[Bf-committers] Some suggestions for nodes' interface revision in PBR times

[Adriano Oliveira]

Dears,

I would like to suggest some reviews for IMAGE TEXTURE and NORMAL MAP nodes
interface to help with PBR workflow. This could be implemented in 2.8.

1. COLOR SPACE. Today we need to open a drop down menu and pick color
(sRGB) / non-color (linear). In a PBR workflow, most of textures should be
linear (roughness, metallic, normal map, ambient occlusion etc) and only
albedo/base color is usually a sRGB bitmap. Therefore, we need to perform 2
clicks over the majority of textures we import... A better approach would
be to have just a check box for "[  ] sRGB", like in Unreal. If it is
checked (default), color space is gamma corrected, if it is not, it is
linear. Believe me, when you have a scene with dozens of PBR material, this
is a huge time saving.

2. RGB output slots [not as needed as above]. Now we have COLOR and ALPHA
outputs from a Image Texture node. In PBR workflows is very common to merge
gray scale maps into the four channels of a RGBA texture. It would be nice
to have as outputs COLOR, R, G, B and ALPHA, like in Unreal. [This can be
done via Separate RGB, of course].

3. INVERT GREEN / Y in NORMAL MAP node. There are two standards today for
normal maps: OpenGL (Blender) and DirectX. Most systems offers a check box
to invert direction of the Y channel. Bake in Blender does, so it seems
reasonable to have it in NM also.

Best regards,


*Adriano A. Oliveira*