Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

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lysol
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by lysol »

PeterBitt wrote:
lysol wrote:
raevol wrote:Is it just me or does everything look kind of shiny like it's wet?
Might not be just you! It's the specular maps. They are really hard to get right, cause either you get no shinyness or you get too much. I would like to have just a tiny tiny bit on the walls (I guess it's the walls that look too wet now, or..?) and a bit more on polished stone and a lot on metal and glass. I do agree that some are too shiny at the moment. Thanks.
Specular maps are textures that allow you to control the shinyness, where black means no specular and white means 100% specular (maybe the other way around). You can not generate specular maps automaticly, they need to be assembled by hand. You have to define which parts of the texture are supposed to be shiny and which are not, having one global shinyness value for a whole texture wont work well and give that plastic look.

But maybe you shouldnt spend to much time on specular maps, they might become obsolete when/if Hrnchamd's PBR implementation gets implemented into OpenMW. It requires a bit different approach and makes specular maps obsolete. Perfect training ground for that would be the MGE XE PBR prototype, its allready working perfectly:

https://imgur.com/a/kLx44
https://imgur.com/a/eTe0V
(my models and textures all WIP)
Yes, I did generate the specular maps at first, but then I redid them all manually. Still not happy with them though, I need to darken most of them quite a lot.

I know I shouldn't take too much time doing this, but it's fun to learn anyway. I do hope scrawl implements PBR someday though. More stuff to learn. :) I'll probably redo a lot of these textures then.

And yeah I've seen your PBR experiments before, even though these pics were new to me. Obviously they rock.
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PeterBitt
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by PeterBitt »

Oh sorry I didnt read much, thought you didnt understand the basics of specular maps.
It sure doesnt hurt to practice with it and your textures look nice so far!


@Biboran @Atahualpa
Thanks! I am making random models from time to time, just for the fun and practice.
Biboran
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by Biboran »

@PeterBitt
Anyway you do a great job! Looking forward for you new models.
MacKom
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by MacKom »

IIRC, texture artist usually take the diffuse map and fiddle with contrast/curves/levels to get a spec map out of it. Also noticed they tint it blueish, probably for a good reason. Thought I`d mention, just in case you haven`t tried that. ;)

As for PBR - yeah, it is a great step forward in modernising the graphics, but I wouldn`t hold my breath TBH. It looks very taxing for current hardware (tho I could be wrong), and I`d much more prefer good performance and stability over eye candy at 5 FPS.
SquireNed
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by SquireNed »

MacKom wrote:IIRC, texture artist usually take the diffuse map and fiddle with contrast/curves/levels to get a spec map out of it. Also noticed they tint it blueish, probably for a good reason. Thought I`d mention, just in case you haven`t tried that. ;)

As for PBR - yeah, it is a great step forward in modernising the graphics, but I wouldn`t hold my breath TBH. It looks very taxing for current hardware (tho I could be wrong), and I`d much more prefer good performance and stability over eye candy at 5 FPS.
PBR isn't necessarily rough on a system. There are countless possible methods of doing it and it replaces the old shaders, which themselves can also vary greatly on performance. PBR simply means moving over to materials that have physical properties (such as the ones you'd use in Blender to render a raytraced scene) instead of sticking around with old school quasi-realistic shading.

There's a good description here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... NjGETJMZvY
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lysol
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by lysol »

PeterBitt wrote:Oh sorry I didnt read much, thought you didnt understand the basics of specular maps.
It sure doesnt hurt to practice with it and your textures look nice so far!
I didn't really at first, but I've read a lot about it since then. :) And thanks btw.
MacKom wrote:IIRC, texture artist usually take the diffuse map and fiddle with contrast/curves/levels to get a spec map out of it. Also noticed they tint it blueish, probably for a good reason. Thought I`d mention, just in case you haven`t tried that. ;)
You actually paint it in the color you want it to reflect. In other words, it should reflect in the same color as the light except for some metals, like gold for example, where the light always reflects in gold no matter what.

The reason they tint it blue, I guess, is that since you want it to reflect the color of the light that is shining on the material (usually white), you need to reverse the color of the specular map. Most sources I found said that you have to do that to get the correct result. Since most of my textures are brown-ish, the reverse color of that is blue. So most of my specular maps have a blue tint with some discreet red details here and there (green in reverse). With reverse, I basically mean that you in photoshop go to hue/saturation and set the hue to -180.

After this, I usually darken them quite a lot and also up the contrast a bit. If there are details that has to reflect more, I compensate for that manually.
MacKom
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by MacKom »

lysol wrote: After this, I usually darken them quite a lot and also up the contrast a bit. If there are details that has to reflect more, I compensate for that manually.
I`d definitely recommend you give curves adjustment layer (in PS) a try, as it handles both values and colors. ;)
TheMechanist
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by TheMechanist »

I have no idea if this is helpful. But I just stumbled over this software bundle: https://groupees.com/software
A software called MindTex 2 ist included who claims to do stuff you mentioned. It's probably worth a look...
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lysol
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by lysol »

Looks nice on that short video I watched. I'll have a closer look later. Thanks!
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psi29a
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Re: Vivec retexture to show off/test shaders

Post by psi29a »

The autotilegen looks awesome too and runs on linux! :D Not bad for both tools for 3$.
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