PBR missing rim darkening on non metallic rough surfaces If you have a dielectric (non metallic) sphere with a large roughness value (say, 0.95), and put it in a lighting environment that has a constant onmidirectional lighting value (such as 0.5) Cook-Torrance ggx PBR renderers seem to be missing a darkening at glancing angles.

I thought this was a bug in my PBR implementation at first when comparing vs a mitsuba ggx render, but I've found the same issue in google filament (https://github.com/google/filament) as well as in substance.

For instance, below is the iray version from substance compared to the opengl version from substance. 0 metalness, 1 roughness, omnidirectional ibl of 0.5, albedo of (1,1,1).



Is this a known limitation of cook-torrance ggx based PBR? Can anyone explain why this limitation is here, and the reason for the difference?

I've noticed that it's much closer to the path traced "ground truth" at lower roughness values (like up to around 0.5-0.75), and that the most commonly interesting roughness values are near the lower end of roughness. 0.5 even looks almost "completely rough" for instance.  Is the issue that the approximations used don't really try to make these less important higher roughness values look correct?
The problem is in the diffuse term, which can be seen by making the specular portion of IBL not be added into the result.  The diffuse only render will not have the darkening, and of course, the specular can't make the diffuse darker. (Note, fresnel vs no fresnel is not the issue here).

The core problem is that lambertian diffuse is being used, which is view independent. There are other view independent diffuse terms which give results closer to the ground truth.

Two example diffuse terms are Burley (Disney) and Oren-Nayar.

Burley is talked about here: https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html#toc4.5

An approach used in Titanfall is described here:
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024478/PBR-Diffuse-Lighting-for-GGX