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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 8th Jul 2009 at 1:47 AM
Default Where can I find a specular tutorial?
I'm interested in making some patterns that are shinny, and the packager says this in enabled... is there a tutorial available somewhere that describes how exactly to do it?
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Test Subject
#2 Old 8th Jul 2009 at 7:02 AM
A quick answer is that the specular texture should have higher values (white) where you want it to reflect more light (aka, be shiny) and lower value where you want less reflection (dull). Haven't seen any tutorials, so you might just want to play around with making white and black stripes and see how it looks in the game, to get a feel for things.
Lab Assistant
#3 Old 8th Jul 2009 at 11:55 AM
You're not the only person who is insterested in specular maps. I've tried it and it somehow didn't work for me

Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow is a mystery,
Today is a gift, that is why
We call it the Present.
Lab Assistant
#4 Old 9th Jul 2009 at 3:36 AM
Default Specular?
Specular? What does the texture look like? I'm curious to know.. I was messing with the lipsticks, and the Matte one has only 2 .dds textures.. and one just shows the highlights in the lips.. When i make it white it makes the lips shiny, and when i make it black it just makes it dull. Is that it?
Test Subject
#5 Old 9th Jul 2009 at 7:38 AM
I think the shine is a part of the mesh and not the .dds images. I tried making an object shiny using a new specular map and it did absolutely nothing.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#6 Old 10th Jul 2009 at 11:50 PM
I've had success with the specular maps thing, but the effect can be subtle. Also, for whatever reason the pattern packager is finicky about them. Some of my patterns 'took' on the first go around, others had to be generated over a few times to keep their shinny-ness. I found that actually hitting 'new pattern' in the packager between patterns helped the specular map take, but that may just be voodoo.

Sadly I don't have in game shots of how great this tile pattern looks, but this is one of the ones that I thought was a success.

The pattern (color 1, color 2, color 3, example colors):


And the specular:


The specular has a lot in common with my highlight layer, but I've made the red tiles much shinier than the white ones, this gives the white ones a matte finish in game while the red ones look like glass. The effect is very pretty.
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