#pbr multi mat performance
lofty swallow
Not sure, ask your question here I will forward it to the rendering team if needed 🙂
ivory breach
I would like some information on what the performance cost of the multi material is on average vs pbr basic, and how those costs increase depending on resolution of mask textures and how many channels are enabled
lofty swallow
to my knowledge the whole purpose of multi pbr is for performance optimization, but I will go and gather some expert commentary
ivory breach
it might have less VRAM usage over high res PBR Basic but the additional computation with the masks cannot be less expensive than PBR Basic?
I guess it could be just baked once and the resulting texture stored in memory instead? or something
then aside from just doing the baking when loading the material, the cost of rendering would be the same?
lofty swallow
To quote from one of the rendering wizards:
PBRBasic is one layer in basic settings (no parallax) while PBRMulti material uses four layers + mud + dirt layer. The lighting is the same so the blending and sampling of more layers is the most visible difference - simply 1:6 in worst case.
Mask textures are sampled just once so there will not be much decrease in performance with bigger textures but of course, it will make bigger pressure to resource system. Generally, best is to keep the textures in lowest resolutions as possible and compressed (in term of quality) as the access to them is faster due to better locality in caches. As we have four layers, three channels from mask textures are used - one is always default
and no, you can't bake all the materials from Multi into Basic when loading them as you can't get the same quality - just imagine a house with the resolution it has currently and which is achieved by using detailed layers which are tiled. The same baked into Basic material will just create much bigger data if you want to have same quality asset.
ivory breach
trying to figure out if it's worth spending time on making different skins of weapons using pbr multi, juggling mod file size vs rendering cost
a bunch of parts of the weapon would have a separate pbr multi - handguard, grip, upper, lower receiver, stock
lofty swallow
it always depends what he want to achieve but from the term of rendering it's better to use one Multi material as it's just one render call and from the point of view of data size it almost similar (just the mask texture must be used)
If one weapon has multiple materials it makes sense to put them into a multi pbr
But if you have 4 different color textures there is no advantage for you to put them into one material and switch them