Wooden barrel

[Tomcraft]

I just (almost) finished a wooden barrel for a renderscene. I only need to make the black lines smaller and change the place of the cork. How do you like it?

I also think about a specular map, but i never did a real spec map before (only greyscale). Do you have any tutorials? And Do i need to put the spec map into spec color or spec level?

Would there be any other maps be useful for making it look any better? I also made a normal map with Photoshop with a deepness of -2, but the normal map is a bit hard to see..

[doylle]

Hi,

your barrel looks ok, but a polyocunt and a texture size would be usefull...

about the specular map, the best way to produce a simple specular map is to make a grey scale version of you colour map, and then higher the contrast, and lower the brightness. Afther that it's up to you to decide what part you want to reflect much, and what part not. (in this case, the metal rings will reflect more light than the wood, so you can brighten that space up in your diffuse map).
The specular level will decide how much the area will reflect light. (white being totaly reflective, black being not reflective at all.)
the specular color is to tell what color you want to reflect. in special cases you might want your object to reflect a different color, but mostly you just want it to reflect the color of the lights in the scene, so just reuse your specular map you used in specular level.

Would there be any other maps be useful for making it look any better?

since you're making this for a render scene, all depend on the position of the object in the scene. if it's somwhere in the back, then i wouldn't bother about a normal map, the chance that it will have any visual effects is very small. If it's in the front of you scene, then i would definatly add a normal map...

I hope this helps you somewhat...

[chris holden]

A specular map should almost always be colorful. Inverting the hue (hue shift 180) is a common way of handling this, but isn't always the effect you want based on the material. You almost never want to greyscale your diffuse to get a based started for the specular. I see people use this a lot, and it's bad news. The metal areas should be bright and the wood very subtle unless you want it to appear wet. Bright white/tan highlights painted on the edges of the metal trim will make them pop nicely under the right lighting conditions. Realtime testing is key when working with specular.

You can always check out a game that uses speculars and has easy access materials, such as Doom3 or Prey, to get a better idea how these materials should be on a variety of objects. Be careful not to pick a game with bad materials or you'll get bad info.

It might help to add an ambient occlusion pass to the barrel (add a skylight and bake lighting), and reduce the repetitiveness of the metal trims possibly adding a highlight to the edges. Weathering, such as darker orange/brown rust bleeding off the metal trims to the wood (more below than above), and water/dirt transition at the base would also be nice.

[Generalvivi]

i like your wood texture but the rings around the barrel could look a bit more like metal then they are right now . can't really put my finger on it .

[Talon]

Looks pretty decent, nice textures.

I think you need to add studs/nails at regular intervals around the loops, something to show that they're held there and not magically floating.

Also, your metal loop texture is very obviously mirrored and repeated in parts. Try rotating the loops randomly (well, keep it so the edge loops line up, obviously) around it so that you never see any obviously repeated parts at the one time, or at least not in the same vertical "row".

[DaveW]

I think you could edit the wood a bit to make it less 'straight from source', but I like it. Shadows around the metal rings would be a nice touch too.

[rawrsie]

you could try really weathering it and addin some rust stains on the wood near the metal rings. Looking good so far though.