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