Texturing black leather

almighty_gir

hey guys, i'm currently trying to texture some black leather gloves. the problem i'm having is that they need to be BLACK, not dark grey.

currently the "best looking" way that i've done is to have a simple black diffuse, and let normals/spec handle everything else. this gives the visual result that i'm looking for.
the only problem with that, is that i've heard doing that can make your texture sheets "look bad" on a portfolio, as it shows a lack of detail.

so i'm kind of in a bind, really. any tips on this would be gratefully recieved. thanks!

Dim

I might suggest that raised areas in the normal maps be lightened a bit to denote where the leather has been worn and repeatedly creased. That's about all I got

Brendan

Dim wrote: »

I might suggest that raised areas in the normal maps be lightened a bit to denote where the leather has been worn and repeatedly creased. That's about all I got

leather should still be black underneath (if you've ever messed up a leather chair you should see the leather is the same colour all the way through), so the spec should do fine for light and medium scuffs and what not to show where it's lost it's shine.


However, there's nothing I've seen in real life that is pitch black, not even the night sky. And apart from the sky, everything else is dirty, covered in dust and what not (or maybe that's just my place?).

Also remember that really dark gloves are going to stand out like someone threw up a marker pen on your screen unless you have a suitably dark surrounding for them.

Ark

Like you said, letting the spec and normal maps take care is the best approach. Maybe bake some very subtle AO into the diffuse if you think it lacks detail. Id say the final result is all that counts.

[HP]

Mmm, I never use pure black and pure white in my textures. Remenber that in real world, there's no such thing as pure black and pure white, so you need to keep that in mind while texturing.

Study your materials man, is it a matte material? Or very high glossy reflections material?





Look at these examples for instance, do you see any pure black in there? No, you dont. (Maybe the crevices, but that's the AO and even still it's not pure) Notice how in the first one you see more brownish colors being absorbed and reflected by the material, and in the second one you get white highlights because of the light setup, even there you don't have pure blacks, even in black/white setup, that's why there's no such thing as pure colors, especially not in CG, if you do that it will look fake.

Long story short, in games black should be dark grey and make up for it in the spec / shader, and white should be light grey.

(imo)

popngear

I would stick with a dark grey instead of going to black or even something close to black (you probably don't want to go below around 15,15,15, or something along those lines). I tend to go towards the lighter end on my textures because of the way that lighting is calculated in game engines. Because it is a multiply, if you have something that is very dark, it is very very difficult to brighten up if you have to. Also, as others have mentioned in this thread, nothing really even in real life is really black.

r_fletch_r

I think this is a bit of a pointless worry. If your result looks just like black leather then you have done your job.

if it suits your model you could add some wear. regardless of what's been said black leater is not black all the way through. Its animal skin with a black coating on it.


I would add a small amount of colour variation but the Normal and the reflections are what seem to make leather look like leather.



look at miranda from mass effect 2. The latexy leather effect is done with the reflection falloff not the diffuse.


looking at the diffuse for miranda, those black glossy areas are just a noisy 20% black, with some occlusion detail around folds.

almighty_gir

[HP] wrote: »

Mmm, I never use pure black and pure white in my textures. Remenber that in real world, there's no such thing as pure black and pure white, so you need to keep that in mind while texturing.

Study your materials man, is it a matte material? Or very high glossy reflections material?





Look at these examples for instance, do you see any pure black in there? No, you dont. (Maybe the crevices, but that's the AO and even still it's not pure) Notice how in the first one you see more brownish colors being absorbed and reflected by the material, and in the second one you get white highlights because of the light setup, even there you don't have pure blacks, even in black/white setup, that's why there's no such thing as pure colors, especially not in CG, if you do that it will look fake.

Long story short, in games black should be dark grey and make up for it in the spec / shader, and white should be light grey.

(imo)

arguably, you don't see any black areas because of the lighting. take a look at the handbag, for example, you can see areas which really are "pure black" due to lack of lighting.

and since specular is the term for how much light is reflected, while diffuse is simply the colour that is reflected. so surely if the colour that is to be reflected is in the grayscale (or black) and it has a high specular value, then a black diffuse + good spec map is the answer.

my worry with that, as stated before, is that people don't like to see colourless areas on a diffuse map, for whatever reason, regardless of the theory behind it.

Brendan

I'm not sure anyone will care as much about a boring diffuse map when they can clearly see that:

a) the end result is good
and
b) the end result was achieved through good normal/spec/etc maps.

Or you could just not show the diffuse.

r_fletch_r

almighty_gir wrote: »

and since specular is the term for how much light is reflected, while diffuse is simply the colour that is reflected. so surely if the colour that is to be reflected is in the grayscale

Diffuse and specular are both reflections. the colour is a description of how much light is being absorbed by the surface.

You want to post pics? could make it easier to help.

almighty_gir

i will once i get my monitor sorted, it seems to be showing very different things to what other people are seeing.

so this could very well be a false alarm lol.