PBR Improvements & Bugs

[peefTube]

Which component should be improved?

Render

Describe your suggestion

PBR is lacking a significant amount of visual features which would be amazing to have. I'll try and keep this short while running through everything I think can be improved or fixed.

1. Refract and $localrefract on PBR
2. Detail textures on PBR
3. Lighting improvements - this one I'll need to describe in a bit more detail, especially since I consider this a bug. Currently PBR seems to favor cubemaps and phong over properly rendering lightmaps and dynamic shadows. This is fine in some places but it makes working with PBR materials frustrating in large amounts. I don't know what can be done to correct this, but I do know I would prefer to have lighting informed primarily by lightmaps/projected textures with phong and cubemaps as an additive component, instead of how it currently seems to behave (which seems like it is vice versa).
4. Corrected rendering in Hammer - bright, reflective textures in PBR render blindingly bright in Hammer, making it difficult to gauge how a texture will look in-engine.

If I think of anything else I'll try to remember to add it here.

[peefTube]

Addendum on point 3. This is a visual example of PBR not being favorable over stock. Some examples of stock textures can still be seen on the walls here, providing visual context for how the lighting SHOULD look. Because PBR seems to favor phong lighting and cubemap reflections over lightmaps and projected textures (not even rendering projected texture shadows in some cases, unless the ptex is very bright), it makes working with it very difficult in some cases. This is something I would really like to see amended.