I don't think coloured spec is always necessary imo. Since spec is cheap way of doing reflection, it totally depends on the lighting and environment the model is in.
One thing that is very important to note, is that unless you're packing grayscale spec and some other maps(gloss, etc) into other channels, you'll receive absolutely no performance benifit over color spec. 8 Bit grayscale spec maps can not be compressed, so they end up being the same size in memory as a full color texture.…
What Harry says above me is absolutely true, but r_fletch_r is making a very valid point. This common voodoo belief-system people seem to have about spec being unrelated or different than reflection, physically, is utter bullshit. Spec helps us fake awesome reflections. Games don't have awesome reflections right now, they…
A guy I know used spec maps for faking something in a test game he made, I think it was color bleed but I may be wrong then. EDIT: It may have been environment lighting or something like that.
we use cubemap reflections for our stuff. so our spec controls how reflective something is. if you turn the spec way down, it cuts out a lot of the reflection but the sun or strong light source is still visible to a certain degree since its emitting more light than the light that bounces off other objects. i dont like how…
er, i think some people here might be totally misinformed. Yes the reflection needs to have influence from the surrounding world, but not everything is a mirror. Different objects absorb and reflect/refract different wavelengths by their intrinsic qualities, and this is what we represent with coloured spec.
Usually the ones who don't color their spec maps are programmers, lazy, or can't due to engine constraints (source engine in particular comes to mind.) Specular colors are crucial for defining materials. Lets say for instance you have 3 kinds of metal on your item. On your spec you could make one of them yellowed, one…
Alright, while I have got you all here, let me ask you a related question. Specularity. White is shiny, black is not. Also it can have color... What dogma leads to people choosing the colors they do. Some choose odd colors, many choose blue or orange, and some don't color their specs at all. :| -I- have been deriving my…
Specular is an aproximation of point light reflections(were doing it with math not shooting rays). It doesnt cover the whole content of the scene other than the lights but it is reflection. If you had full scene reflections it would still be run through the same Gloss/Spec maps. Boths shots, 1 photometric area light, shape…