Using 2048^2 textures, and roughly 3800 tris. I desperately need critique on the texture as I'm not really liking it atm. First properly normal mapped weapon [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img] Frame isn't worked on at all btw.

Darken up the diffuse and go crazy with the spec. Good looking nextgen metal needs spec and diffuse that really work together. I found, when I was learning how to do it, that studying both diffuse only game textures and film style textures will help. The right thing for your average nextgen engine is kinda inbetween those two.

Edit: model's cool, btw

bake a nice ambient occlusion map to add over the whole diffuse.

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Darken up the diffuse and go crazy with the spec. Good looking nextgen metal needs spec and diffuse that really work together. I found, when I was learning how to do it, that studying both diffuse only game textures and film style textures will help. The right thing for your average nextgen engine is kinda inbetween those two.

Edit: model's cool, btw

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Ok, so darken the diffuse and brighten/contrast the spec? I used to do painted lighting, but I like this whole dynamic thing better personally :] Thanks.

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bake a nice ambient occlusion map to add over the whole diffuse.

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Yeah, I'll do that... It takes so long to bake though D:

e/ For the ao, should I bake from the highpoly using a cage, or can I just use the normal map and not bother with the highpoly?

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Ok, so darken the diffuse and brighten/contrast the spec? I used to do painted lighting, but I like this whole dynamic thing better personally :] Thanks.


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Brighten and put most of your surface detail into it, yeah. Most of your detail and contrast should come from the spec, on a nextgen(z!!) weapon texture.

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Darken up the diffuse and go crazy with the spec. Good looking nextgen metal needs spec and diffuse that really work together. I found, when I was learning how to do it, that studying both diffuse only game textures and film style textures will help. The right thing for your average nextgen engine is kinda inbetween those two.

Edit: model's cool, btw

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Ok, so darken the diffuse and brighten/contrast the spec? I used to do painted lighting, but I like this whole dynamic thing better personally :] Thanks.

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bake a nice ambient occlusion map to add over the whole diffuse.

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Yeah, I'll do that... It takes so long to bake though D:

e/ For the ao, should I bake from the highpoly using a cage, or can I just use the normal map and not bother with the highpoly?

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If you mean fake an AO map from the normal map by copying channels or some other fuckery, don't do it, it will look wrong. If you're talking about taking the normal map and running it through crazybump, that works fine, although if you're baking in Max you might as well bake it when you bake your normal map. That's what I do, anyways, and I also bake out a diffuse map that I generate selection masks from for easy painting.

You need to put a lot more detail into this to justify the 2048x2048, though, some finely detailed oil patterns and metal grain/brushing would help a lot. Right now it looks like there are 3 flat colors.

What I meant was fake the highpoly using a normal map and bake it in 3dsm, but then I realized that makes no sense because normal maps don't work with skylights D: Didn't take as long as I thought it would anyway [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Also, I think I'll resize the diffuse to 1024, the 2048 was mostly for the normal map.



Also, will smoothing errors that are in the viewport but not in the render show up in-game?

Gloss level is really far off. i assume this is the gun?

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Make the surface look bright due to the quality of your spec map, not a crazily tight gloss setting.

My gloss map isn't working in the viewport so I haven't really taken much notice of it. Its also hard to get a angle which shows off the spec map well D:

Mind a screengrap of your material settings?

Well, then, mind showing your gloss map? Personally I'd just handle it in the settings for an object as simple as this one, but either way it's still too tight of a gloss.

Here's my failed attempt at making a turnaround thing:

Why does it look so bland in-game? :[

I think CSS guns tend to have a ton more detail in the diffuse texture, less on the spec. Source never seems to handle it that well.

You can also do some kind of reflection map on them, I think this tutorial covers it: http://www.fpsbanana.com/tuts/3683

It looks bland in game because Source doesn't do very nice lighting/shading on first person models. Additionally, you have zero color information in the diffuse/specular, so it's perfectly grey - this isn't as noticeable in max because you're using colored lights.

Also you need to put a flat piece underneath the slide because you can see through it in one of your screenshots and it looks like the gun has grown teeth.

Would you mind posting the VMT to take a look at?

"VertexLitGeneric"
{
"$baseTexture" "models\weapons\v_models\shroom_cat9\cat9_diff use"
"$bumpmap" "models\weapons\v_models\shroom_cat9\cat9_norm al copy"
// "$selfillum" "1"
"$phong" "1"

// "$phongexponent" "30"
"$phongboost" "5"
"$phongfresnelranges" "[1 3 6]"
// "$halflambert" "1"
"$phongexponenttexture" "models\weapons\v_models\shroom_cat9\cat9_glos s"
"$phongalbedotint" "1"

}

@SupRore - Yeah they do, but I'm trying to move away from that (communities like cdg and fpsb rely completely on diffuse maps for lighting for css weapons). At the moment the cs:s version of the Source engine doesn't support specular + reflection.

@GhostScape - I'll add a bit of blue, that's a good idea, thanks.

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(communities like cdg and fpsb rely completely on diffuse maps for lighting for css weapons).

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Well, I think it's for a good reason. I completely understand why you'd want to make better use of spec/normal, but the Source engine seems to really do a pretty horrid job making use of them in most cases. It really probably would be more effective to just bake a lot of it in.

Anyway, good luck. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

i'm no weapons expert, but it looks as if your bullet can't physically fit inside that clip

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@GhostScape - I'll add a bit of blue, that's a good idea, thanks.

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Make it very subtle, but about a 3% colorization layer would be helpful. Also, don't make it just blue, or it will still look weaker than it should - mix in a bit of brown/red towards the bottom, so the color fades from one to the other as it goes down - it should be almost imperceptible but will make it pop much more. Think of it as reflecting sky and ground. You may want to tint it a bit more blue or brown or something overall depending on the material.

Unfortunately, that nice coloured spec map you have there is next to useless in Source, as I'm sure you know already. The red channel of the exponent map is the gloss map, and the green channel tints the spec map based on the diffuse colour, which is a really crappy way of doing it IMO. It never looks as good as a proper RGB spec.It looks like you know what you're doing though, and have the spec map in the alpha of the normal map.

I think you could go even darker on the metallic parts of the gloss map still, and change the frensnel ranges to be a bit less biased towards rim lighting. Start with [1 1 1] and play with phongboost till the main body of the gun has a bit of a sheen on it from all angles. Then tweak to get the rim lights.

BTW, there is a third-party extended phong shader that supports RGB spec and environment mapping together. You can get it here.

Oh cool Cheese, didn't know that the seperate channels in the exp map were used for different things.



Still tweaking but update anyway.

No probs. The "$phongalbedotint" "1" is the bit that switches it on. I'm not sure that it works in CS yet though, but it does work in Day of Defeat for sure. Hopefully Valve will roll out all the new goodies into the SDK soon, if they haven't already.