PBR student project ideas

[pjcozzi]

One of our students at Penn, @moneimne, plans to do their senior design project on glTF PBR (basically starting now-ish through May 2017) so I just want to take inventory on what he could contribute to.

Please comment with ideas!

• Gentle introduction to PBR tutorial, glTF-Tutorials
  • Could be a great warm-up project.
• gltf-pipeline stage to generate GLSL shaders from PBR materials that can serve as a reference implementation.
  • What other content pipeline stages would be broadly useful to the community, e.g., for IBL?
• Full reference PBR viewer. A few folks are already working on this: [PBR extension] Provide example implementation and specify (suggested) shading model #697. Still plenty to do.
• Add PBR to the Cesium glTF loader.
  • The Cesium team would be happy to help.
• Exporter support like contributing PBR to the Blender glTF exporter.
  • Could be hard; I have no experience with Blender.
• Finalize the PBR extension spec (and related glTF spec changes), [WIP] PBR Materials extension #643 and friends labeled PBR
  • Perhaps not the best student project, but he could contribute input from his implementation experience.

@mlimper @erich666 @cedricpinson @lexaknyazev @emackey

[mlimper]

What other content pipeline stages would be broadly useful to the community, e.g., for IBL?

Good question - IIRC some comments where made that IBL shouldn't be part of the spec (at least not part of the PBR extension), but of course that doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful to have tools for it.

Full reference PBR viewer. A few folks are already working on this: #697. Still plenty to do.

Some support would be helpful - it might take some more days to sort out what could be separate tasks in this context, in the meanwhile your student could maybe already join our conversation in #697?

[pjcozzi]

CC @moneimne, the Penn student.

[cedricpinson]

blender export with good support of gltf and PBR is important. Blender is not so hard I did an exporter in the past. So as osg format is kind of similar it could used to see how it is done. https://github.com/cedricpinson/osgexport/

[mlimper]

@moneimne Do you have some bandwidth to contribute to the PBR example application (#697)?

[moneimne]

Yes, I'd love to help in any way I can. I read through #697 and it seems like you have already gone through a couple iterations of examples. Is there anything specific you had in mind that I could contribute with?

[mlimper]

Yes, I'd love to help in any way I can

Great!

Is there anything specific you had in mind that I could contribute with?

Yes! We were considering a runtime filtering of the environment map, as described here.
With my latest commit (already over two weeks ago), I added very basic support of an environment map. However, the actual hard work isn't done, which is the "correct" filtering of the environment map during runtime. If you could provide me with your email address (for example mailing to max.limper( at )igd (dot) fraunhofer(dot) de), I could also provide some example code.

[moneimne]

My email address is moneimne(at)seas(dot)upenn(dot)edu.

I read through the linked article on runtime environment map filtering, but it may take me some time to familiarize myself with the techniques used. Do you have an approximate timeline that you expect the example application to follow?

[mlimper]

Do you have an approximate timeline that you expect the example application to follow?

There is no hard timeline. Having this until the holidays could be nice, however ;-)

[pjcozzi]

Thanks again for everyone's input.

Closing this as a duplicate with @moneimne's roadmap: moneimne/WebGL-PBR#1