Will Eevee have anisotropic shading?

I believe anisotropic shading is kind of ignored for realtime/game engine stuff.
I didn’t get a response from aniso controls when I tested it.
Is this something that is planned to include, and will it have the same possibility to influence the tangents (radial, UVs, pure color, manipulated etc)? Or is it just too costly?
Aniso is pretty important to me.

I want to know as well, I hate that I can give you a reply, but hopully if more people comment on it, the more likely they will implement it

It’s not so much ignored as it is an incredibly hard nut to crack with today’s realtime techniques.

Isn’t it just scaling roughness by the tangent direction? How can that be trickier than supporting roughness maps in the first place?

Is not “that” hard to do using custom OpenGL shaders, and there’s some papers that can help (google is your friend), but remember: There’s only one Clement, his plate is Full as Heck ™ and if/when aniso is in, your render times will suffer quite a bit. At least in some tests done in UE4 last year, anisotropic shading converts a realtime engine into a non-realtime engine with current Top High End Hardware. But research is still happening out there.

Fusion 360 does this since a long time

IIRC Clement’s old PBR Blender had anisotropic shading, but it seems that right now he and the other devs might be more concerned with fixing bugs and other more important changes.
After all, Anisotropic shaders (and a working sky texture!) would be pretty nice, but there are crashes and freezes to fix, like crashing when opening a new file if the current one has node groups (kinda?) or freezing when I select Eevee / lookdev and my AMD drivers are newer than 18.7.1.

And the disastrous mesh editing screen refresh rate …

2.8 is so painfully slow

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Yup, all productivity/construction/bim modeling software that support rendering/directX rendering has it singe ages, but you can’t control them, and they only support one or two variants (inventor and Microstation can do more, but most of these materials are lost when you export them, leaving generic ones to work), since CAD/BIM software doesn’t need artistic control. The problem is when you need to tweak the material or use these in game engines or realtime engines with full artistic control (E.G. Disney ubershaders).

Edit: They already have it since quite some time: https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/19649-anisotropy-material/page3

Is that possible now (for us to manipulate roughness that way I mean)?
I skimmed through some FarCry stuff, and apparently there they did two things; aniso highlights and aniso reflections (probe stretching?) and added them together - far from perfect but better than importance sampling and better than doing nothing.

It’s not only for pans, but also for carbon fiber, appliances, and quarter turned carpet tiles.

Currently, the priority for Clement is bugfixes, polishing, and shoring up Blender 2.8’s draw code. It wouldn’t be great for Eevee to get anisotropic shading as long as it has temporal instability in the visuals.

However, it shouldn’t stop someone from coding a patch which adds this type of shading to Eevee.

I’m deepening the parameters of the shader principled bsdf, I did a search and I landed on this post …
what is the current situation with anisotropic shading?
is it still ignored by eevee?
…yet it does not seem too complex a feature or am I wrong?

It’s on Clement’s todo list, but it’s not high priority. He will probably work on it in a few months…

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thanks for the reply, nice to hear.

While we don’t have phisically plausible anysotropic shading, we do have this.

And this

https://twitter.com/fu1002/status/1181515895933325312

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If Blender Internal and Cycles is anything to go by, anisotropic shading is never in the initial batch of features in the first release, but it will eventually come.

Many of the more recent commits to Eevee were about making existing features more robust/powerful and fixing quality issues. Eevee’s initial feature set is fairly large compared to Cycles in 2.63 so there’s a lot of smaller things in the base to polish probably.

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Anisotropic BSDF is on @hypersomniac’s ToDo:
https://developer.blender.org/T68453
As for ETA though, no idea…

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Well in the meantime, I thought I’d make a custom node group that can be used like the anisotropic BSDF in cycles. It’s based on a technique that unreal also seems to use in its engine where the normal is warped to emulate anisotropy.

Here it is.

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Thank you! That’s the most complicated node setup I’ve seen as a workaround for now. It looks really nice. I will have to see how it performs on my other lower end machine, for now works great on the integrated graphics on full screen so I guess is performant.

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Damn. That’s bloody impressive.