PBR 50% not needed ?

PBR = realistic

but

They are shaders…I mean you can create the same thing with just more vertices (ex. wrinkles) and higher texture resolution. Shaders are just an easy way. You can put shaders over textures but again a good texture = don’t even need them.

The ONLY thing you can’t do is the lighting. Refraction, roughness, reflection, and dynamic changes (camera/light/object movement).

Right?

Uh!? What are talking about?
I suggest some reads before asking, no offense.

we can actually do reflections in the normal render, upbge has CubeMap reflections.

EEVEE I suspect is sampling a bunch of stuff each frame,
unity etc develops a grid of ‘offline’ reflection probes, and lighting probes,

these ‘offline’ reflections are mixed somehow with very small ‘realtime’ reflections using a Z-buffer depth

this way you can have accurate realtime reflections that are fast.

there is another technique called Screen space reflections - but it has it’s own drawbacks.

Long story short - EEVEE and UPBGE_old_render both need the ability to make a grid of light probes and a grid of reflection probes ‘offline’ (stored on hardisk)

edit:
this is using HG1’s node based cube map reflection shader -

Umm… Shaders = lighting calculations. PBR stands for Physically Based Rendering which is based on equations empirically derived from real-life samples of light paths and then approximated for computer purposes(at different levels for static rendering and real-time rendering).

Also, the title is a bit weird. Whether it’s needed or not is totally up to artist. If you’re going for realistic style, you’re more likely want to have it, while minimalistic and cartoonish styles need totally different shaders. But I think you’ve gotten wrong what PBR stands for. It stands for shading model that allows to efficiently simulate the way that different surfaces react to light.

for games with many lamps eevee is just not there yet as well.

checkout using a KDTree to efficiently manage static lighting in normal bge / upbge
(move the same X lamps around to populate ‘Lamp hooks’)

lamps use resources even when energy is set to zero.

Oh I was thinking about real-time too much. I meant shaders then…not PBR shaders.

Ignoring camera/object/lighting/refraction/reflection, what does a shader give me that a realistic high-resolution texture on a super detailed mesh doesn’t? A skin shader is just making the task easy.

PBR is not realistic. If you are aiming for high end visuals, it does certainly not harm you in achieving that goal. But you can as well have highly stylized graphics with them.
One of the huge advantages is that PBR shaders create consistent results in basically every lighting situation. That makes it a lot easier to create certain moods with lighting without the need to change the materials again for this particular lighting situation.

Yes but that is lighting of different angles, the high-res texture on detailed mesh is good, like I said only shader lighting is still needed…

Besides angles, it is also light intensities, or even ambient lighting. If you are using “old school” shaders, it is not unusual that you have to create different materials for different times of day and even inside/outside variants might be needed. If you are using PBR, you can get away with one material which just works in all those cases. And the material will certainly look consistent with all other materials.

I have no idea what you mean with that.

Forget about it, it’s too complex, I’ll just keep truckin on acquiring PBRs, and great textures.

It is not really that complex. It takes time getting used to it, that’s for sure. I have the impression that you don’t fully understand what PBR is about and also you are mixing it with other topics. In your questions, there is a little bit of tesselation related stuff, a little bit of baking, mixed with lighting. Maybe you are confused because of you read about microsurfaces in PBR too? All that makes it complicated to answer your question.

I am sure if you could express more clearly what you actually mean, you would be getting an answer. You might also ask whether certain things effects could be achieved with baking and old school shaders maybe. However, in order to get an answer, you need to ask a little more precisely in order to help you. Or you may say what your goal is that you have in mind, because I am getting the impression that you have something like that in your mind.

Maybe you should start making games instead of spamming the forum with useless threads!

True ,we dyin to see more works in progress threads cmmon guy’s less PBR and lets get blendering. Our UPBGE and BGE need nice playable Games.
[AND SPEAKING OF PBR LETS SEE IT IN BLENDER GAMES WE WANT HIGH GRAPHICAL LOOKING BLENDER GAMES ]
Lets get back to works in progress !!!

Fred/K.S

My goal would be to use more vertices and a very realistic full human body texture, not needing PBRs, and lastly have realistic lighting i.e. when camera/objects/lights move to different angles/locations/scales, including body reflection. For essentially a realistic real-time human baby simulation.

No matter how good your textures are, in order to get something very realistic like this, you need Fresnel and energy conservation, which are both part of PBR. But for human skin, you additionally need to have subsurface scattering.
You are not going to be able to get those effects with additional vertices.

actually, we do have a subsurface scattering feature in upbge.

(it works really nice)

I don’t know if Fresnel or energy conservation can be done in a old school render like bge though.

I had tried SSS. Is there any way to lower its effect to super low? It’s just too much, the skin is too pink/red lighten…I think I remember that I couldn’t lower other things, meaning so the SSS, has to be lowered more. Any way?

For a real-time goal, actuallly you should aim at keeping low your vertices count. Normal maps exist just for this: having tiny detailed geometry (as wrinkles) without modeling it. It’s an universal suggestion, but you maybe have your reasons to do otherwise?
Again, i suggest some read about PBR, since you are still using the term improperly. Knowing what it is, and what it is useful for, you’ll probably want to use it, at least for your realistic shading goals.

Fresnel and energy conservation are by definition part of PBR. That’s the reason why they are computationally more expensive. If a shader does not have Fresnel and energy conservation, it is not a PBR shader.

Since you don’t have a sufficient understanding of PBR at this point, you should first focus on that part and once you feel comfortable with it, you can continue with more advanced stuff. Get the best possible result out of a PBR shader. This is already not that simple. SSS will than add the last touches to that. If the basis for SSS is not good, it is not going to look good.