What is PBR (Physically Based Rendering)?
Physically based rendering (PBR) is a way of describing materials with physically meaningful values, such as base colour, metalness and roughness, so they look correct under any lighting.
Older materials were tuned by eye for one lighting setup and often looked wrong in another. PBR materials model how real surfaces reflect light, so a copper pan looks like copper in a sunny exterior and in a dim kitchen.
The usual PBR texture maps
| Map | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Base colour (albedo) | The surface colour, with no lighting or shadow painted in |
| Metallic | Whether the surface is metal (1) or not (0) |
| Roughness | How blurry or sharp reflections are |
| Normal | Fine surface detail that bends light without adding geometry |
| Ambient occlusion | Soft contact shadows in crevices |
| Emissive | Parts that glow |
glTF and GLB use the metallic-roughness workflow. Some tools use specular-glossiness instead, and converting between the two is approximate.
See it in action
The copper pots and tactical helmet in our library are good examples of PBR texturing. Rotate them and watch the reflections change.
Written with AI assistance and reviewed by the Renderlyst team. Corrections welcome at alishbakhalid766@gmail.com.