shading problem

[canis lupus 20]

whenever I make my own normal map for my units I get a wierd shading problem.

all I know is that it occurs when I make the normal maps but I can't figure out why

here's a screenshot of how it looks

[Messiah 2]

do you have a specular map? You need both to make rvmats work.

[canis lupus 20]

yeah that should be in place, any links to tutorials on how to make specular maps would be welcome though

-edit

okay it was the specular map, not sure how and why it was wrong but I got it solved now, tutorial links still welcome

[Messiah 2]

hehe, I suspected as much - thats a typical specular map error in your screenshot.

As for tutorials, there's not much you need to 'learn' as such. In photoshop just take your texture panel, go into layers and paste in a total white colour into the blue, red and alpha channels. This will leave you with a magenta version of your texture. This is enough to create a basic specular map.

From there you just need to play around adjusting the brightness and contrast, as well as adding extra white or black tones to areas that need some help obtaining the right specular (apply these tones in the main magenta coloured texture, rather than channels, as you can manage them better there)

White is shiny, black is matte.

[canis lupus 20]

okay thank you very much for your help

-edit

okay I get the problem again I remembered the specular maps and it works on all the model except the helmet, I changed the normal map on this helmet and this is what I got

[max power 21]

I have an issue that seems very similar to this one only it happens when I have a specmap applied. The problem seems related to the orientation of my uvw unwrap.  Pieces of the model that aren't orientated the same way (say, the front of the car is orientated with the top to the right, and the sides are unwrapped with the front to the top) show massively different lighting conditions.  Conversely, there are lighting seams along the uvw edges over soft shaded edges.

Just to do some quick tests, the specmap was created with Linker Split's filter code in Texview2, so it should work well enough for this purpose.  I got it from here.

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">

sp = 10;

p = src pixel [u,v];

x = 1 - green p;

y = green p * ((sp * blue p + 1) / (sp + 1));

c = color[x,y,blue p,1];

edit: I should say that it has only 1 LOD and no config.

[max power 21]

I managed to solve this issue. To anyone else who is experiencing shading issues, I would recommend posting on OFPEC. The community there actually responds to stuff like this.

[BadBenson 0]

the sharp shadow on that helmet could also be caused by wrong colour settings in the rvmat. try it without extras (if u have forced diffuse and such activated, deactivate) and really basic. just an idea cuz it reminds me of problems i had not too long ago.

BB