Specular Maps coming, for....?

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    Hello everyone, as i got my new texturing tool today i started to experiment on some specular lights. In relation i got a question, will the specular maps be applied in a permanent way or will it be something like a rain map?


    Without:


    With specular map/lights:


    I know that we would need it for metals and so on, but like on the bricks you see we can create a "wet" look too. It is important to know cause this influences the specular map creation. It's not a suggestion just a question i can live with every implementation ;D.

    My only concerns about it is the memory^^ Especially since the game uses a lot of textures. First we want to add normalmaps, another step is to move to dds textures to save memory. After that, we will have a look how much memory is really consumed by the textures and if it makes sense to add specularmaps :)

    Quote from red51

    My only concerns about it is the memory^^ Especially since the game uses a lot of textures. First we want to add normalmaps, another step is to move to dds textures to save memory. After that, we will have a look how much memory is really consumed by the textures and if it makes sense to add specularmaps :)


    Sure, Sure, step by step. But if you want to implement parallax too like you said you will need an height/displacement map, too. And may we can turn it on and off. But good to know it.

    Quote from Nova

    Sure, Sure, step by step. But if you want to implement parallax too like you said you will need an height/displacement map, too. And may we can turn it on and off. But good to know it.


    Yes that's true. Eventually we will save the displacement information in the alpha channel of the normalmaps (of course it still requires more memory than simple RGB files). We will see ;)

    Quote from red51


    Yes that's true. Eventually we will save the displacement information in the alpha channel of the normalmaps (of course it still requires more memory than simple RGB files). We will see ;)


    I would suggest to use specularmaps in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture XD but that could be problematic, cause we would need alphas for transparent texture parts?

    That would make sense! But there are indeed a few textures which use the alpha channel, especially plant textures :/
    Another problem about using the alpha channel for displacement or specular maps is, that the creation of texturepacks would be a little bit more complicated (simply replacing a texture is obviously easier than baking the information into the alphachannel^^).


    We will have to see in the future how we will handle this ;)

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