Gloss Map

cyborgguineapig

I need to create a gloss map for one of the assets for work but I am a little lost. I know how it works and what it does, its just that I am a little confused in how to paint it. Is it just flat colors ranging from white to black for different areas of the texture? Any links , examples or tips would be greatly appreciated.

-Art

cyborgguineapig

Nevermind.. found some good links to describe how to make gloss (aka specular power).

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=364120&highlight=specular+power+map
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=364120&highlight=specular+power+map

So I guess it really is mostly flat colors and gradients.

Rob Galanakis

Gloss factor, programmatically speaking, is:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>float NdotH = saturate(dot(N, H)); //raw specular level
float specularLevel = pow(NdotH, gloss);</pre><hr />

So we can see that, say we return a value of .5 for NdotH (saturated dot products are always between 0 and 1), and we raise it to the gloss power, we get:
if gloss = 2, specular = .25
if gloss = 30, specular = 0.0000000009

As we can see, gloss makes the specular power fall off exponentially. A high gloss makes a very tight highlight, a low gloss makes a very broad highlight.

Anyway, it seems like those links provide more than enough knowledge about the gloss of certain materials, so no need to go into that, I hope the code-understanding makes you a bit more knowledgeable about it at least.

cyborgguineapig

Thanks Professor420, I'll admit though I'm not much of a coder. I figured painting a gloss map was very similiar to how the bell curve works in most 3D applications. White for sharper highlights, black for broader. More or less its basically just painting flat greyscale values for different parts of your map. It is so simple and easy to create, I could not help but feel I was doing it wrong