In this article, we’ll take a look at a portion of the ModelIO framework we haven’t used so far: materials. In previous articles, we’ve used ModelIO to do the heavy lifting of loading 3D geometry, but have loaded and applied textures manually. This ad hoc approach works when we only have a base color map, but quickly grows tedious as materials become more complicated. Here, we’ll take a deep dive into ModelIO materials and learn how to use them to perform basic physically-based rendering (PBR).
You can find the sample code for this article here.
This is not a tutorial on physically-based rendering. PBR has been a hot topic for the past several years, and other people have written excellent tutorials on the subject. Joey de Vries’ series is probably the most approachable. Also consider taking a look at the documentation for Google’s brand-new mobile-first rendering engine Filament. For more theoretical background, consult the following papers and resources:
The focus here is on how ModelIO represents materials, deemphasizing how a shader might render them. For this reason, the shaders for this article are a pared-down version of Apple’s LOD with Function Specialization sample, which is worth studying.
