by LeeC » Sat Mar 20, 2010 7:01 pm
Give me a few mins then fella, and I'll check it out for you.
Oh, before I forget... the diffuse texture is what forms the basis for the plane's colour. That Bushy Tail repaint we did, you were editing the diffuse texture there.
Ok, there are two things you will need to work on.
If you have DXTBmp, load in C152_T1.dds and notice that in the Alpha Channel window, there are some pale grey shapes against a white background. That is the image you need to edit to affect how reflective the aircraft is. Black = very reflective, White = not reflective.
As well as that, there is also C152_T1_specular.dds. This texture controls how shiny the aircraft is. Note, reflective and shiny are not the same thing with the textures, that's the confusing part.
Reflectivity controls the reflection of the environment map, shininess controls the highlights on the aircraft.
So in theory, you could have paint that reflects a lot but doesn't show any defined highlights. It's the balance of these two textures that is the key to it looking convincing.
In the C152, they've done what appears to be a quite common technique for the specular texture, desaturate the main texture and invert it to create the different levels of specularity.
The danger with that is that it can create false levels of specularity. In reality, you should consider what materials you are representing in your texture, and then set a specularity level to match. Rubber would be very low, so would be dark, glossy paint would be quite shiny, so would be pale grey, or even white.
I've seen a few aircraft that are made less reflective/shiny underneath because they used that technique, which is fine until you fly the plane upside down, and then it all goes wrong.
I would suggest, make a copy of the texture folder and call it texture.repaint (or similar) create a new version of the aircraft in the aircraft.cfg and point it at the new texture folder. Then just lay blocks of varying levels of black to white on the textures (even black, mid-grey and white will be enough). On one side, do the specular texture, and then the other side, do the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. That way, you can see each effect on it's own.
I'll keep checking back on here over the next 2 or 3 hours, if you have any more problems, shout up and I'll help if I can.
Last edited by
LeeC on Sat Mar 20, 2010 7:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
