Thanks for the info, I knew even my statement might have been a stretch.
I'm not even sure Disney can be fully credited with popularizing it, I think it was becoming important in videogames with packed GBuffers almost concurrently.
I'm not even sure Disney can be fully credited with popularizing it, I think it was becoming important in videogames with packed GBuffers almost concurrently.
I don’t know what the precise differences are, but FWIW we had an uber shader that we called “uber shader”, with a metalness map (a texture driven metallic BRDF lobe, not just full color specular) at PDI in the late 1990’s, written by Sing Choong Foo (who worked on the Lafortune model). I’d guess Pixar and other studios had one too by that time.