Specular map master thread - The hidden art behind the awesomesauce.

Wahlgren

In here I hope we can discuss cool tips n' tricks and show examples of good spec maps.
To start it off. Do you have any examples of awesome spec maps and what are your thoughts on the subject?


_______________

Let's face it. Most of us hate doing them properly. It's not always about crunching polys and painting awesome diffusemaps. Most of the time a bad specular map will totally ruin your piece while a good one will take your model to higher levels of awesome.

Still. Most of us can be crazy lazy when we do them. "Desaturate or hue-shift diffusemap, increase contrast, paint some highlights here and there".

Here's one of mine. Not really a great spec map (a bit subtle) but hey. Gotta show something right? The handle (top left) is a bit crappy but it worked in the model.

A small trick I've noticed is that organic stuff usually looks better with a hueshift of 180 while metal gains more from just being slightly desaturated.


Specmap in action.

Millenia

Looks good - could you show the diffuse too so I can see how much difference there actually is between them?

eld

It would be awesome if we could include gloss-map discussions in here too, considering specular maps and gloss maps go hand in hand.

ZacD

Spec's most important job is to create differences between the look of "materials"
I think the polished wood should be a bit shinier when compared to a dull gun metal. But there's a few spots that should be more intense on the gun, any scratched corner or edge, or any nuts/bolts/springs that are made of a different material.

shogunato

good idea

THE 5

Could you post the spec of that sword you made?

I'd like to tune my Sword a bit

ZacD

@THE 5 The gold is one of the biggest things that looks off, gold tends to be mostly dark and yellowbrownish, but the bright yellow/white highlights is what really sells it.

Cyrael

great thread. I hate/don't know how to do proper spec maps. So thanks for this!

IEatApples

Any good tutorials on making spec maps? Its an area ive been avoiding a bit to much and need to work on.

THE 5

Quick model to practice with, gonna pimp up the specular with the help of this thread

Eric Chadwick

This thread in the Archives section might help.
specular maps and normal maps

Also some more here on the wiki
http://wiki.polycount.com/Specular Color Map

rasmus

There's nothing interesting about gloss maps as far as I'm concerned - if I use 'em I treat it like flat areas of different values (see below) that correspond in 0-255 to Max 's 0-100 gloss slider as reference, since they're a bit hard to visualize in the head. Spec maps on the other hand, yeah - metals usually benefit from being the same color as the diffuse as opposed to organics (as discussed at length in the juicy "Why so blue?"-thread, hehe). I tend to put most of the high-contrasty noise and over-darkened grime in the spec, then copying it over ever so slightly to the diffuse to make sure it carries over and doesn't appear too unrelated. Using oily patterns or colored noise can also help make plain gray metals look more interesting. I kind of see a specmap as an opportunity to magically 'reveal' a second texture almost, making the most of the map, not just a way to mask out highlights where they shouldn't be. I like the hints of stuff glinting in the highlights that make you go "Oh - HEEEEYYY"...

ZacD

You gotta post a image of the model showing off the spec with the texture sheet!!!

attattattack

I'll post the link for ya
http://www.gameartisans.org/contests/dw/4/view_entries/finals_1_1886.html

butt_sahib

Here is what i stand by when doing my specular maps.....
http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/ArtReference_SpecularMaps

:-)

eld

rasmus wrote: »

There's nothing interesting about gloss maps as far as I'm concerned - if I use 'em I treat it like flat areas of different values

Exactly, they ARE extremely simple, but they usually fall into the void when it comes to threads like this, they do have a big impact on the final result, which should be important to mention.

r_fletch_r

Personally I create my Spec/Gloss from my diffuse. That is not to say that i use the values from my diffuse. just desaturating the diffuse is usually totally the wrong way to go, and gets really crappy results. just because paint is white doesn't mean it reflects 100% of the light that hits it or that dark dirt has no specular.

I usually paint my diffuse using tiled textures masked with layer masks. using each layer to define certain specific features on the map. I have a layer for distinctive materials like metal, paint , dirt, rust,decals and so on.

Once my diffuse is done i duplicate the layers and use adjustment layers to get the layers to the correct values, this is great because your masks take care of all the work.

eld is spot on. gloss is UBER important. Gloss is essential for getting a good range of material definitions. On a model made of different mediums its essential to being able to define those materials.

The 5: you have you lightmap in your specular map??? The only time thats really usefull is for tight cavitys. not broad shading. spec is defines the how much light is reflected when it hits not if it can hit.

vahl

rasmus wrote: »

There's nothing interesting about gloss maps as far as I'm concerned - if I use 'em I treat it like flat areas of different values (see below) that correspond in 0-255 to Max 's 0-100 gloss slider as reference, since they're a bit hard to visualize in the head. Spec maps on the other hand, yeah - metals usually benefit from being the same color as the diffuse as opposed to organics (as discussed at length in the juicy "Why so blue?"-thread, hehe). I tend to put most of the high-contrasty noise and over-darkened grime in the spec, then copying it over ever so slightly to the diffuse to make sure it carries over and doesn't appear too unrelated. Using oily patterns or colored noise can also help make plain gray metals look more interesting. I kind of see a specmap as an opportunity to magically 'reveal' a second texture almost, making the most of the map, not just a way to mask out highlights where they shouldn't be. I like the hints of stuff glinting in the highlights that make you go "Oh - HEEEEYYY"...

and if you didn't consider them that way, you'd have added the grease and dirt present in your diffuse and other things that would have broken the specular's uniformity, thus would have made the material much more interesting and good looking that what you have now. Sorry to be blunt man, not trying to come up as an asshole, but this kind of statement is just...WOW...nothing interesting from gloss maps ? there's so much you can add to the spec from a gloss map...this is the map that can make your metal look like metal, or concrete, or plastic, it shouldn't be underrated.

rasmus

Vahl: OH SNAP "and if you didn't consider them that way, you'd have added the grease and dirt present in your diffuse and other things that would have broken the specular's uniformity, thus would have made the material much more interesting and good looking that what you have now." But that is exactly what I am doing, in the spec, which I thought was readily apparent. Gloss= size of highlight, Spec= Power and color of highlight. Thus it is really easy to control the hilight size with the flat values when as in this case I wanted to separate large areas (broader hilight on sides of box, sharper on shiny back tank) Then do everything else in spec. Not saying that's the only way, but it's easy to control. So like Eld is saying, gloss is important, but to the extent that I've used it this is how I find them used best. If you think I'm missing something, bring it on

EDIT: It is true that you could go in on a finer level, sure - like making sure that each bullethole on the body in this case has a higher value to ensure a sharper spec where the paint and dust have been scraped off - if that is what is actually needed to make it look better. I'm just approaching it from the saner angle as opposed to the "I'll just copy my specmap into the gloss, hur hur" approach, which is both crap and impossible to control.

vahl

well I'm not saying you should copy your spec in the gloss, that would just be plain retarded, I say that painted metal doesn't have the same width as brushed metal, or bare metal, or galvanized metal, or dirt, or, well any other material present on your example. there are materials which looks is only possible to achieve properly by heavily working on the gloss map, like anodized surfaces, chrome, bumpy surfaces, etc.
in your example the variation you add in the spec totally disappears when the light hits the surface because it's all the same gloss value. and making a more elaborate gloss map isn't much harder to control than what you do now, unless your psds are a clusterfuck of subfolders and hundreds of layers, but who would want to do that anyways ?

I'm not saying my method is the best, far from that, just pointing that your statement is wrong to begin with, then the way you use the gloss maps is up to you, only the end result counts

on skin for instance, a good gloss map can easily help you getting the specific bumpy look of skinpores by breaking the smoothness of the specularity.

Eric Chadwick

rasmus wrote: »

Gloss= size of highlight, Spec= Power and color of highlight.

Not to be pedantic here, but "power" is usually gloss. So,

Specular Gloss = Power, width, same thing.
Specular Color = Color and intensity.

r_fletch_r

Im not saying your wrong Eric but calling Gloss power doesnt make sense to me, I could be wrong but by my understanding gloss is a measure of diffusion. The power/amount of reflected light comes from how reflective the surface is

Spec = Aproximation of reflected/absorbed light
Gloss = Aproximation of how specular/diffuse the reflected light is.


This only deals with point lights doesn't it? I mean if you want to get really nice reflection/diffusion your going to need a cubemap.

ZacD

Specular highlights are only a cheating shortcut, technically its caused by the reflectiveness and glossiness of objects and materials in real life. Power is a weird term to me too, but I guess you could think of it as reflective power or something.

Eric Chadwick

Might help to see the Microsoft's Direct3D specs.

Specular Reflection

Specular reflection creates highlights on objects, making them appear shiny. The D3DMATERIAL9 structure contains two members that describe the specular highlight color as well as the material's overall shininess. You establish the color of the specular highlights by setting the Specular member to the desired RGBA color - the most common colors are white or light gray. The values you set in the Power member control how sharp the specular effects are.


Specular highlights can create dramatic effects. Drawing again on the blue crystal analogy: a larger Power value creates sharper specular highlights, making the crystal appear to be quite shiny. Smaller values increase the area of the effect, creating a dull reflection that make the crystal look frosty. To make an object truly matte, set the Power member to zero and the color in Specular to black. Experiment with different levels of reflection to produce a realistic appearance for your needs. The following illustration shows two identical models. The one on the left uses a specular reflection power of 10; the model on the right has no specular reflection.




Illustration of specular reflection models

When I work with shaders, I see the term specular power used quite a lot, and it always means the width. Also sometimes "Exponent" is used, same thing.

But it also controls the intensity at the same time, since a wider highlight is going to spread the same brightness across a wider area. Or I think that's the mechanism, not sure. It does generally get dimmer the wider it gets.

r_fletch_r

Yup broader spec means more light diffusion which means dimmer highlight, otherwise your in a situation where the surface is actually amplifying the light that hits it.

THE 5

r_fletch_r wrote: »

The 5: you have you lightmap in your specular map??? The only time thats really usefull is for tight cavitys. not broad shading. spec is defines the how much light is reflected when it hits not if it can hit.

I don't know what a lightmap is, I assume you mean the AO layer above the specularity, is that wrong? Where AO occurs there is a shadow, thus not much light and not much specualarity that could happen there. Thats just how I've seen it so far, dunno wether it's the way to go with, I did not texture much so far (3 Models including that test sword).

I still wanna see Wahlgrens sword spec
I don't know how to describe it but the specularity on the blade looks like marble. somehow like this, looks awesome

In his first example there are also a lot of gradients, by what rule are they placed, toplight? And there is this "warm shadows and cold highlight" storry that I do not understand yet.

Currently reading through the thread eric linked to, but I did not get much from it so far :S

r_fletch_r

the 5: I wouldn't bake broad shading into the spec map or the diffuse map. you've got a normal map for that and most engines these days will take care of dynamic shadowing. Cavity/AO is fine but your 'ambient occlusion' looks more broad where it should really just be focusing on contact/crevices

so far as that sword goes it looks like high spec, very low gloss.

THE 5

Took away the randomness from the gold, actualy I took away the gold since I want to get this steel texture right.
Also turend down the gloss in the 3Point Studios shader to 5.
I still don't like the balde and ignore the hilt so far.

EDIT:
Now I realy put a marble texture over it, added some scratches aswell.


EDIT:
Tried that gradient stuff, dunno if thats good...