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MD
Bachelor project2022

Render Catalogue

Bachelor thesis: a browser catalogue of Substance Designer materials, lit by a PBR shader written from scratch in GLSL. Playable on this site.

Starting the renderer…

Brick

Fired clay with deep mortar channels — the set the height displacement was built for.

Drag to orbit · scroll to zoom

How it renders

Six maps, one pass

Every set is six greyscale and colour maps baked out of Substance Designer. The shader reads all of them in a single pass — there is no deferred buffer and no post-processing stage.

Base colour

sRGB

Surface colour with no lighting baked in.

Normal

tangent space

Per-pixel surface direction, applied through a tangent frame.

Roughness

red channel

How wide the specular lobe spreads, remapped per material.

Metallic

red channel

Metal against dielectric. Read only by the comparison material.

Ambient occlusion

red channel

Contact shadow in the creases, scaled at the end of the shader.

Height

red channel

Displaces the vertices, then rebuilds the normal from four taps.