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!