Authoring Textures BO3
From Theory to Practice
- Artists paint unlit surface features and properties into textures.
- Specular colors have been determined from measured Indices of Refraction.
- Diffuse colors have been measured using cross polarization photographic techniques and analysis of various color spaces.
- ALL TEXTURES MUST BE AUTHORED IN 16bit!!!
- Everyone must leave room for everyone else.
- There should be minimal duplication of information.
Authoring Normal Maps
- This is the most important map of the bunch. Highest resolution, most detail.
- Bake from a high-poly. model with your package of choice.
- We compute variance based on the roughness represented in the normal and modify gloss.
- Detail normal maps should beused to represent anything smaller than 1/8th of an inch. Detail normal maps contribute to gloss variance as well.
Authoring Diffuse Textures
- No values below 40, none above 238. This leaves room for lighting.
- Exception: In the case of a pure metal, this map should be completely black.
- Start with a flat color swatch to represent the unlit base color, or reflectance, of your surface.
- Do not paint AO or highlights of any kind into the diffuse map.
Authoring Specular Textures
- Most of the time you should be skipping this step.
- In the case of a surface with bare metal showing, you can create a specular mask.
- Start with a white texture and paint all the parts that are not pure metal black.
- Touch up the areas around your metallic areas with grayscale values to simulate some dust coverage, or light pitting.
Authoring Gloss Textures
- Start with a fully white texture, to represent the glossiest that your surface will be.
- Set the gloss range in APE to the appropriate surface type.
- If the presets in APE don’t work, you can select custom and dial in the high and low gloss thresholds to suit your full range map.
- Paint the least glossy parts of this texture completely black.
- There is a separate power point that goes into further detail on gloss maps.
Authoring AO Textures
- Bake these with your favorite tool, just make sure they aren’t too dark.
- There should not be AO across your entire surface, this will make your model get very dark in shadow and look flat.
- AO only affects the indirect lighting: reflection and bounced diffuse. Otherwise, your model would look like it had creepy moustache growing all over it.
Sources
Treyarch!
