Ambient Occlusion doesn’t need to be used, however you can multiple it or overlay it on the diffuse channel to give more depth.
Gloss > Glossiness
Normal > be sure to plug into a Corona Normal Map, with Poliigon normals youll want to check “Add gamma to input” and “Flip green (Y)”
Reflection > Invert this map an plug it into the reflection slot, in most cases check the reflection map itself. Sometimes they just use a pure color or something with such low contrast you can just leave this map out and set Reflection levels to 1.0
Like you said you can overlay the AO with diffuse to get some finer “shadows” to show up.. and the reflection map, pretty sure if you’re doing things the PBR way, you should forget the whole map when working with Corona and leave reflection “strength” to be handled by the glossiness channel. So - reflection strength to 1 and channel to white (right?).
Although I don’t really buy all of the fuzz about PBR workflow, maps, and how to use them “properly”, be it Poliigon or Megascans. Just make materials that work for you. Overall or just for one specific angle.. take some freedom and excaggerate material properties if it makes things look better
Respond to Jtveclipse12:
Very helpful respond, thank you.
The Normal map can also be nicely integrated by setting Override to 1 while importing.
The Glossiness maps sort of “breaks up the reflection” when placed in Glossiness slot.
Some of the Reflection map [Like the brick] have a lot of details and not just one color but seems to make no difference whatsoever, it seems the Glossiness map is overriding anything that the reflection map might be doing…so I have no idea what it does and by the way, why the need to invert it, looking at the brick reflection map, inverting it would make the line reflective and that makes no sense, I guess the gist is putting ANYTHING to the reflection slot at all makes no sense to me.
Respond to Vkiuru:
I am agreeing with you that the reflection map seems…at least in Corona…to makes no difference.
Relating to the reflection slot with strength 1/ white as the classic PBR-procedure, I think, (I might be wrong) using maybe >80% white and 20% or less of a reflection map which can be different to the glossines map gives some interesting variation in shimmer. But thats is just my perception it can be some kind of placebo. Would just be interesting, if anybody can confim this assumption.
Why such rave? can’t see anything spectacular about that poliigon thing. Diffuse textures are good but rest of the maps are just derived from those. Can’t even come close to quality of scanned stuff like megascans or RDT. Or maybe Op just fell victim of some guru guy’s advertising? ;]
Anyway, moving this to general cg discussion board.
You are right it can hardly be compared, many displacement maps had been or are absoluteley wrong. They just converted maps from color to bw but the newer shaders got some extra love.
Stone walls e.g. had been based on good photos but the displacement was a joke and combined with alot of work to fix them, but the mentioned and linked shader works well.
