Design Nomenclature / Surface & Material
Diffuse map
Also called color map, base color map, diffuse texture
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
The texture supplying a surface's diffuse response. In legacy spec/gloss pipelines it routinely carries baked lighting, ambient occlusion, and painted highlights; a true albedo map carries none of that, only the material's own reflectance. The difference is authoring discipline, not file format — the same PNG can be either.
In practice
Used as a synonym for albedo, and mostly it is one. The word is worth keeping precisely for the case where light is baked in.
Not to be confused with
- AlbedoThe fraction of incident light a surface returns by diffuse scattering, per wavelength band — the color light acquires after entering a dielectric, bouncing, and leaving. Bounded in practice: real materials rarely exceed 0.9 or fall below 0.03. Under metal/rough conventions the same channel supplies conductors' normal-incidence specular reflectance instead.
- Ambient occlusionThe fraction of the hemisphere above a point blocked by nearby geometry — a purely geometric visibility term, no light involved. As a material channel it attenuates ambient diffuse in creases. Physically it is a coarse stand-in for the interreflection a GI solver computes properly, so under real GI it double-darkens.