Favorite type of Material-standard among users?

[eXeler0]

Who prefers classic "rendering materials" (vray, corona) over PBR like in Unreal 4?
If so, why?

Cheers
eX

[TomG]

Both Corona and V-Ray are PBR materials, btw. Just that "PBR" is one of those 3D standards that isn't really a standard. What aspect of Unreal shaders are you comparing, e.g. the glossiness/roughness workflow, or something else?

[burnin]

Just to note...

 real time/ game engines & offline engines still differ (also by standards) and "Photo-Real Based Rendering" is a way to unify those
it's quite new in the game engine realm while in the offline engines ray/path tracers world the thing is approx. decade older (aka Physically Based rendering).

So about shaders... IIRC, VRay still goes by its old school "advanced" model since it's known to many, but nowadays mostly used "the new standard" uber-shaders/ materials are Disney's Principled BRDF or Autodesk's Standard Surface... /// One of which we're still waiting for Corona to feature ;)

[eXeler0]

Both Corona and V-Ray are PBR materials, btw. Just that "PBR" is one of those 3D standards that isn't really a standard. What aspect of Unreal shaders are you comparing, e.g. the glossiness/roughness workflow, or something else?

Yes, Metalness of a material + glosiness/rougness..  Seems to me its a more intuitive way to create materials and get a good result quicker than in quirky custom material definitions as seen in most renderers over the years (not just vray, corona..).

I would prefer it if Corona was more like U4 in that respect. Simply put, I ***personally*** get better results faster in U4 than i Corona when it comes to materials.

[TomG]

One piece of good news is that we will be looking into a new PBR material at some point in the future (https://trello.com/c/j7EFSn08/165-add-new-grounds-up-pbr-material ), so it is always good to hear what workflow people like best so we can take that into account :)

[mantaskava]

Is it only me or the term PBR is badly over used these days? Isn't like 99% percent of render engines "PBR ready" nowadays? Only thing that differs a little is a workflow (e.g. metalness vs specular vs layered mtls etc), but all them are PBR still.
Can anyone name a few render engines that doesn't support PBR yet? Haven't done the research, but I cannot think of one.
Often times clients ask for "PBR models" which always makes me smile because I see most of them don't even know what does that mean (and that it means pretty much nothing these days  IMO).
Personally, I don't think mentioning the term "PBR" since a few years back is worth it at all.
Probably a bit of off topic here but wanted to say this thought for a while now :) And what are your thoughts about this guys?

[sprayer]

mantaskava
many 3d models do not need PBR materials, for web app, mobile app, mobile games etc. As we work close with game models like in megascan it have all PBR maps but for mobile games they not needed. Also some product render of mechanical parts etc does not need PBR, and CAD software i believe do not support PBR, archicad, fusion 360 etc

[burnin]

As I see it, PBR as an abbreviation got "overused" since it became rendering standard for game engines.
Also, it's often understood poorly and thus mistaken, since it can have two distinctive meanings - Photo Based Rendering or Physically Based Rendering - depending on who you talk to...
In short, first is merely an artistic style. The second, which we are more involved in, is the one that lead us to predictive rendering which basically means accurate light simulation & material representation. For now, no game engine can do that.

[mantaskava]

mantaskava
many 3d models do not need PBR materials, for web app, mobile app, mobile games etc. As we work close with game models like in megascan it have all PBR maps but for mobile games they not needed. Also some product render of mechanical parts etc does not need PBR, and CAD software i believe do not support PBR, archicad, fusion 360 etc

Yeah but who makes professional/commercial renderings with native (and not third party) render engines inside archicad or fusion 360 anyways? Let's take Unity, Unreal, Vray, Corona, Redshift, Cycles, Octane, Fstorm, Arnold, Keyshot, Lumion, Maxwell - I believe all of them will render your materials physically correctly, although workflows and results will vary and you're gonna have to adapt to every render engine a little bit differentely (meaning results won't look exactly the same in all of them out of the box).
So what exactly makes or brakes "PBR" model(material)? Say a client asks for a model with two versions, one PBR and one not PBR. How it will affect the material you're making? For me - the only thing that changes is the software I'm rendering/setting up the material in (although textures remain the same).
Again, it's either that I am missing something here or PBR term really doesn't say/define much.

EDIT:
For now I see it like this - take one model and try rendering it in all of previously mentioned render engines (and try to get the same result), you're gonna HAVE to tweak the textures/materials in all of them to get some decently similar results. Then take some render engine that doesn't support PBR (like someone here mentioned Archicad's native renderer) - you're gonna have to tweak materials/textures too. Long story short - in ANY of render engines you won't get the same (good) result without some manual tweaking of the settings and/or textures. Even if you take two "PBR" engines, results and workflow will be different. And that's probably why it doesn't say much.
Shouldn't we all  be more specific and mention the exact render engine instead? Until there's some "true" PBR which makes same material look exactly the same in all of render engines, without any additional tweaking.

EDIT number two:
Let's take Megascans for example - I've seen lots of textures (albedo) where sRGB values goes well below 30-50 ("correct" PBR values for totally black color). Does this mean megascans models/materials are NOT PBR ready? And as far as I'm aware they say it's PBR, but that doesn't make sense then.

EDIT number three:
So what exact criteria a render engine has to meet so it is considered PBR? And then the second part of the question - can you guys mention these render engines that are not PBR?