Physically Based Rendering approximates how real materials react to light and is used in most modern games. True PBR is a part of Community Shaders that has several benefits:

• More realistic lighting than in vanilla and complex material is possible, and more effects such as subsurface scattering, glow or multilayer can be combined.
• It allows the usage of PBR materials which are widely available online, many for free.
• Those materials can be used easily in standard tools like Blender and exported in a simple way.
• The materials will look the same way in Skyrim as in those tools so it is easy to create consistent visuals. There is no need to experiment and adjust brightness according to Skyrim's very unique levels.
  

What about Complex Materials?

Complex materials are totally separate from True PBR and there would be no point in combining them. You can still use complex materials on non-PBR objects as usual.


Can I convert vanilla shaded textures to True PBR?

If you originally had PBR textures that you somehow converted for Skyrim, you can use those easily. Otherwise it is impossible to do without assumptions, because Skyrim textures contain fundamentally different data. For example, many objects using enviornment mapping are metallic, but not all of them. You can do manual work or use some AI to make the necessary textures, but it is unlikely that it will be a meaningful visual improvement over vanilla.


My materials ingame look wrong?

There is many possibilities for this, I will list the common ones. If the material is really shiny, the mesh probably isn't marked for PBR, so is vanilla shaded with specularity 1. If the material is too dark in the shadows, you might have too dark ambient occlusion. If the material gets black when you walk to it with a torch, your normal maps might be wrong - either flipped, or wrong format (OpenGL).


About Texture Compression

There is a number of compression format for DDS textures with various properties such as number of channels, quality and file size. Not all of them are supported by Skyrim. The following list should be sufficient in most situations:

• BC1: RGB + 1bit alpha (fully opaque or fully transparent). It has reasonable file size and quality. Use for opaque or cutout albedo textures, and RMAOS textures if you don't need specular. In case of visible banding or squarish artifacts, use BC7.
• BC4: One channel (grayscale). Has the same file size as BC1, but only one channel with better quality. Use for parallax textures.
• BC7: RGBA. Has good quality and twice the file size of BC1. Use for normal maps and albedo with full transparency.
• BC3: RGBA. The RGB part uses BC1, alpha uses BC4. The file size is the same as BC7. This can be useful when you need to preserve a quality alpha channel, for example in complex materials or landscape textures with parallax in alpha channel.
  

For more details this article is recommended.


Visit the wiki to learn more.