Normal, Specular and Gloss Maps Pack for 1.88+

[Killer Wolf]

i've tarted up the Vamp skin a bit, to make them look a bit more "lived in" and fit w/ the game skins. i've dut it into a couple layers and amended the opacity to use them for the spec map as per the posts in the Vamp MkVI thread. i then add an Alpha channel, which starts all black, and did a quick test [which PShop displays in 50% shaded red]:

just to see how noticeable it was in-game. not at all, was the answer :-/
reloading the png, the opacity is fine, but the alpha mask has done nothing, there's no trace of the "KW".


maybe i'm misunderstanding, is the alpha in PShop just for selections? do i then need to fill w/ black and add it to the normal paint layers? when you said the alpha holds teh gloss did you just mean the overall opacity value in the png of the image?

[Old Murgh]

maybe i'm misunderstanding, is the alpha in PShop just for selections? do i then need to fill w/ black and add it to the normal paint layers? when you said the alpha holds teh gloss did you just mean the overall opacity value in the png of the image?

If I'm getting your intent right, you want to have emission info on the alpha channel of an image.
What I learned by looking at the early Smivs stuff was the basic emisssion map, an all black image with just the bright lighting effect stuff in its proper position. This will then end up as its own file, OR as some of the pros do, then merged onto the alpha channel of the diffuse map (to save some space, but the em maps are really small even in a big format, so maybe not a very important operation).

[another_commander]

i've tarted up the Vamp skin a bit, to make them look a bit more "lived in" and fit w/ the game skins. i've dut it into a couple layers and amended the opacity to use them for the spec map as per the posts in the Vamp MkVI thread. i then add an Alpha channel, which starts all black, and did a quick test [which PShop displays in 50% shaded red]:

just to see how noticeable it was in-game. not at all, was the answer :-/
reloading the png, the opacity is fine, but the alpha mask has done nothing, there's no trace of the "KW".

As a first step, I would advice not using the values of 1.0 and 0.0 in the specular map's alpha channel. For reasons related to limitations of the current renderer, setting either of these two exact values results in a no-specular-highlights situation. Use something like 0.99 or 0.01 as maximum and minimum respectively instead.

when you said the alpha holds teh gloss did you just mean the overall opacity value in the png of the image?

Yes, the opacity channel of the specular map image (or alpha channel, if you prefer) represents the glossiness of the material. A value of white (1.0) represents a fully smooth material with no microsurface details which reflects light practically without any spread, while a value of black (0.0) represents a rough material where the microsurface bumps and valleys cause the light to bounce around a lot before finally being reflected back to the camera, causing a large reflection spread.

Just to try to explain this a bit better, here is a series of pics of a Cobra. The only difference between those pics is the gloss setting. Here, I am only changing the values of the spec map's alpha channel. Nothing else. Gloss increases from first to last pic. Note how the reflection starts almost incomprehensible and proceeds to become more and more concentrated at one point as gloss increases. The low gloss represents a rough material, while the high gloss represents a smooth one.


Edit: Seeing Old Murgh's post, if your intent is indeed to apply emission effects on the ship, then you do not want to mess with the alpha channel of the spec map at all. You just need to specify an emission map, which holds the rgb values of the emissive effect. Alternatively, if you are ok with monochromatic emissions, you can add this information as grayscale data in the alpha channel of your diffuse map and specify that alpha channel as the source of the emission information in the shipdata.plist materials definition - see how the core game does it for reference.

[Old Murgh]

Edit: Seeing Old Murgh's post, if your intent is indeed to apply emission effects on the ship..

My money is on him asking about what you explained.

[Killer Wolf]

no, my emission map is different altogether, lights on black as you say. i think i misunderstood @another_commander in the Vamp thread: i thought to get specular i needed to amend my basic skin, lowering the opacity to appropriate values as you did yourself in the quick Vamp skin you knocked up. maybe the confusion is when you said "The "smudges" visible on the wings and elsewhere on the hull could be removed from the diffuse map and entered as details in the gloss map instead. " you mean unpaint them from the texture and paint them into the spec map version - whereas i've got confused over the talk about alphas and though i had to come up w/ the varied-opacity image for the spec, which would also have an alpha channel holding the gloss details.
as it is, i should only have a spec map that has varying opacities for the spec but also incorporates the smudges/dirt, which would be of much lower opacity, thereby cutting down the glossiness and specularity for those areas at the same time - is that about right?

is that black on the Cobra part of the paint scheme or simply the glossy reflection of space?

[another_commander]

Yes, I think now you are getting it right The smudges on the wings represent dirt or dust. As such, your material in those areas is not metal, it is the dirt. So you adjust your spec/gloss as you said - reduce both reflectivity and gloss in those areas because dirt is less reflective and rougher than metal.. Now, if you want to show rust, which has a reddish color, you would provide that reddish color in the diffuse map.

As for the question, the dark part of the Cobra is part of the paint job. Unfortunately we cannot show environment reflections in our render engine yet, but if we could, some level of skybox reflection would be there too, depending on the amount of gloss.

[Killer Wolf]

magic, thanks for your explanations

[cbr]

no, my emission map is different altogether, lights on black as you say...

If your emission map contains color ( for example to represent different color warning lights on your ship ) it has to be a different emission_map.png as
the alpha channel contains grayscale values...

[Cholmondely]

Would there be point in renaming this OXP?

I avoided looking at it for half a year (whilst playing v.1.88) as the name meant nothing to me - having no idea what normal maps were, never mind specular and gloss. Eventually, the name finally made some sort of sense, and I downloaded it and was suitably razzle-dazzled. It is an important oxp.

But, as a dumb pilot, if I'd not been working on the wiki, the name would still mean nothing to me. And with over 730 oxp's on the EM, I'd still be whizzing past it each time I looked through the EM.

How about: "Enhanced ship textures (with added specular & gloss maps)"

Or can somebody come up with a better name?

Now that we are on the threshold of seeing v.1.92, the "1.88+" seems a tad redundant.

And. I don't think that I can do this, but should it also be included as part of Norby's Ambience Collection (the one for beginners)? Norby did say that his collection oxp's should be updated. And it seems churlish to change the names.

[phkb]

a_c, with the thought of including the specular/gloss maps into 1.92, I've been having a close look at some of the ships, and I think there might be an issue with the Cobra Mk1. I've got a video capture that demostrates the issue, but it's easily reproduceable: any clean 1.91 install with just your OXZ installed, start a new game, go to the Shipyard and view the Cobra Mk1. You'll see, as it spins, a kind of sparkle effect on some of the edges. At least, that's what I see on my rig. And I'm quite prepared for that to be the answer!

Here's a YouTube link to the capture: Problem with Cobra Mk1 Specular texture

[another_commander]

a_c, with the thought of including the specular/gloss maps into 1.92, I've been having a close look at some of the ships, and I think there might be an issue with the Cobra Mk1. I've got a video capture that demostrates the issue, but it's easily reproduceable: any clean 1.91 install with just your OXZ installed, start a new game, go to the Shipyard and view the Cobra Mk1. You'll see, as it spins, a kind of sparkle effect on some of the edges. At least, that's what I see on my rig. And I'm quite prepared for that to be the answer!

Here's a YouTube link to the capture: Problem with Cobra Mk1 Specular texture

Confirmed. This is a problem caused by the bloom algorithm and it is more common in games than one might think. It occurs when bloom is applied on isolated pixels of a relatively low resolution texture. You can check that the problem goes away if you press F9, which toggles bloom on/off. The Mk I gloss texture is based on the Mk I diffuse map (it was created simply by grayscaling the diffuse), which has a lot of "dirt" on it, causing it to have areas where glossy pixels alternate with non-glossy ones a lot. The sparkles are just those isolated pixels blooming while reflecting light momentarily as the ship rotates.

In fact, the Mk I is my least successful glossmap and it might be a good idea to redo it at some point; I was never truly happy with it. I think it can be made to look much better overall. Just reducing the glossiness a bit might help. Or we can consider the new Mk I by Griff, which is just stunning and a great example of how gloss maps can be done to work properly and in unison with their corresponding diffuse ones.

[Griff]

That sparkling would look great on a ice asteroid, or some sort of asteroid with metal seams running through it
I'll have a dig through my oolite files this evening and see if i have that cobra MK1 texture without the dirt on it - the work you did to make these old textures work with the spec/gloss lighting is amazing A_C, bringing them into the default game is a great idea i think

[Cholmondely]

That sparkling would look great on a ice asteroid, or some sort of asteroid with metal seams running through it
I'll have a dig through my oolite files this evening and see if i have that cobra MK1 texture without the dirt on it - the work you did to make these old textures work with the spec/gloss lighting is amazing A_C, bringing them into the default game is a great idea i think

It might be nice to see another one or two models for the Rock Hermit.

While I love the entrance to the hermit, eg. those rails with the lights running along them (what are they there for? They vaguely remind me of dockyard cranes running along railtracks), it always seems that 50% of the rock hermit is the entrance to it! For some hermits, fine. But every single one in every single galaxy?

[Cholmondely]

magic, thanks for your explanations

Maestro - did you ever publish your g&s'ed Vampire?

And am I correct in presuming that this is the only "non-Griff" ship to use this (2018) feature?

[Killer Wolf]

The MkVI Vampires were my first attempt to do things that way, so they might look crap. i think CBR did a far better skin.