physically based rendering using shaders/custom effects?

[Vaquero]

Hello community!
I'm a 3D-artist and just getting startet using Vizard. One of the first things I noticed was, that vizard's 3D asset pipeline relies on "the old way" of doing things with shaders. So there's diffuse, specular etc. In an effort to get even more realistic approximations of light-surface interactions, the popular term is physically based rendering (PBR). Not, that Lambertian models, Phong or Blinn aren't also physically based somehow, but what I am referring to are keywords like "energy conservation" and "microfacets". I haven't seen any mention of PBR on the forum.

I had a quick look into the documentation on shaders and now I'm aksing: Is it possible to integrate PBR through the use of custom effects and how to do it?
Or how would one go about it, if not with custom effects? I'm not a fully qualified programmer, so I'm grasping at straws here. Ideally someone else would come up with a plug&play solution for introducing Disney's PBR model to Vizard. A lot of content creation software seems to be very compatible with the Disney PBR, that's why. Another popular one is GGX.

If you don't know what I am talking about, with a internet search you'll find lots of ressources with introductions, like this one: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory.

Some pros:

• Use less texture space. Albedo map is an rgba map, metal and roughness can be packed in another rgba map and you have 2 additional channels for whatever you want (AO, cavity, …w/e)
• Less guessing about matieral parameters (there are real world measurements and charts)
• Works well under different lighting conditions

[Jeff]

There is no built-in support for PBR. It would be possible to write customer shaders for this.

[Vaquero]

Thank you for your quick reply. Unfortunately, it doesn't answer my question. I figured, there is no out-of-the-box built-in support, so my question is, how do I get there? Using custom effects and composers? Or exporting GLSL shaders completely from 3ds max?

In the documentation there's this: "The lighting model controls how the surface properties of an object interact with lights to produce shading. The default composer automatically applies a lighting model effect that uses the Lambert model for diffuse shading and the Phong model for specular reflectance." So if I don't want Lambert or Phong, but instead some PBR, I would have to use custom effects to somehow insert the PBR code into the shaders?
Since I'm just wild guessing, help is very much appreciated, if anyone has experience writing shaders for Vizard.

[Jeff]

The effects framework may help but this an advanced topic that requires knowledge of programming in GLSL. It's not possible to export these shaders from 3ds Max.