Texture Haven commonly has, among others, a “Rough Ao” map which tends to look pink or green. What is that supposed to do? How would one make use of it? The name at first suggests Roughness Ambient Occlusion but that combination neither makes sense to me nor would it explain why these maps would have colors like that.
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I don’t use texture haven, but I would assume they’re packed textures. Roughness in red channel, Ambient Occlusion in green.
This can be done because each of these material components only require a single channel. It looks pink and green because there’s no blue channel.
You could also have Roughness/AO/Metallic.
To use them in Blender, you’d load the texture and then access each individual channel with a Split RGB node.
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Game Engines use channel packing to reduce draw calls and graphic memory.
But overall its a clever idea and very practical even if you don’t do realtime rendering.
You can actually pack 4 greyscale channels into one RGBA image if you also use the alpha map.
So you could combine Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, Metallic and an Alpha for transparency or Emission into one image file.
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Oh ok that makes a lot of sense
that was super interesting thanks for the info, bumping this quality thread