Need guidance with PBR Material work flow

This is going to be lengthy, so bear with me :).

LY documentation:

Docs on textures

Terminology (Lumberyard specific):

• Albedo = Diffuse, where the diffuse map has no shadows or highlights but only the raw surface color information (Albedo as a term was introduced so no one would mix it up with the old diffuse maps, which were allowed to have shadows and highlights in them)
• Glossiness = 1 - Roughness (meaning they depict the same physical property only inversed) Glossiness goes into the alpha channel of the normal map, which is done to save memory The key is to name the file <whatever>_ddna.tif so LY recognizes the special format. Roughness is not used by LY.
• Specularity: Try to avoid maps for that unless you are trying to create a metal material. Chose a solid color around 58 to 80 grey Now let me shamelessly link to my tutorial on texturing terrain because terrain has one difference to normal PBR materials in Lumberyard in that you will want to use highpassed textures as described in the video:

Terrain texturing tutorial

Now for PBR vs. "regular" texturing: It's really simple, earlier textures had too look good and then looked good for exactly the light setup they were created for. PBR textures as the name says have to be accurate to look good, but then look good for any light condition. Regular textures were really just images whereas PBR textures hold data such as the albedo of a material or its microsurface texture. This means it's now easier to create realistic looking materials because you don't have to be an artist anymore but simply know which material has which value. The goto guide on PBR is probably by Marmorset.

Marmorset Guides on PBR

There are two major workflows: Spec/Gloss and Metal/Roughness. LY uses Spec/Gloss which means you need:

• Albedo, with Spec/Gloss it tends to be called "Diffuse", again just a naming thing
• Glossiness (How "not rough" is a material at a certain spot?)
• Normal map (Always needed, together with Glossiness makes or breaks a material)
• Specular map (Only needed for metals or materials with parts of metal. Otherwise use uniform grey with values around 58 to 80 Hope that serves as guide. PBR is a huge spectrum of knowledge so condensing it into a single post is difficult.