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How to get this effect (Mass Effect armor)

greentooth
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C86G greentooth
Hi there.

I wonder how this dot-patterned effect is done.
Do you think the dots are in the diffuse or in the spec or both? It won´t be in the normals, I think.

Also, what about the dirt on the shoulde pad (1)? Diffuse only or also spec/gloss?
c1ohcvcag0kwfwdwa.jpg

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  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    Nothing special, standard diffuse, spec, gloss and normal maps. Dots do have a specular (they are respecting the light effect) and the dirty parts aren't shiny.

    Looks closely, the answer is all in that picture.
  • C86G
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    C86G greentooth
    Yeah I know about the different maps. Just wondered which one they use for the pattern. Or said better, which way is a good to get this effect : )

    I`ll try it with diffuse/spec/gloss.

    Thanks.
  • Ghostscape
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    Ghostscape polycounter lvl 13
    I'd be very surprised if they're using gloss maps.

    The dither-dots appear to have a very dark/no spec, with the brighter dots having spec, so the pattern shows through even in the speculr highly. The left-most picture has a normal-map pattern in the pure black area forming that bikini-swoop down from her hip to crotch.

    The dirt on the shoulder pad is most likely dark in the diffuse and has no spec.

    My reason for assuming there is no gloss map is that everything on her suit appears to be uniformly shiny and it's largely a singular material. A gloss mask in an alpha costs a lot of memory. I don't remember if you can customize teammates armor or not but unless they're cramming the custom color masks in with their gloss (which is unlikely since the blue channel gives you unusable information frequently thanks to compression and I think they only use two colors for customization so they're likely only using one map), I think it's unlikely they're spending memory on gloss maps.

    For a futuristic sci-fi game like Mass Effect gloss is probably the least-useful map you can have out of D/N/S/g
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