NVIDIA has shared their SIGGRAPH 2019 presentation on Material Definition Language (MDL), a technology developed to define physically based materials for rendering solutions. In the talk, NVIDIA’s Lutz Kettner and Jan Jordan present how MDL can be used to match the appearance of a single material within different rendering techniques.

“With RTX technology, materials that are tricky for today’s game engines are now possible to do,” explained Jordan. “The MDL SDK directly generates material code for use in RTX-enabled renderers, so developers can create materials and graphics with high fidelity.”

From the blog post:

MDL is the solution that provides this material definition through using bidirectional scattering distribution functions (BSDF). This enables artists to create various materials like metallic paints, clothing, fabrics and more.

For example, the newly released NVIDIA vMaterials 1.6 library contains 1700 materials available for artists to use. With the layering capabilities of MDL, designers can adjust the materials to get the look that’s needed. Since vMaterials are built on MDL, they can easily be saved and opened in other supporting applications.

The full talk is available here.