Jove DX11 Rendering system

Jove is an extensive system intended to accelerate asset creation, bring physically based shading to Unity and a next generation asset pipeline. Jove is made of several parts, a physically based shader (an implementation of a Cook Torrance BRDF), a material compositer and a system for creating and manipulating HDR environment maps (IBL, image based lighting (AKA Cubemaps)).

What is a physically based shading??

Physically based shading put simply means representing materials with real values instead of approximating it through guesswork. This means that in order to create a material you feed it (via textures) properties it has in real life. For example, you feed concrete a pretty rough non uniform roughness texture. You no longer guesstimate specular and gloss properties. It represents a paradigm shift in rendering and asset creation as a whole, away from ad-hoc guesstimates towards actual physics.

Physically based shading follows the very basic physical law that the amount of light leaving a surface can never exceed the amount of light hitting the surface. This means that size of specular reflection is directly linked to strength of specular reflection, controlled via a single texture called roughness.

Joves shader takes six inputs spread out over three textures. These are as follows

Color (Diffuse) - RGB Color value without any AO or shadows at all

Roughness - Greyscale that determines how rough a surface is (think polished wood versus concrete)

Normal map - A normal map

Metallic - Greyscale that determines if it is metallic or not. You almost always want this to be either pure black or pure white

Reflectivity - Reflectivity for non-metals (think polished wood)

Cavity - Small scale ambient occlusion