your base texture is really bland and theres like nothing really on it and your wood specular is totally off. you want to put things to highlight in the specular, like scratches or parts of the blade (which are the brightest) not everything evenly
also paint the different sides of the blades with different light values, makes it a lot better.
i'm actually the guy that made this tutorial and there are a lot of things I would recommend today that I didn't know enough to teach at the time.
first, your UVs are making it harder for you to texture this, look at for example the way the side of the blade is split into at least 3 parts - it will be harder to texture details continuously over this surface than if it was all one UV island. the way to get around this is to favor fewer UV islands, keep each island on its own smoothing group, and use supporting edges where needed to prevent bad smoothing and therefore make for a cleaner bake.
texture-wise, don't be too eager to jump into wood overlays and hand-painted scratches. start with flat base colors in the diffuse and specular (and gloss if you're using it). your materials must read with flat colors before you move on to texture overlays and unique details, or else you're going to over-complicate things for yourself and ultimately waste time riffing on a bad foundation.
when it comes to adding details, look at the wood and ask why you've made the darker-pigmented areas lighter in the specular and whether it accurately reflects your reference material for how wood reflects light. and in terms of overall shape for details (thinking specifically of those scratches on metal), these days i wouldn't recommend hand-painting much of anything... use details from photos whenever possible, and follow the same approach of making sure they are represented on every map in the appropriate way.
I'd also recommend inverting the color of the wood's specular from the diffuse; it will give a more natural color to the wood's specular highlights.
At this level, you should see the grain on the knife edge, as well as the lighter secondary bevel. You can probably do both details almost entirely in the specular map.
Most of the other metal pieces will probably have a subtle satin finish.
Ctrl-I inverts everything, including saturation and brightness. You can adjust the hue alone by using Image/Adjustments/Hue Saturation... (Ctrl-U) and changing the hue by +/-180. The differences might be subtle, but you might want to play around in a scrap workspace to see them.
Well I'd sort of have to disagree
Quote from the link:
"You can see in this ref here(my fingers lololol) that the highlight is more of a clean white than anything else....
So when the goal is to get nice clean white highlights, it helps to use the inverse color of your diffuse."
That's actually quite outdated imo, every shader/engine that I can personally think off (udk/cryengine/marmoset/xoliulsahder/etc) all are "correct", in that white spec = white highlight.
If you actually mean use blue because that looks better in your opinion on wood, then that's fine, but I wouldn't say it's a rule to always do that because of the above.
yeah, these days most shaders seem to be doing their lighting in linear space, you should definitely work to a target implementation (if your end result will be marmoset toolbag, and you know toolbag applies spec in linear space, then don't color your spec in a way designed to compensate for the diffuse)
wood and lacquer are dialectric materials that'll be giving off untinted reflections (white specular), in general the key to making it look both interesting and correct is proper gloss information such as variation between the pigment grains, making darker pigments/knots more dull, that sorta thing, rather than tinting it blue imo.
Replies
also paint the different sides of the blades with different light values, makes it a lot better.
first, your UVs are making it harder for you to texture this, look at for example the way the side of the blade is split into at least 3 parts - it will be harder to texture details continuously over this surface than if it was all one UV island. the way to get around this is to favor fewer UV islands, keep each island on its own smoothing group, and use supporting edges where needed to prevent bad smoothing and therefore make for a cleaner bake.
texture-wise, don't be too eager to jump into wood overlays and hand-painted scratches. start with flat base colors in the diffuse and specular (and gloss if you're using it). your materials must read with flat colors before you move on to texture overlays and unique details, or else you're going to over-complicate things for yourself and ultimately waste time riffing on a bad foundation.
when it comes to adding details, look at the wood and ask why you've made the darker-pigmented areas lighter in the specular and whether it accurately reflects your reference material for how wood reflects light. and in terms of overall shape for details (thinking specifically of those scratches on metal), these days i wouldn't recommend hand-painting much of anything... use details from photos whenever possible, and follow the same approach of making sure they are represented on every map in the appropriate way.
At this level, you should see the grain on the knife edge, as well as the lighter secondary bevel. You can probably do both details almost entirely in the specular map.
Most of the other metal pieces will probably have a subtle satin finish.
@DWalker can you please tell me how to invert the color for the spec?
it was THAT easy huh? lmao :poly142::poly124:
This link is a pretty good discussion of why you want to color the specular map :http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=64286.
Quote from the link:
"You can see in this ref here(my fingers lololol) that the highlight is more of a clean white than anything else....
So when the goal is to get nice clean white highlights, it helps to use the inverse color of your diffuse."
That's actually quite outdated imo, every shader/engine that I can personally think off (udk/cryengine/marmoset/xoliulsahder/etc) all are "correct", in that white spec = white highlight.
If you actually mean use blue because that looks better in your opinion on wood, then that's fine, but I wouldn't say it's a rule to always do that because of the above.
wood and lacquer are dialectric materials that'll be giving off untinted reflections (white specular), in general the key to making it look both interesting and correct is proper gloss information such as variation between the pigment grains, making darker pigments/knots more dull, that sorta thing, rather than tinting it blue imo.