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Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
This might be a bit of a noobish question, but I'm a bit unclear on this. I'm looking at some materials in an Unreal3 project, and instead of having a baked specular texture (or alpha channel, etc), a lot of the speculars are generated in the material node editor, along the lines of… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
well. another reason for doing that node based way is to not have to load another texture just for spec. depending on platform it could be pretty deadly for your framerates if everything had an extra texture just for spec. also it's so much faster to quickly iterate your spec like that. arguably you could say that hey,… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
Yeah, TD was briefing me and he mentioned the artists here tend not to do anything special with their spec, like you said, hence the node-based spec. Thanks for the additional info on the 360+PS3 stuff as well! :) -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
It's just 3 or 4 more instructions on the GPU if you do the typical Node-based thing and as most people never treat their speculars any better than that in Photoshop either it's sufficent. In regards to speed: Keep in mind you have a very limited texture buffer on your GPU, especially if you go with XBox or PS3… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
Yeah, this is something I'm seeing here. There doesn't appear to be a huge well of understanding of the real purpose of specmaps amongst the artists. I mean, it could be they're just rushing and don't give a shit, but I doubt that, since the rest of the stuff looks good. Even ignoring the fact that the specmaps are… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
Man, I was waiting for someone to suggest this.... How about instead of using a specular map, we use the diffuse but plug in another texture to control it? Brilliant!!! Well this only makes sense if your extra texture is very low res, but honestly, I would rather settle for a proper spec map that is low res at that point. -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
So this is an excuse to do it wrong? Edit: Im with EQ on this, your spec is the life of the material. Just cause its not on the screen, the same as a char/wep doesn't mean it should not get some lovin. Your just creating a less appealing environment to run through. Yes its more on the engine but this isn't the 90s anymor… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
I've gotta say this makes me cringe a bit, spec is generally the life of a material. Unless its something that has very little/no reflection. On certain materials like metal, rubber, certain plastics, lacquered wood etc, the spec is often what should get the most love. Pulling a spec from diffuse should only really be done… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
I consider it a vital component of the specular term and throw it on everything I can. Approximating it with Schlick works well enough and shouldn't be very expensive. That blog post only shows off the changes in specular strength but fresnel also accounts for color variation in materials with colored spec (even the brown… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
What about fresnel? I stumbled upon this lovely blog post time ago and was wondering how often you utilize some sort of fresnel expression in your speculars. I've seen it used it a lot as rim lighting hack, stylistic choice, means of separating characters from background or various gameplay reasons but how often do you…
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