Fast PBR Viewport Render is a Blender addon that lets you fetch curvature, AO, normal maps, transparency, matID and height from the camera youre currently looking through or directly from your viewport. It uses Blenders "Render viewport" operator which renders pretty much exactly what you see on screen or what the camera you are looking through currently has within frame. Therefore its extremely flexible as "what you see is what you get" and as you can use it ANYWHERE to render ANY sort of geometry or scene. It works by modifying your render settings and renderer (it uses Eevee and workbench for maximum performance), it can render out several 4K maps in the matter of seconds, making it versatile and useable for projects where you need to do a lot of rendering (and hence cant afford any time lost for waiting). It also comes equipped with a flexible, configurable and automatic file naming and folder hierarchy system that lets you move and name your images wherever you want based on custom & automatically generated variables that describes your images.
Note: The readme is somewhat outdated as the addon has a lot more features (unrelated to just texture creation) at this date <3 Possible addon rename also coming up as it can do many more things now outside of generating PBR images. Also note that the source code here on git is somewhat out of date (this is because some of the files in this repo are too large for github), instead download the latest release that you can see under "Releases" to the right. The addon is actively maintained & in a development phase, more documentation and explanations of how to use all the tools on a more detailed level will come once a larger portion of the addons features are at a mature & well-tested state.
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- Runs on Windows based devices exclusively at the moment. If anyone would be interested in making it work cross platform I would gladly accept any collaboration!
- Can only bake from a single perspective (of which you choose) as the addon uses Eevee and workbench to perform the bakes. In other words, you cant bake using a target mesh based on another mesh's UV.
- Bake any visible geometry, could be curves, text, objects w modifiers (etc).
- Supports baking geometry that has Z fighting (the Z fighting wont show in the renders) as well as geometry with inverted normals (the addon tries to automatically detect inverted normals and corrects them once found through a fast post process filter).
- Capable of baking/rendering multiple cameras, each camera rendering multiple passes with the click of a single button using customizeable predefined configurations & output image naming.
- Advanced highly customizeable file naming & folder hierarchy system that you can use to process images emitted by either FastPRR or by any external software. It lets you fetch data like the image resolution, folder name, file type (etc) and insert such data anywhere in the path that you want to export your images to or the images names themselves. - Its also really easy to use. The intended usecase for this is to let the addon to be your backbone for organizing your files in a reliable way, rather than you renaming your images and moving them to the correct folders manually.
- Experimental (v1.3 and forward) : Mesh processing features that can convert most types of geometry (like curves, text (etc)) to raw mesh. This has very little to do with PBR however :P , but is useful for when preparing your geometry for export using something like FBX or glTF. It uses a philosophy of that everything should look the same after processing, but converts everything to raw MESH based objects.
- Experimental (v1.3 and forward) : Material merger, capable of merging materials that are identical, but that do not use "shared data" (this is achieved using value comparing for all the nodes in the node graph as well as all the material settings to see if the node graph, material and all the associated settings have the same values). The motivation for this feature was to merge duplicate materials generated by DecalMachin3 as it can generate thousands of identical materials in larger scenes (therefore the addon has some dedicated code geared specifically towards merging these decalMachin3 materials), however the feature is generic and works for all sorts of materials.
- Match viewport display and Surface Base Color. Simply put takes whatever color is set under Material > Surface > Base Color and copies it over to Material > Viewport Display > Color. This is useful when wanting your materials albedo to match when previewing them in both workbench and Eevee/Cycles.
- Diffuse (color + lighting, gives you what you see when previewing in EEVEE or Cycles)
- Albedo (color) - useable for Mat ID
- normal
- Curvature
- Ambient Occlusion (AO using Eevee)
- Height (uses Eevee's mist pas making the BW map limited to 256 possible values per pixel, however the output is linear like its supposed to)
- Transparency (makes the world background black & anything obscuring it white)
- MatID
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Simple bake setup: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/20190653/136704470-e3d3a362-9d9f-48e7-8a6a-69f4d155d6db.mp4 The resulting image created in the video ended up looking like so once combined with some smart materials in "Quixel Mixer" afterwards: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/20190653/136704479-869414bf-1a4b-440c-bd17-36b90903a5ad.jpg
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A quick usage example showcasing how to fetch heightmap from a camera in Blender, extracting the height data & then using that to create a landscape in Unreal Engine 5: https://youtu.be/kGkdHABi6yE
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Trimsheet unwrapping: https://youtu.be/CXOazuUQ_3Y
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1.7.0 Turntable render: https://youtu.be/nlrJ_2AIcQc
If you prefer a video guide: https://youtu.be/wev76s-1FG0
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Download and install the addon .zip file like usual (via Top Panel > Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install > select the zip).
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As of v1.7.0, after the initial activation of the addon you should now see an error message asking you to restart Blender to complete the installation. If you see this, simply restart Blender and activate the addon once more.
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You should now see the dedicated "Fast PBR Viewpot Render" panel in In "your 3D viewport > Left side Bar/foldout panel (N is the default hotkey to open/close) > Fast > Fast PBR".
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Optional step if your normal matcap doesnt install automatically: Download the FastPBRNormalMatCap.exr attached in any of the releases (as of 1.2.1 and up the exr file is bundled as a part of the zip file for convenience) and install it as a matCap in Blender (& make sure you dont rename it, the script utelizes the matcap to generate the normal maps):
- Choose a destination path, note that this path has to include the file name itself and the file extension. Only png is supposed at the time being, so make sure that it ends with png.
- Configure the render passes you would like to use by toggling the checkboxes, more settings might become available in there foldout panels on a later time.
- Choose the resolution by setting your camera resolution like usual in Properties > Output Properties.
- Save your file for safety (The addon modifies your render settings and later reverts them, but if the script fails to reach the end due to a fatal error (which could occur if the Blender version you're using is not 100% compatable) it might not get a chance to restore the settings. If that happens however, theres a "restore settings" operator/button that you can call/press to revert the settings yourself as the addon automatically sets up a restore state to go back to.
- Hit the top button "Fast PBR Viewport Render" to render out your maps, once the operation is complete you will see a pop-up message appear at your cursor as well as that Windows file explorer will automatically open up the directory that the images has been created in for you.
- To render multiple cameras at once, name the cameras as you lik
To find out more about each button and property in the UI, you can hover over it to get a short decsription:
Anyone is welcome to contribute, the addon is 100% pure Python 3.
If you encounter any issues, dont hesitate to open up an issue ticket here on Github and I will do my best to assist. <3 Also dont shy away from digging in the code yourself if you believe you can figure out whats happening in the event of an unexpected Python error or any sort of unexpected behaviour.
Also make sure to read the below section "Known issues"
- (Now fixed) The transparency pass is inverted.
- (Now fixed as of 1.3) The height doesnt utelize the full 0-1 range as its utelizing Eevees mist-
- (Now fixed as of 1.8.0) In the 1.7.0 release the addon seems to not successfully activate the first time, activating it twice will have it start properly. I will try adressing this in the future
- Support for normal maps that are texture/shader based.
- (Now implemented, although not error free) Support for baking geometry with inverted normals without it affecting the result of the baked texture emitted by Fast PBR.
- Better height maps.
- A grid visualizer that lets you preview how large a pixel will be on the final image before performing a render.
- Bake passes for material/shader based roughness/specular/metallic.
- Got a sick idea? Dont hesitate to let me know about it!
You can reach me by either opening an issue or discussion here on Github, or sending a dm to me over Discord: danieljackson#0286 or saying hi in our Discord https://discord.gg/TD6qNA9y7H !
The addon had its initial development in the process of the making of a video game "We Might Die" (an upcoming title as of writing this), we needed A LOT of textures baked from geometry for hard surface details for sci-fi ship interiors. The workflow is that you model/sculpt/generate geometry of any kind (the addon supports any sort of geometry thats visible in workbench & Eevee) in Blender or your software of choice, generate the maps and then add image based microdetails and materials in a texturing software of choice, such as Quixel Mixer.
The addon is also capable of renaming images emitted by another software and doing the naming for you with naming standards of choice.
Its recommended that you keep your images to the power of 2 (so 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 (etc)) and perfectly square as that will yield best performance when using it in most modern renderers as of today.
Tags: Fast Toolbox, Fast Tool box, Fast Tool-box, Fast-PBR, FastPBR, Blender, batch render, turn tables, UV unwrapping, grid UV unwrapping, Fast Blender addon, Blender script, Material Toolkit, automatic rendering, automation
