No, you can't have a coloured spec if you need to store it in the alpha. Paint the grayscale spec map, get it looking right, then just create an alpha channel for the diffuse and paste the spec map in.
Definitely not engine-only. breakneck: since you were asking about maya, yes it's possible to do in maya as well, drag in your texture and shift-right-click drag on your shader, connect the out-alpha to the spec. I can never remember, you may have to do the out-transparency to the spec, or perhaps connect the out alpha to…
Ok, still going on this: say i "need" to put the spec in the alpha as a specular mask (*cough, cough, art test** cough**), whats the best way to do this?? also i am doing the modeling in Maya. Will the color map with the spec in the alpha even work? or do i have to do some crazy shit in Hypershade?? thanks for the help!!
This is good advice. For some materials I will delete the diffuse texture altogether and just have spec+normal - especially if you have a very dark diffuse map.
One thing to note, at least in my experince when dealing with compression is that Diffuse + alpha = the same amount of texture memory compressed as diffuse, and full color spec compressed. The reason for this is that a standard 24 bit image will take 1/4th the amount of memory compressed, but a 32 bit image with alpha will…
i have seen this being used where the alpha channel of the diffuse is being used for the specular map. Is this really as simple as making your diffuse black and white, doing a color range select then copying that into the alpha channel?? or is there another way to do this?
In 3dsmax you can have any map use the alpha channel. In this case you would copy your diffuse to the spec slot, and Under Mono Channel Output, switch it from "RGB Intensity" to "Alpha".
This is very poor general advice, and varies wildly on the material type and content of the textures(some textures can be resized easier without noticing a quality loss). After doing a texture optimization pass on basically every texture in a game, i can tell you that sometimes you will want to resize the diffuse,…
as far i have seen,and i use,i put the spec map in the blue channel of the normal map,coz u can easily calculate blue channel,if u have red and green and the shader will do this. Vj