Specular map

[Hitcher 0]

hi , how to get the pink _as color for specular map please

[max power 21]

They use only one colour channel of an RBGA image. The specular maps aren't colour information, but scale information from 0 to 1 standing for 0% to 100% specularity. Instead of havign a whole bunch of useless information, like the value of 3 colour channels to make grey, they only use one. I think it's the red channel, but it would be best to crack open a BIS specular map to see which one they use.

[Hitcher 0]

how to get a similar texture with photoshop?

[sander 14]

Hi,

The process is described in this useful tutorial:

LinkerSplit tutorial

There is an alternative though. It is certainly not the most elegant solution, but when I had trouble creating one that did not require me to play around with the values to be filled in Texview2, the quick and dirty solution was to first create the specular map file as a gray image and then put a layer with the pink on top and merge that with the gray layer. It was quicker in my experience to get the desired effect by varying the opacity options for the pink layer before the merge than playing around with the formula values in Texview2.

Regards,

Sander

[Jahve 0]

Or simply desaturate the color map, add a top layer of #FF00FF, set to Linear Light at 80% opacity.

[max power 21]

how to get a similar texture with photoshop?

I'm sorry that no one has been able to explain the way this works more clearly. You'll have to decide which areas to make reflective and which areas should be non reflective.

Upon review of the way those maps look, I believe the scalar information is contained on the green channel.

To make a map like that one, a good place to start would be to open up the diffuse (the image that holds the basic colour information, otherwise known as a colourmap or a texture map) map, desaturate the image, then open up the red and blue channels and white them out. After that, you can edit the green channel in black and white, white being most reflective, and black being non reflective.

Obviously, for camouflaged surfaces, that technique is going to look quite shit, since the colour of paint has nothing to do with its reflectivity. I believe that the above technique should be a good enough fake for most amateur attempts, though.

Do not take the word amateur to be pejorative in this case. Professional computer art is getting extremely complicated. Computer artists are reasonably well paid and work long days to achieve what they do. Doing something that's professional grade in your spare time is always the goal, but it's not necessarily realistic, especially if you're just starting out. Taking cheats and shortcuts important, but they usually result in a less-than-optimal product.

[Jahve 0]

my method is with photoshop.

@plaintiff1: What kind of things with camo are you talking about? BIS vehicles like hmmwv, m113, stryker etc all have specular maps. but ofcourse you dont make the specular map over the camouflage...

[max power 21]

my method is with photoshop.

@plaintiff1: What kind of things with camo are you talking about? BIS vehicles like hmmwv, m113, stryker etc all have specular maps. but ofcourse you dont make the specular map over the camouflage...

Perhaps I wasn't clear. What I was saying was that using a camouflaged diffuse map as the basis for a specular map would doubtlessly look funny, because it would make unnecessary differences in reflectivity between the different colours of paint. For some objects, however, this would be an acceptable cheat for someone who doesn't want to spend a lot of time figuring out what specularity is, what scalar means, and how that relates to the green channel.

[Linker Split 0]

it's really simple:

Open in texView2 the texture you want to create the specular map for, then save it as <table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">nameoftexture_as.paa

you'll get the pink texture one