Physically Based Rendering Comes to WebGL | Hacker News Reader

Physically Based Rendering Comes to WebGL

blog.playcanvas.com

Sweet! Beautiful work.

PS. https://Clara.io also has support for physically-based rendering in WebGL, just use the "Physical" material. :)

Nice! Is there are any nice demo with CubeMaps?

It isn't yet officially released so I am not yet showing off the demos. But you can try it yourself, just create a new scene and add a Physical material to an object. From a technical perspective, it is an implementation of GGX, Schlick, Anisotropy/Anisotropy Rotation, Translucent SSS, and Clear Coat.

I gotta say, it's mighty ironic to use CubeMaps when testing out physically based rendering. Clearly, only the material is physically based :P

This is the first time I've seen playcanvas. It's a very impressive platform so far. A pretty good potential competitor with unity in the future?

PlayCanvas is very nice! And nice people as well.

It is hard to compete with Unity with the same efficiency on all the non-web platforms platforms supported by Unity when it has to run in a browser/JavaScript. But for web-based games PlayCanvas beats out Unity clearly.

> But for web-based games PlayCanvas beats out Unity clearly.

For the moment at least, if you discount the Unity plugin approach.

Unity 5, the coming version, features a (plugin-less) WebGL-export (and I believe the Unity 5 beta already supports it):

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/18/mozilla-and-unity-b...

The Unity WebGL export is great news. It is pushing forward the platform.

However, the reality is that they are desktop only, at least for the foreseeable future. The Emscripten Webplayer generates a significant blob of Javascript which doesn't work well on mobile.

Raw Javascript engine's like PlayCanvas are ~500Kb compared to ~10MB for Unity in Javascript.

To a degree, but Unity 5 isn't at all like a JavaSCript app. It's WebGL approach is basically to convert C++ and C# -> JavaScript via emScripten. It is a messy approach and it doesn't really take advantage of what the web offers -- because you still create your game in C#.

I think anyone that wants to target the web primary should use something that isn't based on a large emScripten blob as their engine. This will become more and more of a liability as time goes on.

But this does give Unity 5 a checkbox besides WebGL.

Maybe, but performance is still pretty terrible for a number of reasons (GC/optimized features vary greatly across browsers) compared to one run by a more static VM. As a raw GPU driver, it works pretty well, though.

Did anyone else think of the book when they read the title?

http://www.pbrt.org/

That is where this originated, at least in part. :)

BTW one of the best references is this: http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course...

Worked in Firefox with a recent iMac, but slow in fullscreen.

So I opened it in chrome and it hangs my iMac. I do graphics programming and use 3D a lot, and it is the first time my machine hangs.

Runs fullscreen in Chrome on my iMac just fine. Framerate isn't so hot though.

It worked really well for me, and I hope to see some more demos!

also https://labs.sketchfab.com/siggraph2014/

I love how the physically-based model include an ambient map. Because you can't have those with Blinn-Phong shading.

Also, by physically-based rendering I assume they mean physically-plausible shaders.

Weird, but sketchfab demo is really slow here.

It seems broken right now. I think this was a special purpose demo. It did work back when it was released.

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