Specular Maps

[admiral horton]

Does anyone have any tips on making specular maps in gimp for Bridge Commander Mods

[flarespire]

have you tried grey-scaling the image and playing around with the levels of the image to make a specular map?

[admiral horton]

yeah I have

Then I look at the specular maps in BC Mods and they just don't look the same and there is no tutorials on making them for Star Trek ships

[flarespire]

might be something to do with the .tga export settings, mind posting the settings for export gimp gives you?

[Bones]

Make sure your specular map doesn't have alpha channel, otherwise it specular highlights won't appear in game, also it doesn't have to be greyscale, 8 bit RGB will do just fine (you might even have some colored speculars if you wish to add pearlescent effect to the hull, just like Constitution refit had)

In ship scripts, ship.py should also have lines pointing to maps with _specular / _spec suffix, it looks like this

Code: [Select]

# Search String for Glow, Search string for Specular, Suffix for specular
pLODModel = App.g_kLODModelManager.Create(pStats["Name"])
pLODModel.AddLOD(pStats["FilenameHigh"], 10, 120.0, 15.0, 15.0, 400, 900, "_glow", None, "_specular")
pLODModel.AddLOD(pStats["FilenameMed"],  10, 300.0, 15.0, 15.0, 400, 900, "_glow", None, "_specular")
pLODModel.AddLOD(pStats["FilenameLow"],  10, 600.0, 15.0, 30.0, 400, 900, "_glow", None, "_specular")

[admiral horton]

Well I ain't use it for a game but 3D art and I am taking a tga converting it to png and desaturing it then using the level tab in gimp to adjust but I still ain't getting the same look as other who do speculars

[Tethys]

Usually desaturation and levels work, but you can also try playing with the exposure too, most notably the gamma correction. Not too much though, because then the texture runs together and you dont get the greebled effect, but a pasty specular that just shines. If that fails to work, sometimes I find that inverting the desaturated texture and then doing the levels and gamma on it will give me my result. Good luck.

[admiral horton]

Thanks I will try that

[admiral horton]

The exposure I am guessing is in Photoshop, but does anyone know that it is called in gimp