New Products & Service Simulation 
VR-NEXT Rendering Engine: for PBR
3D model rendering engine that has realistic physical characteristics like material and light
●Release date TBD
　About PBR
Physical Base Rendering (PBR) is a new method for 3D model rendering that has realistic physical characteristics like material and light. Physical features make it easy to define materials and reproduce rendering image with more reality. By defining materials physically, users can get data about color and light reflection, and model shapes can be recreated with less polygons. At last, although rendered images are more graphical, performance like speed and memory consumption will not be worse.
　History
Originally, PBR was announced in 2003 by MERL, which is one of the research bases of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. In addition to the movie industry (including Disney), game studios (including Unreal engine used by Epic Games) started to spread the technology in 2012.

Nowadays, this technology is often used for 3D graphic rendering for movies and games. It is used in virtual movies and games using 3D graphics.

Thus, FORUM8 will use this technology for future VR software.
　Material
Several material models (metal, reflector, glass) are available. For example, 3 parameters (color, metal characteristic, roughness) express any textures. In all models, it corresponds to the physically quantifiable parameter and values are actually measurable.
　High dynamic range
Light reflection is calculated with real physical volume, and RGB conversion set by HDR tone mapping decides visible light range. This draws natural lights.
　Light source environment map
In addition to point light source and directional light, an environmental map as light source and a mirror surface according to material setting can depict natural light reflection from many directions.

Click to enlarge the image. Click to enlarge the image.
　Rendering time
Since this technology removes troublesome processing and depicts with less parameters, rendering with this method is faster than the existing rendering ways. It extracts the GPU force to realize a high-power display function.
　Correspondence to glTF
Native support of gITF2.0 released in June 2017 guarantees the high compatibility of PBR data. It also reduce the size of saved 3D data and loading time.
　Effect of PBR
PRB exerts a large effect on various applications including the following cases.
  • Add a feeling of immersion and reality to VR simulation
  • Best rendering method for automatic creation of training data in machine learning field.
  • In the CAD/CG field, work efficiency will be improved since real-time rendering is close to final rendering result.
　Non-unbiased / Unbiased rendering
After physically defining material and light source of 3D model, reflection on models is computed and rendered. These calculation can be done on GPU in real time, and multiple approximate values are created when continuing real-time rendering (30 or 60 FPS).

This type of renderer is called real-time renderer or "Non-unbiased" renderer and is used for game and VR-Next.

If you don't need real-time rendering, the exactly same scene can be rendered without approximate values. In this case, a process of rendering is called "unbiased rendering". It means models are fully rendered without shortcut until it reaches a certain quality. This type of renderer is used for movie, CM, and introduction of construction cases.

Although FORUM8 is mainly focusing on the real-time rendering, we also investigate the unbiased rendering, which has a possibility to be line upped as a super computer cloud service. As a result, users can use the same model in both of real-time and graphic video.
Click to enlarge the image.
Model courtesy of Karol Miklas (sketchfab.com/karolmiklas)
& Sketchfab's user Serjogasan. CC BY 4.0.
(https://sketchfab.com/Serjogasan)
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