Is it just me or does this character looks really bad? He looks like a cartoon. Do I need to change a quality setting or something?

This is what he looks like in a basic MAX level for me:

That's not too bad.

But.... does his corpse need to get balloon-hands so quickly?

Furthermore, (n your screenshot) his wrists are slightly too thin to look natural. Unless his shirt has sweater-style cuffs stitched to the ends (which is something my mother would probably insist on doing to keep out the draught even as I went out to fight ruthless criminal gangs).

He resembles an action figure whose hands are deigned to plug into the arms via the wrists.

Your screenshot has a complete absence of light influence, so the shaders have nothing to latch on to.
Thats the downside of PBR, without really good lighting, it looks considerably worse than DNS.

What you can do is replace the color map with a more pronounced diffuse map. That would require some basic texturing.

Hmmm ... not quite. If the PBR material is made well, then you will get the correct results from the material under any lighting conditions. Here's a definition of PBR:



While the model looks poor in the first shot due to poor (flat) lighting, it's also partially due to poor quality materials on the model. This is not the fault of PBR materials, but of the way this PBR material was set up. In my opinion, the model also looks poor in my screen shot with better lighting. Again, this is due to poor quality materials to begin with. So, it's not the fault of PBR or a "downside" of PBR in particular. In this case, it's the fault of the poorer quality of the material itself.

In theory, yes. But just look at some of the games out there. The material on the GG chars are fine, relatively speaking. Likely better than what the overwhelming majority of end users can make. But render it in flat lighting with high ambient settings and it all looks like play doh. There is just something off in the way that GG max renders currently, aside from the materials in use.

Had a quick look, technically speaking it should be making use of the AO map in the surface texture. However that said I did have a quick look at the skin texture it self. The skin texture is way too light, which is the reason it looks like that in the shadow. Almost of the textures on the character is way too bright, because the engine doesn't make use of light scattering or surface scattering you end up with a character looking like this, when in the shadows.

It wouldn't be a bad idea, to increase the AO, as well as a bit of gloss and metalness to the textures, this should enhance the skin feel of the character.

But yeah the skin color is an issue

A bit of gloss, a bit of red hue to the skin.



Looks better even in the shadows.

Yep. So, again, not an issue with PBR. It's an issue with the PBR materials in MAX and, as Wiz pointed out, partly due to some of the shortcomings of MAX. PRB does look proper under all lighting conditions.



Most look fantastic ... in all lighting conditions. Things are not meant to look dynamic in dim lighting. That's just not how one's eyes work.

You know, there are some steam-fodder UE4 asset flips that use perfectly made asset store content but still manage to have it look atrocious due to the way they light it. (or don't for that matter). But yes, max shortcomings and the material seem to be at fault here. I don't disagree with you, technically you should be correct ...its just that I've seen it and I always feel so bad for the artists that made those models for them to be defiled this way.

PBR =/= PBR, it depends on how its implemented. GG classic has some form of PBR implementation too, which made it look partly worse than it did when it was strictly DNS mostly due to its complete lack of a proper lighting engine.