Hey Developers,
Future Is Bright Phase 2.5 is now live! Big thanks to the Art and Rendering teams for making this happen.
This is enabled on all platforms and we’ve tuned the effect/quality per platform and quality level.
Image by @ArtBlox_406
What’s new?
Building off of https://devforum.roblox.com/t/future-is-bright-phase-1-released and https://devforum.roblox.com/t/future-is-bright-phase-2-released, we’ve modified our lighting system to adopt a Physically Based Rendering (PBR) model. PBR allows for an industry standard way of authoring materials and more predictable visuals under different lighting conditions. Material authoring will come later.
We switched to a new specular BRDF and have tried to maintain a similar look to before, but some built-in materials will look a little different.
The most notable difference, however, will come from Image Based Lighting (IBL) where we use the environment map (skybox) as a source of lighting information.
How do I use it?
Two new scriptable properties control the IBL amount:
Lighting.EnvironmentDiffuseScale
Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale
Valid values for these properties are [0-1] where 0 represents no IBL contribution, 1 full IBL contribution, and (0-1) a mix in between.
EnvironmentDiffuseScale controls the amount of view independent lighting reflected from the environment, scaled by the objects color. Note that this is added on top of Ambient and OutdoorAmbient and can be used in place of Ambient and OutdoorAmbient. We recommend setting both of the Ambient controls to 0 and using EnvironmentDiffuseScale.
EnvironmentSpecularScale controls the amount of view dependent lighting reflected from the environment. This gives the “mirror-like” reflections, dependent on the objects roughness property. This lighting is most notable on metallic materials.
The example above shows the two sliders with different values. The sphere uses the built-in Metal material. Also note the colored highlight.
Another thing to notice is the effect of the Fresnel term seen around the edges. The Fresnel term is dependent on the viewing angle and describes the ratio of diffuse vs specular reflected light.
More tips
When both properties are set to 0, lighting should appear similar to before FiB 2.5.
To get the most of the new environment lighting and PBR, we recommend:
- using Voxel or Shadowmap mode
- setting Ambient and OutdoorAmbient to Color3(0,0,0) or a low value
- setting both new properties to 1
Since we only use the skybox as a source of environment lighting (when outdoors), the choice of skybox will have a big impact on the final look. Choosing a skybox with a ground (or dark color) should lessen the light coming from below.
What’s next?
Control over the PBR material properties … stay tuned!!
