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Showing posts from December, 2025

PBR: A Guide to Moving From Specular to Metallic/Roughness

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As of July 2019, the Blender Foundation Released version 2.8 with its new rendering engine, Cycles. (Blender Foundation, 2019)  Allowing for Global Illumination & RayTracing, Cycles is Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) Engine.  This addition allows us to create truly photorealistic imagery within a free, open-source engine built from the ground up for customisation. But to fully take advantage of the power of photorealistic rendering, a re-think of how to apply texturing is required.  In this blog post I will overview how to quickly suitably translate the old diffuse/specular workflow into the new diffuse, metallic & roughness environment, using the development of my 3D modelling project as a case study. Fig.1. My Initial Render preview of the scene, in EEVEE My model starts out with a homogenous material with specular set to match the shininess of the reference images provided. By starting out the texture process with material composition-first, rather than detail...