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Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
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Very interesting thread. I know this thread is Unreal specific, but i'll broad it up a bit and say it really depends on your engine / shader system. I don't know how Unreal works, but with CryEngine3 material editor, with a few minutes tweaking your material (spec strenght and color, glossiness,fresnel tweaks and… -
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?
Problem with spec in alpha is that DXT5 doesn't compress the alpha channel at all. A DXT5 costs about double the memory footprint of a DXT1 of the same size (ie, at that point you might as well use a full color spec, or a mono spec each in RGB). And yeah, ultimately the reason for going with spec derived from diffuse was… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
I'm surprised no one has brought up spec power yet....I find spending two minutes on a good spec power mask to be more impactful than spending the an hour on a good spec...not that they both aren't important, but the sharpness of the highlights is the most telling quality of a surface for me. Certainly the ideal situation… -
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?
I absolutely agree; spec maps can make or break the look of an asset. TD understands this as well, but I guess at this point it's a question of what can be done with what's already in place. I'd like to convince/teach the artists to do proper spec maps (as well as be allowed the space/mem allocation), but it remains to be… -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
This has been mentioned by almost everyone in the thread so far. Certainly absolutely 100% not something I would agree with. If you're going to use a unique texture anyway, don't waste your time messing about with diffuse controlled specular. The relationships between diffuse and proper specular are extremely important, so… -
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?
Yeah a lot of new materials have simple specs that don't much different than a tweaked diffuse, but anything that gets touched, scrapped, liquids spilled or dried on it, made up of different materials, etc, etc really needs a detailed spec. -
Re: Unreal - Specular texture vs Material Nodes?
Certainly things like art style, time constraints and technical/memory constraints need to be taken into account, with any and all art content. I was however speaking more on a fundamental basis, and when we start to talk fundamental material representation, the spec map is often the life of your texture. Too many artists…
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