[Can someone explain PBR Occlusion/Metallic/Roughness to me like I'm a Golden Retriever?]

This is functioning to pbr spec as far as I can tell.  Here is antialiased text, and blurred text, with the light source (technically environment hdri) rotating around it, in substance painter, basically reproducing the behavior you're seeing:

https://gyazo.com/e9b1746a7b838315425c086f7e3814f5

 

As far as "why", that is a good question though.  Would love someone to correct me here but my understanding (intuition or guess really) has been.... Imagine we have a board and paint it with 3 strips,

A. a flat, matte paint,

B. An eggshell or "medium glossiness" paint, and

C. A very shiny 3rd example paint, satin or wet satin paint even. 

Point a spotlight at that board.  You'd expect the light hitting C to be the most "shiny" or have sharper and more accurate highlights, while A would still exhibit a highlight but much bigger, softer, more washed out almost... and B would be somewhere in the middle.

So with that in mind, here's a mockup (but with 5 "Strips" instead of 3)

https://gyazo.com/ca0097cf0557fe61400bc3294acaeb1d

So, watching the mockup animation, notice about 1/3rd of the way in... the 2nd strip from the right shows as "brighter" overall or reflecting more light across the entire surface, because of the angle the light is hitting it at, at least in the area where the arrow is pointing in the screenshot below.  I feel like that is the same sort of thing...

 

 

With that in mind, watching the 1st animation above again notice how the blurred text kinda "pops" or... how the light first hits the edge/halo, then lights up the bulk of the text itself...

Here's a polycount post discussing the same kind of behavior too, from what I can tell, and also attributing it to contrast or different adjacent values:

https://polycount.com/discussion/184534/pbr-smoothness-bleeding-issue

 

Edit: Chatgpt claims that this is called "Specular aliasing", briefly googling that term does seem to show more instances and confirmation.

 

TL;DR;GR2GR (too long, didn't retrieve, Golden retriever to golden retriver 😆)

    - This is sadly how PBR works across the board afaik, as a visual artist using PBR materials you'll usually just want to "fake it" and blur, smudge, or paint roughness over areas like this.

 

 

 

[Dear Mira]

It was early '07, we were both so young.  I couldn't stop staring at you!  You were so cute, had this way of copying and mimicking everything I did.  I feel horrible about how I kept saying I wanted to "share" you with all my friends, I never meant it like that...  You taught me to look at things in a different way!

I saw you later that year I think, hiding in the same dirty back-alley debug menu.  At least... I wasn't sure that it was you, she didn't have the same luster, was so square around the edges... I always wonder where you ended up, what really happened, why you just.. faded away...

Every time I see a water reflection it hurts me, I miss you so much baby.  Sometimes I think I would flip the whole damn sim upside down just to see you one more time, but I know it wouldn't be the same. :(

http://www.sluniverse.com/snapzilla_snapshots/logan_bauer_postcard_from_second_life_137283.jpg