Comment by losvedir
1 day ago
All right, off topic but I've seen this a bunch lately and the term just really irritates my brain for some reason. What's its origin? "[adverb] based" just feels so wrong to me. Shouldn't that be a noun: "Evidence-based medicine", "values-based", "faith-based", etc. Does "physically based" bother anyone else?
It is a bit of a silly term. It was made mostly to contrast against the somewhat more adhoc methods that preceded it. The new technique was parameterized more around physical properties where the older ones were more about visual descriptions.
This paper from Disney is what kicked off the movement https://disneyanimation.com/publications/physically-based-sh...
What’s hilarious is there’s nothing physically based about the Disney model. It’s empirical and It’s not even energy conserving.
As sibling pointed out, physically based rendering precedes “PBR” by a looong time and goes much, much deeper than “I put a metalness map in my shader”
Note that the book is even older than that – I remember first reading it in 2009; apparently the 1st edition was in 2004!
But what alternative can you suggest which doesn’t break grammar or usage precedents like “physically based”?
Physics-based? Reality-based? Physically-derived?
Physics-based sounds perfectly fine to me.
"X-based" to me is equivalent with "based on X". Physics-based = based on physics, evidence-based = based on evidence, values-based = based on values; all perfectly fine.
Physically based feels correct in a sentence like "Our company is physically based in New York but we operate world-wide". But what does the "physically based" in "physically based rendering" mean?
But I'm not a native speaker, what do I know.
It bothers me too, but I’m French. I always assumed it was some corner of the language I don’t know