UE4 Mobile Physical-Based Rendering and Material Template Design

1. Theory

Physically-based rendering is a theory to shade based on physical lighting theory instead of artist painting. That means it's more accurate. Artist need to suit for new pipeline and discript object surface more scientifically. 

1) Physically Light

Light is technically an electromagnetic transverse wave. Electromagnetic waves can be characterized by frequency or wavelength. Normally, we can assume light as a ray. 

When a light ray come to a new surface, some ray will reflect directly, some ray come into surface and after complex interactive with scattering particles, reflect back out of surface, some ray is event directly absorbed, some ray will pass through objects. So, we define these phenomenon as Opacity, Translucent, Diffuse Reflection and Specular Reflection.

About opacity and translucent, they are very easy to understand. But the two reflection(diffuse & specular) are complex to calculation. In the following, we are focus on microfacet theory on simulate two reflection.

2) Microfacet Theory

In theory, diffuse and specular reflection are dependent on surface roughness and  metallicity. Microfacet theory think light ray keep simple reflection rules. A roughness surface composed by a lot of micro face. because all micro face face to different direction. That cause light ray will reflection to different direction.

Roughness will affect both diffuse and specular. More rough surface will has less diffuse(not very obviously though). More rough surface will cause specular spread more area and more dark(energy conservation).

Metalicity will cause weather diffuse exist(or very weak). Metal almost doesn't have diffuse, more strong specular at same time(energy conservation).

Every surface has special attribution to absorb some kind of light ray(wave) and reflection some kind of light ray(wave). There's the basic property of surface. As RGB is used to represent light ray. This property can also be a value between 0 to 1 to identify how much color reflected.

In mathematics, we always define these reflection model as Bidiretional Reflectance Distribution Function(BRDF).  

    <Final BRDF> = a * <Diffuse BRDF> + b * <Specular BRDF>

3) Diffuse BRDF

Lambert

Burley

OrenNayar

Gotanda