this post is a year old but it really got me thinking about SE retex potential. i have tried poking around on google, steam, nexuswiki, actual wikipedia... i'm having a hard time getting any hard technical details about the SE engine. i even popped in to ask the experts, but i suspect they are busy with holidays.
at school all of the shaders we make are geared for pre-render, not live render so words like brdf, fresnel, gloss, smoothness, and anisotropy are familiar now. UE4 already supports using physics based rendering shaders and i'm really curious how much of that we can implement in SE. i asked on chatty and the SE engine treats normal maps as bump maps which just means ignoring the colour information so it's a greyscale map? i know that UE4 [and therefore the bears] can support displacement maps, but i'm wondering if the upgrade to the SE engine means allows that too.