enlighten, indoor scenes/architecture and ambient occlusion

hi there

I'm using unity for architecture visualizations and while I like a lot of things about the unity5 beta I am somewhat frustrated with ambient occlusion. Sometimes it seems to work fine and other times results are looking incredibly bland. Has anyone else had this issue?

 

also, I can't work out how the spec map is supposed to work. I have a concrete spec map that is almost black, and still the material is far to specular/reflective. how can that be? is it because I boost albedo and inderict lightning?

 

Do you have an alpha channel (smoothness)? It should be quiet dark and detailed for concrete I guess.
Normalmap helps aswell

 

thank you for pointing me in the right direction . I also realised that you can now work with the metallic model. looks more intuitive to me.

normalmaps: is there a way to make them visible without direct lighting?

 

thank you, I'll definitely check that out!

 

yoveo, you'll definitely want to check out physically based rendering. This is where the game industry is heading, and Unity 5 is no exception (the new "Standard" shader, and the deferred rendering pipeline, is now physically-based)

I highly recommend these to start:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice