glass texture

joe gracey

I'm modeling a lantern and can't get the glass texture part of it right. I'm looking more for an old, dirty type of glass texture, not clean. I'm using Photoshop and Max. Anyone have any good ideas to help me out? Thanks for the help.

Rhinokey

i did some pretty decent glass on warhammer by using a bluish difuse, a cloudy alpha, a splotchy spec map, and an enviroment map of basicaly a photo. took a lot of tweaking on all of it to get it to look right, but in the end it worked

Mark Dygert

Are you confined by anything or can you use max to it's full potential?

joe gracey

I cannot use Max to its full potential. I have two more semesters left in school. I'd say I have a medium understanding of it. I hope that helps.

Mark Dygert

Sorry I should have been more clear.

What kind of maps can you use? Are you stuck using just a defuse map? Or can you use an opacity map also? What about a spec map? Reflection map?
Is this for a specific game engine Unreal3? Or a specific platform DS/PSP or PS2/XBOX or PS3/360?

There a half dozen ways to make glass, but it all depends on the confines of your sandbox as to which kind of castle you can make

joe gracey

I can use any map, and it's not going in any engine. I'm just taking renders from Max. It's going to be for my senior project.

Illusions

I realized the tutorial I was typing out was too long and detailed for something that is a senior project. These are the maps I would use for dirty glass (make sure to UV the glass and output it to photoshop first):

1) Diffuse - Base color of the glass + any dirt/dust
2) Specular - A greyscale version of the diffuse layer, but with the base color replaced with 90-95% white, and the dirt darker than the base white. Explanation: Dust is not as specular as glass.
3) Transparency - An inversion of the specular layer. Explanation: Dust is not as transparent as glass.
4) Reflected Color - A Photo of some sort to use as an environment map.
5) Reflection Map - Set how reflective the surface is. You can probably reuse the specular map with some tweaks since it should essentially be the same (dust less reflective than glass).
6) Set the refraction on the glass to around 1.5 or look up different refraction amounts for glass on wikipedia or the web.

This was quick and I probably forgot something, but I hope it helps for now until someone else can do a more detailed write up. ^_^

joe gracey

Thanks a lot for the help Illusions! Very cool tutorial.

Illusions

Ohh I did forget something

7) Bump/Normal Map - Self explanatory. Dust is probably too thin to influence the bump so don't include it, but thick dirt, scratches, or other surface imperfections you can include.

8) Gloss/Eccentricity Map - Don't really know how to create one of these since I've only ever used the default Maya eccentricity slider, but a gloss map should allow you to differentiate the diffuse specular of dust and dirt from the tight specular of the glass.

Do tell me how it turns out though, it'll be good feedback on whether my help was helpful or not

joe gracey

thanks again Illusions!

joe gracey

I'll let you know if it works, but it might be a while because it takes me a bit to learn something that has many steps.