i think something to look at is the diffuse texture itself: the lighter tones on the wood grain are too close to white, I think. Looking at your reference picture, the main body brown you have in your texture is about as light as it gets. The grain in the reference is all darker but in your texture, it is all lighter. The…
Really AO should not be multiplied onto your diffuse/albedo or spec/reflectivity maps if you can avoid it. When you multiply AO on your diffuse and spec, what you're doing is removing light even from direct light sources and reflections, which is just incorrect. Large scale AO should mask ambient diffuse light and nothing…
Welcome to dysfunctional relationship between RTT and MentalRay... Try adding only one thing to the output in RTT, right now it looks like you have two things, try doing it with only one thing and see what you get. For me mental ray screws up the padding anytime I add more than one thing to the output. AO only, works fine.…
A gradient map is a greyscale texture, often derived in a logical way from the source model/texture. I.e. L4D take the color intensity as grey-value and remap this value to a color gradient (saved in a map). That is, the L4D artists have painted a standard diffuse texture, then convert them to a greyscale image (i.e. by…
cycloverid: Yep your lighting is too strong - metal generally has a very high reflectivity/specularity so you want your metal in your spec to be stronger than your diffuse to achieve the effect. Your spec map right now is too similar to your diffuse - if you pump up the values of the metal areas you want to stand out more…
I can't say too much regarding the modeling since it seems to be pretty well done. The texture and UV map however... Your texel ratio must be all over the board. The arcade stick looks huge compared to the siding of the box. I don't know that it would really need to be that large. The same goes for the lock box area. It's…
I feel I kind of got lost here as well at one point but I feel that what I had a hard time finding was how each map would be used/applied For example (I may be wrong as still learning myself) The main maps I know Normal Map (interchangeable with Bump) Bump Map (interchangeable with Normal) Opacity Map Ambient Occlusion Map…
I think you're sort of preaching to the converted. I imagine either companies want access to your entire site for a fixed fee or be able to get your entire site on a CD/DVD for a set price, and even then I'm fairly sure most artists would be happy with just high quality diffuse textures and handle all the normal and spec…
Thanks everyone! Contrails: Very slowly! I have a scratches brush that looks like a square with one of it's corners partially erased, and a very high rotation jitter, as well as a size controlled by pen pressure. I know I didn't come up with that idea; I think it's from someone on this forum. Anyways, I draw with a low…
Don't we all :) I think someone mentioned it earlier but there's really just not a fast way to approximate this. The nice thing about the methods we've used so far is it's a super slim equation to approximate diffuse lighting from a point lightsource = the dot product of the Normal and the Light vector, once you start…