Spec maps, need help Thread - UT40K: The Chosen mod for Unreal Tournament 3

any1 have any good resources for understanding spec maps well, this is 1 thing i have never found much on, ive only seen examples from games but i dont have a full understanding of it.

try this Game-artist.net its a tutorial but has a bit of info

basically as i see it a spec map sets the shiny-ness of the object, this can be coloured as well as gray, its a way to re-create how a surface refects light. most game engines can't handle raytracing so they have to cheat, spec maps are also used in 3d apps when rendering because otherwise you would have to set a material type for each surface

hope it helps, if not i'll do a bit more digging/thinking

Yeah geodav has explained it pretty well.

Basically, when you look around you in the real world, what you are seeing is just reflections of light. Now some objects, or parts of objects, are going to reflect light better than others.
Say if you had a piece of metal with a bit of rust on it, obviously the metal is going to be quite shiny, but the rust will not be. You can use spec maps to simulate this condition on your models. If using the above scenario, you would then go ahead and paint the metal parts a lighter shade of grey, and the rust parts a darker shade. This would make the metal reflect light better than the rust.

Hope that helped.

It can also be very helpful to look at other people's spec maps to see what they did and how it impacted the final product. I studied a lot of the winning models of the most recent Dominance War and found it to be very enlightening. As a requirement, artists must submit their maps along with screenshots of the model. Take this model for example and compare the specular color map (top right corner) to the diffuse map (lower left corner) and how the 2 maps combine to give the finished product. I also encourage you to look at some of the other champion's work, as each one is vastly different. Pay particular attention to the choice of hue, saturation and value of each specular color in relation to the diffuse map.

After that, just experiment with it. Try different things and have fun. It's all about making adjustments until it just feels right.

thankyou, that dominance war one is alot to take in.

Woaw thanks for the explanations, this will help a lot with my Rhino!
But I thought the specular map was the color that is reflected and the shinyness was controlled by the specular level map...

Off Topic: The model Ministry took as an example reminds me of the "angels" in Devil May Cry 4... This looks awesome! I wish I was talented enough to produce such a good work ^^
Well I guess I'll have to train harder and harder

Edited by: Heathcliff

Hmm i think they are combined in the same map now days if im not mistaken? Maybe someone can back me up on this one?

That's a very good question. I might have seen someone do both a specular level and specular color map. Certainly if it were possible it would give better results. For example, the cloth parts on my guardian's armor I am trying to give a very matte appearance, but I want the color of the spec to be a light yellow to contrast the dark blue. But since I'm using only the color map, I can't do this and have to settle for a very dark and desaturated brown (which I'm not happy with and will probably change to dark gray). But if I could use 2 different maps, I could set the level to be very low, but still use the bright color...

I dunno, maybe that wouldn't work. I'll have to look into that.

Yeah, I wish I could make models that look that good too. It's very inspiring and motivational to see their stuff. None of it is beyond our capabilities, it just takes study, practice, and hard work.

i maybe be wrong on this but looking at some of the spec maps (UT3) they are multi coloured, i mean like a gray spec map but with different colour areas overlayed, i hope thats sort of clear !!!

Yeah, that sounds like the combined map. If you think of it in terms of Hue, Saturation and Value, Hue/Saturation control the color of the shine, while Value controls how shiny or matte it is.

I might have to futher look into this. Is this technique used often today? Should i be worried if i dont know how to do it?

so ut3 supports coloured spec maps?

Oh yeah. You can color it however you want.