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What is a Reflection Property map?

Desperad0
Desperad0
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Desperad0
Axis Animation studio just came to our school to give a talk, and one of their slides showed texture maps that had the usual diffuse, normal, etc. But one of them was labeled "Reflection Property" and it looks orange and green. I've never seen or heard of some thing like that. Does anyone have experience working with something like that?

The slide was about texture of a character in their CG short series Halo 4: Spartans.
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  • Ark
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    Ark polycounter lvl 11
    Sounds like some type of mask map for one of the properties of reflection, but using a rgb texture makes me think it's not.

    Hard to tell really without seeing the slide, could just as easily be a material id map.
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  • Desperad0
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    Desperad0
    Ark wrote: »
    Sounds like some type of mask map for one of the properties of reflection, but using a rgb texture makes me think it's not.

    Hard to tell really without seeing the slide, could just as easily be a material id map.

    I wanted to take a picture of it with my phone, but the speaker was looking my way and they probably won't like their slides photographed.
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  • Lord McMutton
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    Lord McMutton polycounter lvl 17
    If it was green and orange, perhaps it was changing the color of the reflection? If the character it was applied to had Chief's green/orange color scheme, at least.
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    It was probably a packed texture, like Snefer's example here
    http://wiki.polycount.com/TextureAtlas
    And it sounds like it had different reflection masks in each of the RGB channels... glossiness, reflectivity, roughness, etc.
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  • retleks
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    retleks polycounter lvl 18
    If it was just R&G channels, then it could have been a map used to manipulate UV's. My guess is that it is similar to a direction map or even was a direction map. Knowing what surface it was on might help us a little more.
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    Ah then it could be a DuDv map or maybe a curvature map. More info, fwiw: http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTextureTypes
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  • Desperad0
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    Desperad0
    retleks wrote: »
    If it was just R&G channels, then it could have been a map used to manipulate UV's. My guess is that it is similar to a direction map or even was a direction map. Knowing what surface it was on might help us a little more.

    It was for a photo-real human face of a woman.
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  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    Ask them? Seriously, ask them, I'm pretty sure someone giving a Talk, you can ask stuff?

    If they left already, then...'tuff nut?

    I mean were you paying attention as to what was being told about this map? I'm with Retleks on this one, sounds like a Direction Map for Aniso-Reflection, but everyone also could be right, it could also be a Mask-Map, where each channel defines a certain property of the Reflection (R=Roughness, G=Bollocks, B=Mask, etc).

    Although in that case, it would be really weird for using orange, many renderging solutions tend to 'bleed' out colors if you try and separate different elements, making for some unwanted detail, not sure about that in this case.

    EDIT: A human face was used? Did the human face look correct to you?
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  • Desperad0
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    Desperad0
    They were talking about their studio and pipeline, so I wasn't sure about asking something technical and specific that sounded like it belongs to a classroom to a professor - especially in an auditorium full of people. While I was hesitating he already moved off to another topic. If you think this is a stupid thing to do here, you can not reply and let the thread get buried and die like usual, and we'll just move on.

    The human face looked pretty correct to me. It was for the character Sarah Palmer: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_meaye1fgnV1rjezt2o1_1280.jpg
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  • arshlevon
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    arshlevon polycounter lvl 18
    did it look like this?

    mkub.jpg

    if so, then its just the spec map and the roughness map, a roughness map is just a gloss map, sometimes it looks inverted.

    so the spec is in the red channel and the roughness is in the green,


    i just did a google search for exactly what you asked and came across this page that explains the scanning process used in the series, its here

    http://www.ten24.info/?mtheme_portfolio=halo-4-spartan-ops-3d-scanning


    it also has the texture breakdown, i assumed a refection properties map would be the properties of light reflecting off of a surface, and that would be spec and gloss. they just put two maps in one texture.

    google is a cool tool, you type in things you might not know about and you get answers.
    for this particular search i just typed in a few key words from your question

    reflection property map axis animation halo

    it was the second link, the first being your post.
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