I’m playing around with a bunch of textures in a low light environment. I’m having a few problems getting the looks just right, including the brightness of textures.
I prepare the textures, in this case mostly base colours and text, drop them into the scene and they’re hugely bright. As if the amount of light hitting the textures is amplified, or the low light conditions are being ignored on the texture surface. Yes I can stick on a brightness node, but then the colours are wrong, or I can darken the texture and they look bad when the light levels rise.
I’m working on the principal that I should create my textures as they would look in ‘normal’ lighting conditions and they should react to the scene?
How/why are the textures looking like emitters? Where do I tell Blender to apply the same lighting as everything else?
The idea of PBR is to use albedo values close to that of a cheat sheet, setup whatever lighting conditions you want, and just tweak the CM’s exposure. I.e. choosing 1,0,0 for red, means you’ll have a red that doesn’t exist - nothing is that diffusely reflective.
Brightness/contrast mode - just stay away from it, it will mess up anything if you’re not careful. Use ramp or curves, as those will keep it safe. Another way to do this is using a node group doing bias and gain function.
You said low light environment before, not no light environment. You do the same thing you do in real life, i.e. when photographing some item in sunlight, indoors, or near a campfire - you adjust exposure (in Color Management). In no light environment, it shouldn’t show up at all at any exposure, unless you have global ambient occlusion enabled or emission going on in the material.