Our first physically based material

PBR is, at its core, a principle that several graphic engines try to follow. Instead of being a strict set of rules that every rendering program needs to abide by, it is more of an idea—one that dictates that what we see on our screens is the result of a study on how light behaves when it interacts with certain surfaces.

As a direct consequence, the so-called PBR workflow varies from one rendering solution to the next, depending on how the creators of the software have decided to program the system. For our case, what we are going to be looking at is the implementation that Epic Games has chosen for their Unreal Engine 4 real-time renderer.

However, we are going to do so in our already established recipe process, that is, by creating real examples of materials that follow the PBR workflow rather than just talking in a general way. Let's get to it!