A lot of people just multiply their AO on their spec maps rather than bake the spec with a lighting set-up. Ideally a spec map is a representation of the reflectivity values of a surface. And thats pretty much how it is in high end graphics engines and offline rendering. People put their AO in there to help bring out areas…
The lighting in the scene will not affect the spec map bake as it bakes the specularity of the surface, I think what pior did was render a complete map or lighting map and used that as his spec map.
I'd have to agree that baking spec is pretty useless, unless you're baking a procedural mask, or varied color to a UV jumble. Its easier to just paint spec from scratch or by manipulating the diffuse.
Ok this is something that I read a long time ago but never really had proper luck with and I wanted to see some good approaches / ideas on this. before I never really realised how powerful max was with baxing out maps pre existing so I never really bothered I just did the maps I HAD to bake and couldnt create (normal maps…
Baking specular is to get a base, further editing will be needed to add the higher and lower values within the different material areas like scratches, wet areas, dirty areas ect, do this in photoshop ect. You can bake one without without using lights. If you want to use lights like pior did, it's just to give a bit more…
hmm I see so editting the materials themselves is pointless, and adding more light into a scene in theory works for a spec map, but the turn around time might just be easier to just bake a simple spec map and then toss on a AO on that and multiply it and then add all aditional spec map effects from there im assuming. hmm I…
Adding light color to your spec can be really helpful if you know exactly what kind of lights are all around your object keeping in mind that light, bounces off objects and that spec is reflection, it can help you color a jumble of UV pieces quickly. It's not so helpful for characters because they encounter a bunch of…
Whatever works, works! For sure that page I wrote is way old but even back then I stated that there is no 'true' way of doing things. Sometimes you want to lock shininess in place using white blotches in the spec. Sometimes not, ha!
I still don't get why you want to bake specular lighting for a normal-mapped asset, makes no sense. I'm sure Pior does it differently now, that spec map he ended up with looks all sorts of wrong... little bright dots all over? Just look at your own face in a mirror. Move a light around. The shiny areas aren't isolated like…
original un edited version was better :p - well yes I understand that you have to paint in the effects for additional highlights and scratches, but this still really dosent go much about the issue with adding lights and how they effect the overall mesh , and if this even is a good approach for spec color maps as well?