(i love how this reply i did to Rawalanche got moved to here when it shouldn’t of since what i was doing was just saying him saying that they don’t belong in the 21 century aged poorly)
This aged poorly, mostly duo to the fact PBR isn’t really good at anything else except realism
and no am not refering to toon shaders or anything similer
But rather anything that has a VERY unique 3D Style that just cannot be done with PBR that actually requires different reflection models and other things
and using the excuse that Phong shaders look like crap doesn’t work here when they both look almost identical except for the actual functionality of them and the way they work
Now back to me wanting to bash my head againest a wall since am one of the few that require them for something am making but having ACTUAL pain trying to get them back and trying to look and look for anything that works remotely similer to phong specular shading
and no i cannot use 2.79, i had been for a while but the moment i start trying to render some grass with other objects in the scene using transparent textures that shadows don’t like trying to not render parts of
and starts going very slowly duo to the crappy Raytracer it has is where it begins to become irritating to use
and no, POV-ray isn’t an option either since that thing just seems to be purely made with how its suppose to work
and also no, This isn’t saying ‘oh oh remove pbr for phong’
PBR is fine, but it becomes a problem when its the only thing availabile and you cannot use anything else to get different kinds of interesting and unique looks, since being restricted to everything having Realism and not anything thats ‘Unrealistic’ becomes irritating real quick depending on what kind of art you have in mind that you’re trying to do
Realisticly if it were possible alot of different Reflection types should be available to the user besides PBR as some are infact better suited for some styles then others, Phong being one of thoses, since Phong pretty much belongs in the same place as toon shaders for various reasons, since much like toon shaders, They are also VERY good at getting different kinds of cartoony looks duo to how the specular itself worked
Since PBR for example
If your roughness is in the middle, you get a default specular dot
You turn it up, it comes bigger but alot less brighter
Turn it down it becomes brighter but more sharper until it looks like a perfect reflection
now phong tho
Its kinda as if you are resizing the actual specular dot rather then making it become brighter or darker, tho it does have a way to do that too that is seperated from the actual size parameter (the size usually being called Hardness)
Because it can have such extreme speculars, it actually makes it quite useful for getting some unique cartoony looks that still look 3D (or just any kind of unique looks in general that are different), but are not trying to look 2D like how toon shaders do
Even tho back then Those were made trying to be realistic, Today, they’re alot more useful for cartooyness rather then realism, just 3D Cartoonyness, if someone wants 2D cartoonyness they likely want to use Toon shaders
Where PBR is much less suited for that and more is suited for realism
Infact i’ll show some examples of the kind of cartoonyness am refering to
And Please do not use the excuse “oh well cause phong shaders are not realistic, that means they’re garbage”
Saying that is like comparing paintings to realitly since by that logic, most paintings and cartoons in general, even toon stuff made in 3D Graphics do not look good by that logic