Need help with specular metals.
polycounter lvl 9
Alright, I'm working on the Darkmod (for Doom3 engine).
It has come up that metal items of dfferent materials tend to look too similar.
ie: gold and brass are hard to distinguish i deifferent lighting.
As the player will be searching for gold items to loot I wuld like to make the gold and brass stand out as the material they are. So the player can look across a room and think "deffnately brass" (or gold)
Same with silver and steel.
My idea is that gold is a dark yellow with a yellow specular.
Brass would be more of an yellow/orange with brown specular.
I haven't tested this yet s I'm working long hours. Shuld be sleeping now come to think of it.
But I respect the opinions here and would like to know what you think.
Or if anyone has good links to makin materials of each type of metal. Any examples of shaders, ect...
It has come up that metal items of dfferent materials tend to look too similar.
ie: gold and brass are hard to distinguish i deifferent lighting.
As the player will be searching for gold items to loot I wuld like to make the gold and brass stand out as the material they are. So the player can look across a room and think "deffnately brass" (or gold)
Same with silver and steel.
My idea is that gold is a dark yellow with a yellow specular.
Brass would be more of an yellow/orange with brown specular.
I haven't tested this yet s I'm working long hours. Shuld be sleeping now come to think of it.
But I respect the opinions here and would like to know what you think.
Or if anyone has good links to makin materials of each type of metal. Any examples of shaders, ect...
Replies
Gold could be a warmer base color, brass could have more green in its base. Silver maybe more blue than steel, or maybe add some tarnish to your silver (dark gray-brown) and rust (or super clean) to your steel.
Could also try different reflection maps for each (cubemap or spheremap or whatever is being used), so maybe the silver/gold use blurrier reflections.
I don't have a link to color values, but this might help.
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/chrome/chrome.htm
For silver I'd tend to make it brighter, bluer and more shiny than steel. Steel would be dark grey maybe even with some brown in the diffuse.
I think you can come up with some good quick variations just by having 4 sphere models in a test map, one with each different material on (start just with a flat colour fill for diffuse and specular, no normal map), and view them up close and far away while tweaking each of the 4 materials' diffuse/specular maps until they're far enough apart to be easily distinguishable. Then you know what your base colours are for future reference whenever you need that material type again.
Here's my latest object for the mod.
Silver teaset, it has a slight blue diffuse that I think helps it alot. So I think I've got silver, but I'd like comments on it.
By schwaa at 2007-08-26
Also more segments needed for the teapot handle.
As Eric says, metals are mostly reflection, and it's especially obvious in polished silver that it reflects the surroundings.
I'm not going to add any more polys though, the handle is a little rough I agree, but it's already around 450+ polys. I know I could get by with more but we are trying to keep the mod running reasonably well on as many comps as possible.
I haven't tried blends or reflections yet. I know our water refelcts the surrounding terrain. I also know mirrors are possible (but I think that's too much reflection for objects)
Will look into that and try to post back. Might also try darkening my spec map even more.