It's up to the developers to make it not look like plastic (And i think they will), PBR is just a method like said @ryakra, it just add things like specular maps, displacement maps, etc. (nope i was wrong ) Edit: Metallicness, Albedo, etc.
Can we please not be rude to people making simple mistakes? thanks But to be exact for those who dont know, PBR will likely add these maps: Base Color/Albedo (A diffuse map but there should be no lighting data period, it would be the color if shadows and highlights didnt exist) Roughness (Kinda self explanatory, how rough a surface is. Opposite of Gloss, for those familiar with that.) Metallic (Indicate what parts are metal since metals interact with light in a unique way) Ambient Occlusion (Used for adding some lighting data to a texture, its separate as proper actual ao is lighting/light bounce based) ClearCoat map (Im assuming if this is actually used, it will work with the material layers and the white part of this map would be the shiny clear top layer) -taken from the materialEditor.lua, this could be changed in the actual release but all of these seem standard so.
Well what would happen if textures, shader and lighting settings were set to low-lowest ? Wouldn't that just make it look pig ugly ? (well moreso than what those setting currently do)
one is from the game itself and the other is hardware compatible only just do a google search if you dont know what it is
PBR is the way textures/materials are done (using colour/metallic/roughness instead of diffuse/specular/gloss) and RTX (and raytracing in general) is a way lighting is done, to get more realistic shadows, glare, reflected light, etc. together. To make ray-tracing bounce the light rays around correctly, you need the materials to scatter and reflect the light in the right way, which PBR materials does, otherwise stuff will all look at least slightly off at best. the BeamNG devs are presently introducing just PBR, which will make the game look a lot better on its own, and does open the door for ray-tracing integration, but that's a whole nother can of worms on its own, which only a small percentage of players would even be able to use, so even if they are considering it, ray-tracing is probably a long way down the priority list.
So far we've only seen a tiny snippet of PBR in BeamNG with the in-game time probably set somewhere later than afternoon to make the screenshot look more like eye-candy, so judging the whole technology from that is like saying you don't like an entire car because the colour of the wheels isn't silver I'm pretty sure all the materials, especially car paint will look better & more realistic, not necessarily overdone like some shaders for other games
well you got me there, i suppose metallic paint is something i would like i guess. I gotta wait until i see more of it until i can make my mind up
Forgive me but it appears that PBR is less graphically intensive and also more realistic/prettier, so that leads me to wonder, what's the downside?
Needs way more textures so the game file size increases a lot, as far as I know. For now we have just the Diffuse, Normal Map and Specular Map, with PBR we'll have Albedo, Ambient Occulsion, Normal Map, Roughness, Metalness and ClearCoat. 2 times more, for each car, map, etc. If I'm wrong correct me.
Clearcoat doesn't need a texture, it's just a slider for how much clearcoat there is usually. A metalness texture is only needed for a material that has both metal and dielectric parts, so not necessary for most materials.
I guess in practice, you pay for Adobe for Substance or try to get by with free offerings like: https://armorpaint.org/ or https://rodzilla.itch.io/material-maker As with all realism improvements bar goes up and all that comes with that is bad part, for some probably just good higher the bar gets, depends from people and their perspective of course. It is somewhat natural development though, not fan of it though, but tracks of GPL are not much to look at of course, tracks of rFactor1 are not probably getting much love after bar gets high enough either. Soon everyone wants only maps with 40 000 000 polygons like in F1 games and you need a modding team to produce any decent content, that is bar getting higher. This game has been in development 10 years soon enough, I think we are at year 8 now? So at the beginning game was marketed as one with great physics being focus and it was even mentioned graphics won't be big thing, but seeing game focusing quite lot on keeping sofa players with gamepads happy and bringing new levels of visual quality in, I think they have shifted direction a little from their humble beginnings and it is good as game might be more successful with pretty pictures. Physics realism is still of course part of development, but lot is done to have game easy to access and very friendly to play on tv with controller, with Linux support maybe even multiplatform possibilities are happening and game in future might have potential to enter on console markets as modern consoles are quite powerful. It is logical step in my opinion, but time to create a mod that people will accept has been very high with this game and I'm not sure if that is going to become less even there are wonderful tools for PBR, there is so much more one needs to learn and build, how many people will have then time for such? So I guess team sees also this and they have been building tools to reduce time needed to create, but I think that subject is something we see focus on future updates in form of helpful tools and especially information. 300 hours can be more than 1 year building a mod for single person and 300 might not be even a lot, especially if you are just starting out, I do miss times when 10K polygons were though as high end, modding was not a freaking job back then. e. bah, discussion with modern persons is pointless as they just see one step right in front of their face and no deeper thinking of whole chain of effects never occurs.
Sounds like youre reading to much into it when it comes to effort from modders. First off you probably wont need to use every texture type if you dpnt eant to. Another thing is im running a gfx mod but ive made hundreds of 3d modeled cars and one of the big things that has kept me from finishing my 3d models for beamng is that i know itll look dull ingame due to lack of supporting components.
Not enough clearcoat? It's the big picture I lost in my thoughts once again, not so much of this exact upcoming change. I have played with Substance and when you get all the quirks down it is much faster to get materials done to incredible level of visual quality compared to old methods, these wonderful tools do help a lot, but then bar rises again and savings vanish when people are excepting more and more. Please add the firetruck, then people ask make it squirt water, make water put out flames, I really love that Diamondback's reply, because that is how people really are. You have put your bar high enough for not putting your cars to game, but I'm quite certain there is still quite lot of people who would not see your cars as dull, but interesting, likewise I'm not releasing anything because I don't have enough time to spend on building skills and content to expectations of others and perhaps we both are just putting our bars too high or maybe standards have just gone beyond sensible levels already. It is like dreaming of that perfect apple and not having any apples because dreaming too high, not sure if in your culture there is similar old wisdom, but hopefully you understand what I'm trying to say here.