Creating Specular/Normal Maps

[satan]

I was quite unfamiliar with that specular map colouring thing. I used to do it manually before. :P

Thanks for the tips.

[Detachable Toe]

Thanks muchly for the tips Tiros!

Specular maps aren't at all under my grasp, so this should be invaluable.

[Cleese852]

Thanx a lot for the specular explenation!

[biery]

Awesome tutorial.

[Meanie]

Really neat tutorial!
Even more experienced users can get some kind of pointer from this.
Also Tiros, i think that the tutorial was very nicely put and written.

[A Sober Irishman]

How do you actually turn on/use DirectX Display in your viewports? That's the only part I don't get, but the rest is a really excellent tutorial. Thanks Tiros, it was explained clearly and well written.

[Ghostscape]

Originally Posted by A Sober Irishman

How do you actually turn on/use DirectX Display in your viewports? That's the only part I don't get, but the rest is a really excellent tutorial. Thanks Tiros, it was explained clearly and well written.

Make sure D3D is set as your driver under customize->preferences->viewports, and then either create a DX material and load a .fx file, or just scroll down in the material browser on a standard material and click at the bottom where it says "DX display of standard material" (in Max9, at least).

Also, just mashing a few adjustments over your diffuse to generate your specular is a pretty piss-poor way to go about doing it if you have multiple materials in your texture map. You can do a lot with adjustments to hue/contrast/etc, but you should be doing them on a per-material basis, and inverting the hue is not always the right idea - it will just wind up desaturating your object, which isn't always what you want to see.

As for "creating a proper normal" strictly in photoshop, your demonstrated normal map is still very pitted and not at all like the metal that you're trying to make it, because metal does not pit like that. Turning your diffuse into a heightmap does not work for metal or wood or any other material that has varied color. You'd get a better looking normal map for that sheet of metal by keeping it mostly flat and perhaps painting a few dark blobs to give you dents.

[wolfsage]

Originally Posted by Tiros

If you're using maya however, I'm afraid I don't know how to do it.

For thouse of you using Maya;

Select your shader or create a new one (try Blinn or Phong) by R+click Assign new matieral, or Window>Rendering Editors>Hypershade, create new shader, middle mouse drag onto model.

(please don't edit Lambert1 as this is your defult shader and everything else you add to the scene will have that shader applied)

Open Shader in Attribute editor Crtl+A or double click shader in Hypergraph

Map Diffuse into colour, to do this; click on the little checker box icon to right of colour slider, then select File in the pop up box, click on folder icon next to image name and browes to your desired diffuse map.

Specular map goes in....you've guessed it! Specular colour, note: Lambert shaders have no specular highlight, use them for matt surfaces like cloth.
Map file as directed above.

Normal map goes into the Bump node when you click to add your file texture an extra tab comes up in the attribute editor before you select the file location. in this tab find "Use As:" and select Tangent Space Normals, otherwise your Normal map will render as a plain old Bump map.

To display normals in veiw port select Render>Hight Quality Rendering in view port options
You will need to render in Mental ray as Maya software can't work out Normal maps!

Hope that helps :-)

[Tiros]

Ghostscape: Keep in mind that this tutorial is rather old, and that this were mainly a quick thrown together tutorial to give people some pointers in order for their normalmaps not to look like this



As mentioned in the end of the post, it isn't really perfect, and looked a bit like concrete.. but it was atleast quite an improvement from the image shown above

As for the DX display, it'd be better just using a DX viewport shader like Doylle's or something.. didn't know about that stuff when I wrote it though.

Cheers!

[virtualalias]

This was a very informative tutorial, despite its apparent age.

I wonder, though, if I'd sound like a complete idiot asking whether or not NVidia's Normal Mapping tools are a suitable replacement for CrazyBump, at least where Normal Maps are concerned?