I’m surprised how stays on public for so long being absolutely PBR-incorrect. Sorry, author, I suggest you fix the thing as you are helping thousands of artists grow the wrong way.
- Diffuse must not contain light direction hints. Reducing contrast doesn’t help much, as your eye is able to catch light direction on diffuse, your texture will look fine only in same lighting conditions. A good advice is to rotate your sphere bottom-up in Marmoset. King Mango, btw gave an example of a proper diffuse texture. Doesn’t look pleasant to the eye? Correct, thats pure diffuse then.
- Reflectivity should not contain any data at all for material. Reflectivity IS material and since you have the same rock surface on all pixels of your texture you need to have same reflectivity values. By having varying information stored in reflectivity map you are directly affecting the amount of reflected light. And by making reflectivity darker than normal you are making the final rendered area even darker.
A common suggestion to everyone using Marmoset for authoring PBR materials:
- Remember, Marmoset is lying for the sake of making your work looking better. It is a showcase software, not authoring. No realtime game engine offers same render as Marmoset.
- Make a lighting setup in Marmoset with parametric lights only. Use it as often as you use HDR’s for testing your assets.
- As I mentioned before, flip the model to see if your tiled textures still look natural under same lighting. If not, you’re not done with it )
Good luck, keep fighting.