Bug in the Physical Material?

Help & Support
1

I have a physical material with a normal, which will still show even if set to 0. With the Phong Material, it doesn’t do this. Is this a bug? It looks like the normal is affecting the Glossiness somehow? (This is consistent in Firefox and Chrome, both Win) - It’s in this project PlayCanvas 3D HTML5 Game Engine

Another thing I noticed - if the diffuse color is set to black, the refraction won’t show - is this the expected behaviour?

2

Which material has the normals problem? Could you create a separate scene to demonstrate the issue?

Also, I believe the refraction is behaving correctly. If the material is completely black then there can be no light passing through it.

3

Here’s the bug (?) https://playcanvas.com/editor/scene/362239

Another question - after prefiltering the cubemap it gets saved as .dds internally - can I delete the 6 source image assets?

4

tried to use an uncompressed PNG as normal source, still same behavious: even if bumpiness is set to 0, normal will show in what seems to be the glossiness. https://playcanvas.com/editor/scene/362239

this does not happen with the Phong shader, so I’m guessing it’s a bug in the physical shader?

5

This is what specular anti-aliasing does. You can switch it off with a checkbox in old Designer (not sure why it’s not in the new Editor) or with specularAntialias material property in code.

1 Like
6

Thanks for clarifying! So that means in order to have Specular AA work properly I have to either leave the normal channel empty or set it to some value?

7

No, the reason of specular AA is to remove flickering noise and undersampling artifacts of small normal map details. It doesn’t do anything without normal map. One thing that was wrong, is that “bumpiness” parameter didn’t affect it, but fix for this was pushed.
The idea of specular AA is to basically detect areas where some small details became less than a pixel due to mipmapping and make specular look more ‘rough’ there. You should get similar results if you try to render the same detailed surface with full screen super-sampling, all tiny bumps will get tiny highlights, which will then just blend into some average color.

Also: http://blog.selfshadow.com/2011/07/22/specular-showdown/