That's a huge deal for improving skin textures and honestly... a lot of different things.
Cynos3D Resident
Oh i would so very much appreciate this. It would add the ability to use PBR materials on older bodies that support BOM but may not if ever get scripted support for PBR material appliers. Lara Classic comes to mind, yes it's old but it still gets used VERY heavily by certain communities due to the immense backlog of previously existing content for it.
Kristy Aurelia
Could also include Eyes too, as those don't do any multi-layer stuff.