Judith on 10/12/2009 at 21:55
As you all know, T3 doesn't support proper specular maps, but definitely this slot does something. I like to mess around with the Ion Shader from time to time and do some stupid things, because it can lead to surprising discoveries. I never got anything nice out of the specular slot, maybe because I didn't know it's the normalmap that distorts it so heavily. But when you remove it, you can get something like this:
(
http://img709.imageshack.us/i/spec.jpg/)
Inline Image:
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/2717/spec.th.jpgExample's a bit ridiculous but as you can see, there's no specular map being read here. It's a just some tile texture put in the specular slot. It acts as a distorted mirror, stretching the "specular" texture as the player moves around, effect similar to cubemaps.
Oddly enough, this one looks better on BSP, just stretching the texture, while on meshes it tends to flicker and change their brightness level, looks really weird.
This may come in handy for mirrors, if you don't want to put a whole cubemap in it, just a screenshot of a room it reflects, for example. Though, unlike the cubemap, the image will be heavily distorted as player moves. It looks quite spooky and might be nice for some "haunted" themes.
What is really weird - it has to be in a radius of some light. Otherwise there's no "specular" image being distorted.
massimilianogoi on 11/12/2009 at 03:13
I guess I have to start playing with these issues.
Judith on 23/12/2009 at 12:42
You can pull the "reflection amount all the way to the right. It's better to control the strength of the effect through diffuse texture's alpha channel. I guess it's all white because there's not any. Make the specular map of your texture and paste it to the alpha channel, then save it using DXT5 compression.
Also, white color in the cubemap isn't a good idea, it will shine in the dark as well. Try to limit the white color to something more grey (128 or 192).
massimilianogoi on 23/12/2009 at 13:49
What is the alpha channel there? I see it not.
Judith on 23/12/2009 at 17:49
Alpha channel in the diffuse texture itself, not in Ion Shader. You have to use your 2d editing program (Gimp, Photoshop).
massimilianogoi on 27/12/2009 at 11:00
Found the problem. It was simplier than I thought. It was only the bad specular map.
Here's the final result:
Inline Image:
http://i49.tinypic.com/bdlhme.jpgI would know if it's too artificial, related to the other graphical context; I would like to know some opinions of yours.
I just added the wrong specular map:
Inline Image:
http://i47.tinypic.com/2vbpswp.jpgThis specular map is for the silver, that is a very bright metal, or for the water sheet.
Studying some cubemap tutorial, I reached to create a proper cubemap, with spherical reflection effect:
Inline Image:
http://i49.tinypic.com/9hi2vp.jpgascottk on 6/1/2010 at 02:41
Actually there are two specular slots in the ion shader. One of the slots require a simple gradient (look at specular03.dds) and a regular specular map. You may need to import the matlib to 3ds max to figure out which texture goes where.
massimilianogoi on 6/1/2010 at 23:47
I've tried to import some other reflecting metal, but only one slot was occuped.
Anyway, this things about two specular slots, it's very interesting!! It worths to go deep.
