A quick question on specular masks...

adam

When creating a specular mask does putting variation within the specular (like say I had a white box for some shininess and put some texture overlayed on top of it giving it a variation in its whiteness) make a difference?

Or is it better to just leave it near-solid/solid white (or light grey, etc etc).

Hope this makes sense, if not I'll take pics to better illustrate what I'm asking.

sinistergfx

Some grunge/texture in your spec/gloss maps always helps, especially with dirtyer/more damaged surfaces. Nothing has a perfectly even level of shine.

poopinmymouth

Having just gone through making about 20 specular maps for work.

Color variation is good, in fact, it's really REALLY good, within your specular maps. Many times you will want your specular to be a different color than your color map, if you are able to use an RGB specular. I normally make the large flat surfaces fairly dull, and the edges a bit brighter, just to emphasize where they are. You can achieve this very easily by putting your light bake layer as a softlight mode over your spec map and play with the levels with it to dull down the large flat areas, and you can take a version of the color map, run the find edges filter, desaturate, then invert. Put this layer over as a lighten layer, and slightly colorize it and play with the opacity of the layer. This really pops out the edges.