texture: reflective latex for baking

jzero

I've been trying quite a bit to try and make my creaky Max5 do the kind of reflective latex that Bianca Beauchamp is shown wearing here.





So far, I've only been able to get this, which I'm not really happy with. I'm trying to get the gray reflection surfaces you see in the photos above.



I'm going to render the final and Bake to Texture, to get a texture map for a realtime model. Any suggestions for environments, refmaps, Material settings, and lighting setups are welcome.

Thanks!

Joshua Stubbles

A fresnel effect of some sort, in conjunction with what you have there might do it.

Rob Galanakis

Reflections need to be done real-time. The diffuse texture should not have highlights or reflections in it (ie, you cannot "bake" them).

With the right normal map, and cube map, writing a reflection shader is relatively easy, and will look similar enough to those models.

EDIT: The eye shader on my website would be somewhat similar to what you want to achieve with reflections. Because the reflectivity of the surface, the specular should look raytraced, so a regular normal-specular shader with cubemap won't really work well.

EDIT2: I think this is a cool idea for a shader (latex), let me see what I can come up with.

MoP

Yeah you can't do this effect just with a diffuse. A bright specular on a dark plain diffuse might go some way towards faking it, but you really need a realtime environment map of some sort to pull off the effect - even Quake 3 could do this so I'd be very surprised if you can't use this effect for whatever reason.

Vailias

if you really want to do this as a baked diffuse rather than a realtime shader then set the material to be black and about 90% reflective. Then set up a floor plane, medium gray in texture, and about 20-50% self illuminated. Make sure it's big.
Put another small plane or 2 out well in front of the model in positions for the lights, which are "soft boxes". Make these materials white with 100% self illumination.
Last but not least, set up a plane behind the model, give it a white to medium gray diffuse and link the self illumination to a gradient from white at the base to black or dark gray at the top. That will give you a similar faked light setup as to what is in the photos, and again, it will look a bit strange once it is in motion in a game engine.
Black leather you can get away with since its rather diffused anyway, but shiny black PVC would work much better with a realtime cubemap.

Rob Galanakis

Once you are done with the high-poly and normal mapping, please send me the model and normal map files and I'll keep working on the shader, its coming out alright (in fairness its only taken 5 minutes or so) but I really would need source art to test how it looks (or just an arm or leg, doesn't need to be the whole body). If I get a chance I'll make some myself in the next couple weeks.

jzero

Good advice, all. I should make clear, though, that the goal of this is actually to have raytraced reflections baked into a diffuse map. I know, not the most ideal situation, but the environment it's headed for acknowledges this. NOT a modern 'next gen' engine, I assure you.

Vailias: That's the kind of suggestion I needed, thanks. I'll be trying that out and posting the results.

Professor420: *laughs despite myself* The high-poly and normal-mapping? Sorry, I wish I, or this project, were that sophisticated, but no. The model you see above is the one I'm using, although probably with some more smoothing and some simple surface details added, like seams.
.

Rick Stirling

Remember -those are studio shots with studio lighting and white backdrops. If the same shots had been taken in yellow room, you'd have a yellow tinge. Outdoors you'd end up with a slightly blue tint.

Since you are wanting to bake your reflections into the diffuse itself, consider your reflections colours a little.

Xenobond

For only being a simple diffuse texture, the elite guards from RtCW gave that shiny leather/latex look rather well.