If you're still interested in experimenting with it, in your rim lighting shader, I'd suggest retaining some of the diffuse component. Or if you're working with higher specs, do a proper snells law fresnel function and then overlay the function with the diffuse component. so: float fresnel = SolveFresnel…
Very good points guys, I stuck the diffuse only on it , to see if it was the diffuse causing the variety of lighting. The diffuse was off a little bit, but the majority of it is because of the lighting. So I fixed up the diffuse and now the lighter areas are because of the lighting. I did some other small tweaks and…
Hello. A little school assignment I've been working on, in which we were tasked to redo one of our old models, and make it "better". So I wanted to try and simply optimize the mesh (whilst not remodeling anything) and simply make it look more visually pleasing by "just" improving the texture. So far the triangle-count of…
Great! The bottom lighting-only image is looking better overall than the diffuse+lighting. This is a great read on the subject of why: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html#Diffuse%20Textures
You need padding on both your normals and diffuse(and all other maps, spec etc). It looks like the black background from your diffuse is bleeding through.
I've just ventured into the world of foliage: for the cards I modeled leaves and branches, rendered out a diffuse, then applied a material with NormalTexMap in the diffuse and rendered out the normal map.
the hilt looks a bit cloudy. and the scratches on the tip of the blade are too apparent in what ill guess is the diffuse. keep the scratches at a low opacity in the diffuse and make it white in the spec.