lowering reflection in marmoset?

Olli.

I cant figure out how to tone down the reflections on my materials.

ive got a metal material, which is supposed to have a high specular, but not very much reflection. No matter what i do to the 3 (!) sliders i still get fresnel reflections at high angles which basically light up my model like its armageddon or something.

here is a picture with maximum (256) specular sharpness and maximum (3.00) specular fresnel. The problem is minimized with these settings, anything lower for either slider and the reflections just get waaay stronger.



heres the material im going for:


notice how the gun doesnt look like a mirror in the ref pic.

respawnrt

Isn't maximum sharpness close to perfect reflections ?Also the reflection from the shotgun in the picture must depend on the paint rite ? And then you add dirt, amprents and all of that good stuff that you have on real objects and impacts your gloss map and so you get that reflection.

Olli.

lowering sharpness makes the reflection more blurry, but it also becomes brighter, which is basically the opposite of what i want.

r_fletch_r

specular are reflection are exactly the same thing.

for metal like that you want a low sharpness medium reflectivity material. if its getting too bright you need to darken your diffuse.

post your maps and perhaps we can offer some advice.

Olli.

the problem is that the environment seems to be reflecting off the model way too much. really it seems like the environment is actually glowing, whereas it should be just letting off a tad of ambient light.

here are the textures for the part in the pics.

Daelus

Marmoset doesn't do reflections. They create a whole bunch of colored lights based on the environment, which, if there are enough lights, can give the impression of reflections. Lower your gloss and it will blur them together more. Or don't use an environment and use manually created lights.

Olli.

how do i disable environment? or maybe best would be if i could tone it down a bit then use custom lights with it?

EarthQuake

Reflection is specular in marmoset, to lower the reflection amount, you simply lower the specular intensity. Toolbag uses cube map images to do specular, aka reflection cubes. This is more or less what happens in the real world as well, only on computers are "specular" and "reflection" separated.

The only time when a separate specular setting would make sense, or even do anything in marmoset, is basic specular from point lights.

Your reference doesn't have a high spec or reflection, it looks pretty matte to me. Play with the glossiness.

Olli.

yes indeed i dont want the typical hard specular, i want a matte surface which still reflects light (it diffracts it somehow but you can still see the "specular" highlights even on matte objects)

EarthQuake

Olli. wrote: »

yes indeed i dont want the typical hard specular, i want a matte surface which still reflects light (it diffracts it somehow but you can still see the "specular" highlights even on matte objects)

Glossiness(specularsharpness in toolbag?) defines how sharp(mirror like) or diffuse(matte) the reflection is, adjust the slider or load a gloss map(in your spec alpha?) to control glossiness.

Olli.

alright i got that sorted out now.

Does anyone know what exactly 3pointshader's quality normals modifier does?
The bake i've done on this has one place where the normals are oddly bumpy. I've looked over my UV seams, SG seams, and nothing seems out of place. Ive baked dozens of weapons before and never had a problem such as this.

The weird thing is that 3ps's Quality Normals modifier seems to fix the bumpyness.. This is going in a game though so it'd be nice to get the normals working everywhere else too.

like i said, i've looked over my smoothing groups and UV seams and i cant see anything wrong with them. The mesh is pretty smooth, angles between polygons are about ~20 degrees or so in that area..



its hard to show in a still pic but you might see the light is reflecting a bit unevenly..

i've had far worse surfaces bake perfectly.. what could be the problem now?

EarthQuake

Its not very clear what your problem is here.

Olli.

well thats what im asking :P whats the problem?

the symptom is that the normal map doesnt smooth out the surface as it should, but i dont know what caused it. Quality normals modifier seems to fix it, so if i knew what the modifier did, then maybe i'd know what the problem is.

Millenia

It doesn't "fix" anything, it simply renders the normals exactly the same as the 3ds max scanline renderer, so you're not getting any extra smoothing errors from tangent spaces being unsynchronized.

Chances are you're gonna get smoothing errors in-game if their normal map rendering isn't synchronized to the 3ds max scanline tangent space. Not much you can do to avoid that, aside from avoiding extreme angles etc

r_fletch_r

Try to maintain a sense of perspective with smoothing errors like that. View the model from a typical distance, if the error is showing badly then fix it. if not then move on.

Olli.

the problem is quite bad.. Usually what i do is just apply and collapse an edit normals modifier which magically makes most smoothing errors disappear, but this time its not working..