Technical question - 3d scans by Poliigon

[Hadi]

They don't have scanned models free sample, so i downloaded this texture, which is also scanned, so should be good indicator on their texture quality. To be honest, i found nothing wrong with those textures - once you plug them in material, it works as expected. No need to boost anything, well... maybe except glossiness. That map is good by itself, but it's for dry mud and in their preview, mud looks wet, so if you want to replicate that, you need to make that map lighter. CoronaColorCorrect node is perfect for that. One thing is worth to mention, they also provide reflection map, don't know what's its purpose - i didn't use it. Instead i plugged into reflection slot AO with boosted contrast - nice trick advocated by dubcat and Juraj Talcik.

I'm attaching test renders.
01 - maps are pluged without any modification (AO and reflection aren't used)
02 - glossiness map is plugged through CoronaColorCorrect and brightness with gamma are increased
03 - same as 02, but high contrast AO is plugged into reflection slot

I've been using their textures since a while now and never had trouble, that's not the subject of the topic.
What we are discussing here are the 3d models, that are basically a new feature they introduced.
The suggestion to decrease drastically the IOR to 1.1 and boost the normal to 2.0 came straight from their end, meaning the standard material setup is not behaving in a canonical way.

[Jpjapers]

They don't have scanned models free sample, so i downloaded this texture, which is also scanned, so should be good indicator on their texture quality. To be honest, i found nothing wrong with those textures - once you plug them in material, it works as expected. No need to boost anything, well... maybe except glossiness. That map is good by itself, but it's for dry mud and in their preview, mud looks wet, so if you want to replicate that, you need to make that map lighter. CoronaColorCorrect node is perfect for that. One thing is worth to mention, they also provide reflection map, don't know what's its purpose - i didn't use it. Instead i plugged into reflection slot AO with boosted contrast - nice trick advocated by dubcat and Juraj Talcik.

I'm attaching test renders.
01 - maps are pluged without any modification (AO and reflection aren't used)
02 - glossiness map is plugged through CoronaColorCorrect and brightness with gamma are increased
03 - same as 02, but high contrast AO is plugged into reflection slot

I've been using their textures since a while now and never had trouble, that's not the subject of the topic.
What we are discussing here are the 3d models, that are basically a new feature they introduced.
The suggestion to decrease drastically the IOR to 1.1 and boost the normal to 2.0 came straight from their end, meaning the standard material setup is not behaving in a canonical way.

Id say its less a corona problem then and more a problem with their 'PBR' workflow. If they made their normals correctly it shouldnt need to be above 1 as was already mentioned. That data should be encoded into the map.

[Hadi]

They don't have scanned models free sample, so i downloaded this texture, which is also scanned, so should be good indicator on their texture quality. To be honest, i found nothing wrong with those textures - once you plug them in material, it works as expected. No need to boost anything, well... maybe except glossiness. That map is good by itself, but it's for dry mud and in their preview, mud looks wet, so if you want to replicate that, you need to make that map lighter. CoronaColorCorrect node is perfect for that. One thing is worth to mention, they also provide reflection map, don't know what's its purpose - i didn't use it. Instead i plugged into reflection slot AO with boosted contrast - nice trick advocated by dubcat and Juraj Talcik.

I'm attaching test renders.
01 - maps are pluged without any modification (AO and reflection aren't used)
02 - glossiness map is plugged through CoronaColorCorrect and brightness with gamma are increased
03 - same as 02, but high contrast AO is plugged into reflection slot

I've been using their textures since a while now and never had trouble, that's not the subject of the topic.
What we are discussing here are the 3d models, that are basically a new feature they introduced.
The suggestion to decrease drastically the IOR to 1.1 and boost the normal to 2.0 came straight from their end, meaning the standard material setup is not behaving in a canonical way.

Id say its less a corona problem then and more a problem with their 'PBR' workflow. If they made their normals correctly it shouldnt need to be above 1 as was already mentioned. That data should be encoded into the map.

Yeah I agree with you, that was my point.
I think at the moment there's no other way than re-do Corona materials for all of them, until they will fix it.
I appreciate they are providing materials for the most important softwares and render engines, so it's quite of a big commitment.

[Jpjapers]

They don't have scanned models free sample, so i downloaded this texture, which is also scanned, so should be good indicator on their texture quality. To be honest, i found nothing wrong with those textures - once you plug them in material, it works as expected. No need to boost anything, well... maybe except glossiness. That map is good by itself, but it's for dry mud and in their preview, mud looks wet, so if you want to replicate that, you need to make that map lighter. CoronaColorCorrect node is perfect for that. One thing is worth to mention, they also provide reflection map, don't know what's its purpose - i didn't use it. Instead i plugged into reflection slot AO with boosted contrast - nice trick advocated by dubcat and Juraj Talcik.

I'm attaching test renders.
01 - maps are pluged without any modification (AO and reflection aren't used)
02 - glossiness map is plugged through CoronaColorCorrect and brightness with gamma are increased
03 - same as 02, but high contrast AO is plugged into reflection slot

I've been using their textures since a while now and never had trouble, that's not the subject of the topic.
What we are discussing here are the 3d models, that are basically a new feature they introduced.
The suggestion to decrease drastically the IOR to 1.1 and boost the normal to 2.0 came straight from their end, meaning the standard material setup is not behaving in a canonical way.

Id say its less a corona problem then and more a problem with their 'PBR' workflow. If they made their normals correctly it shouldnt need to be above 1 as was already mentioned. That data should be encoded into the map.

Yeah I agree with you, that was my point.
I think at the moment there's no other way than re-do Corona materials for all of them, until they will fix it.
I appreciate they are providing materials for the most important softwares and render engines, so it's quite of a big commitment.

Out of curiosity have you tried with any other engine?

[Hadi]

They don't have scanned models free sample, so i downloaded this texture, which is also scanned, so should be good indicator on their texture quality. To be honest, i found nothing wrong with those textures - once you plug them in material, it works as expected. No need to boost anything, well... maybe except glossiness. That map is good by itself, but it's for dry mud and in their preview, mud looks wet, so if you want to replicate that, you need to make that map lighter. CoronaColorCorrect node is perfect for that. One thing is worth to mention, they also provide reflection map, don't know what's its purpose - i didn't use it. Instead i plugged into reflection slot AO with boosted contrast - nice trick advocated by dubcat and Juraj Talcik.

I'm attaching test renders.
01 - maps are pluged without any modification (AO and reflection aren't used)
02 - glossiness map is plugged through CoronaColorCorrect and brightness with gamma are increased
03 - same as 02, but high contrast AO is plugged into reflection slot

I've been using their textures since a while now and never had trouble, that's not the subject of the topic.
What we are discussing here are the 3d models, that are basically a new feature they introduced.
The suggestion to decrease drastically the IOR to 1.1 and boost the normal to 2.0 came straight from their end, meaning the standard material setup is not behaving in a canonical way.

Id say its less a corona problem then and more a problem with their 'PBR' workflow. If they made their normals correctly it shouldnt need to be above 1 as was already mentioned. That data should be encoded into the map.

Yeah I agree with you, that was my point.
I think at the moment there's no other way than re-do Corona materials for all of them, until they will fix it.
I appreciate they are providing materials for the most important softwares and render engines, so it's quite of a big commitment.

Out of curiosity have you tried with any other engine?

With VRay. Same issues.

[Juraj]

Definitely poor PBR implementation (or understanding) from their part. Their preview thus look good with highly decreased specularity, but it will only look good isolated and from certain angle, light direction.

I would do what Romullus suggested. When the original preview is authored in poor way, you can always get good result by tweaking the shader yourself, you just can't plug&play without effort.

BTW, one thing regarding gamma for glosiness/roughness maps. There isn't actually agreed way that these should be linear/1.0. Logically they should, and it's also how they are read by default in Unreal for exanoke, but this depends on how they were created/authored. So sometimes you need to try both gamma when loading the bitmap to see which one they actually authored it for. Or just use CC node.

[Hadi]

Definitely poor PBR implementation (or understanding) from their part. Their preview thus look good with highly decreased specularity, but it will only look good isolated and from certain angle, light direction.

I would do what Romullus suggested. When the original preview is authored in poor way, you can always get good result by tweaking the shader yourself, you just can't plug&play without effort.

BTW, one thing regarding gamma for glosiness/roughness maps. There isn't actually agreed way that these should be linear/1.0. Logically they should, and it's also how they are read by default in Unreal for exanoke, but this depends on how they were created/authored. So sometimes you need to try both gamma when loading the bitmap to see which one they actually authored it for. Or just use CC node.

That's the only one way at the moment unfortunately, I'm merging their objects in a studio set up and tweak maps and shaders until I get the proper look.
That's something I do with all the 3d assets from libraries anyway, it's unlikely you will get something perfectly working without touching anything.
I thought this wasn't the case with their models though, as they advertised it as a no-hassle one click merging for several render engines.