Yeah s6 hit the nail on the head. An example I always like to use when this comes up is: Go look under your fridge. Its really dark under there, yeah? Now shine a flashlight under it, it lights up, right? If you bake medium-large scale AO into your diffuse, what you're essentially doing is flagging the area under the…
While I agree completely with EarthQuake fridge example and we did use separate AO map for that purpose long before PBR , still from what I saw in U4 and other game engines ( non Marmoset) with mostly simple metallic/roughness approach+energy conservation we do need extra "cavity" and " speclevel" maps just because PBR is…
This whole PBR is based on removing AO from texture because engine already adds AO at a vertex level. I see no point for removing AO from textures that are for surfaces that don't have a complex vertex level to make the engine add AO on them. This ground cracks was just an example I used quickly from CGTextures. This…