PBR (physically based rendering)
A rendering approach that describes materials with physically meaningful values so they react to light realistically.
The main PBR inputs
- Base colour, the colour of the surface. For metals it tints the reflections, for stones and enamels it is the body colour.
- Metalness, whether the surface behaves like a metal or a non-metal.
- Roughness, how sharp or blurry reflections are.
- Normal maps, fine surface detail such as hammering or brushing without extra geometry.
- Transmission and IOR, how light passes through transparent materials such as gems.
Why PBR helps jewelry
Because PBR follows real physics, a gold material made once works in any environment. Change the lighting and the gold still looks like gold. That consistency matters when you render a whole catalogue under several setups.
PBR and file formats
The glTF format uses a standard metallic and roughness PBR model, so materials exported as GLB from CAD or 3D software often arrive in good shape. STL files and many OBJ files carry no PBR data, so materials are assigned after upload.
In the studio
The studio's 98 metal presets and 58 gem presets are physically based, so you can apply any metal preset to a metal layer and it stays consistent when you change the environment or the background. That is what makes colour variants of the same design comparable.