Best albedo for PBR surfaceAppearance

I have made a tufted PBR SurfaceAppearance:

I was happy with the result, but PBR is only for high graphics. On low, it just uses albedo channel, see left, where here albedo is empty, it looks like a blank slab for Graphics 1, awful.)

This is technically correct - the texture is meant to be uniform color, with only normals, metallic, and roughness being differentiated.


But technical is not perceived, so I need something more. I decided to try making albedo a few different things:

  1. the ones on far right are graphics 1
    the ones on middle are graphics 10

  2. ones in the very background have no color texture,
    the ones in the middleground have normals as texture
    ones in foreground have height as texture

  3. Foreground left is fox as albedo, do practically disregard.

open original to best see


My current best-case is do use the normal for albedo, though make it slightly less strong then seen here:

image

Left is the normal-in-albedo, Right original, on max graphics. Note the inevitable darkening.
Selectively removing the normal-in-albedo depending on graphics (when they’re high) seems good for results but not performance/ convention.

Material expert, help pls!


My first thought is albedo should be height/ ambient occlusion, but here the result was oversaturated. Can go at it again if asked.

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