Finished baking the AO and normal maps: Getting into the home stretch. Still have a couple things to fix about the AO bake, but I can handle that at the same time I'm working on the diffuse texture. Onward and upward!
I was wondering. Since your going for handpainted style and you paint the highlights in. So are you only relying purely by diffuse? No spec or normals? Do you find trouble when it comes to lighting ur environment?
You shouldn't have black for your spec on your metal. Metal itself has a very high specular value. You could add in a little color to your spec, use the same hue as your diffuse.
awwwwwww dis gon be gud. :) Have you tried viewport canvas in max? A bit clunky but I loved using it a while back for painted diffuse stuff whilst being able to model and quickly make changes.
I think you're confusing the two: Materials are just a combination of textures (Diffuse, Spec, Normal, etc...). You can have different materials in the same texture and still create 1 single material for the whole object.
Update! Just finished the spec and normal maps. Let me know what you think! I'm very new at lighting so obviously, it isn't the best and it is clearly affecting my diffuse, but you get the idea :)
Thank you for your words of support Wade! :) I've unwrapped the mesh and baked the normals. Still got some cleanup left to do before I start working on the diffuse. Edit: It's not possible to make alpha textures, is it?
We used both on the last game. The 3 way vertex blend shader is actually quite expensive according to our rendering engineer. Diffuse, normal, spec = 9 textures which is costly to render I guess.
I normally don't like procedural texture stuff and prefer photo and hand painted. But, this gives you the normal/bump/spec to perfectly match the diffuse, so that seems pretty valuable for the materials that it's able to do well.
What you need to do is create a cone with a white diffuse color (or whatever color you want the volume light to be) and an alpha map that makes it start out semi transparent at the top and fade out to nothingness at the bottom.