To preface, many of the recent 4K textures look a lot better in terms of PBR map quality and the broader usability constraints — so a lot of the rejected textures will come down to visual quality. The immediate signifiers that an asset is lacking in comparison to ones of traditional marketplaces will be the quality of the preview render (e.g. lack of photorealism, lighting and shadowing, displacement inconsistencies) and the render maps (sometimes poor and muddled color maps can result in misleadingly acceptable preview render images). If a texture hasn’t been accepted, it’s typically due to not hitting the visual threshold — again there isn’t a science to it. Some assets fall right around this threshold, so feel free to have us again review those you feel strongly for.
See above for common examples of visual signifiers. In many occurrences the small indents (e.g. the incisions in the planks) may cause an otherly presentable texture to look unrealistic. Some materials like the moss below look unnatural or “painted”, and other materials like the parquet floor below look too “plastically” or “rubbery” for the wooden materials they’re trying to represent.
The primary scenarios when patch scaling is an issue is when the asset is too “zoomed in” (e.g. the user would have to excessively tile the material, causing patterns to become noticeable) or too “zoomed out” (e.g. the material begins to lose detail). Other times like the first wooden plank below, the panels are half cut unnaturally on either sides which will make for difficult tiling, and in the second wooden plank below, it’s evident in the color and normal map that some areas containing splotches are much lighter in the top and bottom, again making the material difficult to tile.
Typically alignment is an issue when the ridges of planks or other symmetrical materials aren’t straight. For the first wooden material below, the grooves in the render and PBR maps are too faded to evaluate alignment, and for the second material, the outer areas of the texture are disturbed by the patch scaling, causing inconsistencies that aren’t visible in the render preview.
Simple baseline for more unique and fanciful materials — can we envision a designer utilizing this material in their project, and does it meet the base quality threshold? For the more common base materials — do they exceed the quality threshold significantly, and is there a reason for designers to choose the material over the hundreds of nearly identical others? In this case for example, we don’t see enough potential demand for the water marble texture to justify the quality or photorealism deficit, and for the Carrara marble texture, we’ve accepted others that you’ve submitted that are slightly visually preferable.
The PBR maps for comparable marketplaces are typically sharp in resolution and captures the details of the material well. Some common areas of concern are general loss in detail, the depth and shadow information in the PBR maps varying in different areas, and undesirable artifacts being introduced. In the below cases, the color map has a visible discoloring on the right side of the first texture, paired with some unwanted artifacts on the roughness map, and the second texture has noticeable fading in the AO map.
