In Adam Capone’s last two entries, Know Your Assets and Diffuse and Normals, he covered the basics any texture artist should know about the process of making textures and the skills you’ll need. In this final how-to piece, he covers specular extra map techniques with a closing on final stages and more advice about how to get ahead in your career.

Specular

Used to make your meshes look shiny. Texture artists have to create and edit these maps to control what parts of the map are shiny and how much. At first specular maps were gray scale but these days color spec maps are getting more common as technical limits increase. These maps are usually made by pulling in certain layers from the diffuse map but also a good spec map will have its own unique information such as stains or leaking which can really add to the realism and give the asset that little bit more depth.

Extra Maps

These are not essential to all assets but for portfolios it would give you an boost if you’re able to demonstrate any of these well.

1. Emissive. Gray scale map where white indicates glowing light.
2. Reflection. Gray scale map where white indicates reflective areas.
3. Alpha. Gray scale map where black indicates 100% transparency.
4. Color Mask. Gray scale map where white indicates areas of a texture that can be color corrected.
5. Decal map. Used to overlay details on top of textures. Usually used to break up obvious repetition in large textured areas.

Final Stages

When I started in 2005 I didn’t need to get involved with the engine side of things but now its pretty much standard. So it’s worth getting some basic experience with something like the Unreal3 engine, again not essential but it is another way to push yourself closer to the front of the queue.

This stage involves checking for mesh errors and cleaning everything up. The method of exporting/importing depends on the engine used. After setting up the materials/shaders in the engine it’s quite usual that it will look a bit different to what it did in the 3D application so again further tweaking will be needed. At work we usually have custom shaders that replicate the look of the engine shader so it will look as close as possible to the final product in the 3d application.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 6:40 pm and is filed under How To: Art, RESOURCES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.