Resolved Mask Map - ambient occlusion shiny ground workaround?

In the HDRP manual - it says that ambient occlusion in the mask map is used to calculate specular occlusion as well.

I applied a black mask to tweak the values of each channel (metallic, smoothness, etc) through remapping the values. AO also needs a texture to tweak the values.

Is there a way to get around this specular reflection in dark areas while keeping the indirect lightings from lightmaps? If I set AO to 0, then I lose all indirect, but if I set anything higher, I'll get shiny ground when looking at an angle.

Spoiler: Shiny Ground - AO != 0

Losing indirect light when setting AO to 0.

Spoiler: AO = 0

Spoiler: AO = 1

 

The problem looks more like the floor is reflecting the light from the skybox. The AO in the mask map is meant for small details that have no geometric depth and are instead faked by the normal map, since AO won't touch them by default. If you try to use it for large areas like a lightmap you'll end up with massive textures eating memory.

What I think you want to do is bake a reflection probe inside the building so the reflection is of the black surroundings, rather than the skybox.

 

The specular is gone after baking a reflection probe. Thank you

 

Do I have to bake reflection probe everywhere to not reflect the sky? Is it possible to disable environment reflection on a specific shader like URP can?