Sounds like you need a tweak to your shadows, and to your ambient cube map. Shadowed areas shouldn’t be affected by the key light (sun), but should still be hit by ambient (cube map) and masked by specular occlusion. Some example screenshots would help here, in actual prototype game levels, not just single mesh shader…
It's not just "look" It's what you really see midday with a sun 50-70 degree high and everything on the ground shows you very subtle but still pretty noticeable shine toward the sun even being spread wide evenly . I tested it many times by this service https://www.suncalc.org/#/40.1789,-3.5156,3/2023.08.11/15:01/1/3 just…
Isn't gloss a same thing as roughness? And specular level is an energy conservation thing . You can write a simple calculator for that in something like Libre office Calc to do it. Together with diffuse color intensity. Why at all do it in real time? It's beside the fact that you just need 2-3 HDRI emulating different…
While spec glossiness could be looking perfectly same as metal-rough ( if using same GGX highlight spot instead of Blin -Phong) when you add environment cube map with Fresnel and choose physically sound diffuse ,spec color and gloss values . Even if the energy conservation would be a bit off. It's off in modern metal_rough…