Custom Gloss Maps
polycounter lvl 5
Hello 
I've just begun learning UDK this week and I've been playing around with the material editor, which is really cool, but gloss maps have me stumped.
I am aware you can make your own gloss maps within UDK using parameters and whatnot, but creating textures for my environment, I made my own custom gloss maps and height maps etc through ddo and NdO, and when I plug my gloss map into the specular power, it makes my metal beam texture look extremely harsh, how can I get it to look as enhanced as it does in the previewers for dDo?
Thanks for any help.
I've just begun learning UDK this week and I've been playing around with the material editor, which is really cool, but gloss maps have me stumped.
I am aware you can make your own gloss maps within UDK using parameters and whatnot, but creating textures for my environment, I made my own custom gloss maps and height maps etc through ddo and NdO, and when I plug my gloss map into the specular power, it makes my metal beam texture look extremely harsh, how can I get it to look as enhanced as it does in the previewers for dDo?
Thanks for any help.
Replies
Do you have any great resources for material/general tutorials in UDK? I have Hourences and the UDK official doc up at the moment.
if you do a linear interpolate, with a low value of 8 (in channel a) and a high value of 256 (in channel b) and use your gloss map as the alpha, it'll give you a much cleaner result.
the reason for this is that your gloss map has values of 0-1 with 0 being black and 1 being white. if you multiply the map by 256 (for example) then you're going to miss out on "in between" values.
for example:
0.01 = 2.56
0.02 = 5.12
0.03 = 7.68
see how it jumps with even the smallest change in the base gloss value? whereas interpolation would give you a much smoother transition.
Another problem I've just run into was that I have this light with a glass like material on it, which also glows, but the problem is that its made the entire mesh glass instead of just the globe like I want it to be.
Here's the material properties.
you've got a fresnel node multiplied with your alpha texture and the result plugs into opacity, there are two problems i see here:
1. your alpha texture doesn't have any completely white parts, which means all of the mesh will be translucent. make any parts you want opaque completely white in your alpha.
2. fresnel is a mathematical term that has the potential to equal zero. I'll explain the actual math:
lambert shading = diffuse * dot(normal,light)
fresnel (basic) = 1 - (dot(normal,light))
with lambert shading you can expect that when light hits a sphere, the surface is lit at the point of incidence(where the light hits the object) in the shape of a circle that fades out to nothing at the edges of the sphere. because fresnel is exactly the same but with "1 - " at the beginning, it means it's the inverse of that. so where lambert is 1 at the middle and 0 at the edges, fresnel is 0 at the middle and 1 at the edges.
what this means for your alpha, is that regardless of what your input texture says, the fresnel is multiplying it to 0 (black) at the middle of the rendered object. so you will always have this problem while fresnel is plugged in.
Heres what my alpha looks like in PS http://gyazo.com/0b7cd041db09acc770049383c17198d8
and here's the nodes updated.
http://gyazo.com/59abe07f0037fb2c86eb9fa133b02cf2
Still unfortunately the same result.
Yeah that'll probably work.
It did solve this other problem had perfectly using materialinstances.
Although one thing I find with them is, say if I wanna set my material instance diffuse to none, it doesn't seem to change anything, I had to basically create a 1024x1024 white sheet to disable like for example a glow effect. Is there an easier way around that?
It worked
http://gyazo.com/c945adb3cab9f7014e35ac33887f78dc
And it looks awesome. Thanks
Is there anything that can be improved on that material?