Shaders are an everyday occurrence for us 3D designers, but they can be tricky to wrap your head around. Take a simple PBR shader. There are so many working parts to think about it’s easy to lose your way. 

This is why we put together a video of how to create an effective PBR shader. It’s the most basic, and therefore perfect as a jump-off point, for any project you come across in the 3D landscape of today.

What you’ll find in the video is a:

• Basic color map setup
• Normal map slot with strength controls
• A combined mask map incorporating the Metal (R), Roughness (G) and AO (B) maps. We call this the MRA map.
• Simple Emission map setup

A basic set of controls are added to adjust colors and material values. Regular tiling controls are included as well.

We have also added a few AO controls. As a fellow 3D designer you know well Ambient Occlusion can work to boost the visual style. It multiplies the AO map onto the color map, which is great to add a little more depth to the materials. It often comes in handy when you want to create a more stylized look.