I've been trying to make an entity appear metallic and shiny. I don't really know how to create a specular texture to do this. I would like the entity to be as shiny as possible. Could someone please give me some tips.

By the way, I don't even know what an alpha channel is!

Many thanks.

I can't seem to get this level of shininess:



Could it be the shader or maybe the diffuse texture... something else?

The specular texture is usually a grayscale texture. The darker it is the less shine; the brighter it is the more shine. I had this problem with my roads being too shiny till someone told me about this. Hope this helps.

I usually just change my diffuse texture to greyscale and tighten the "levels" of the image more so the brighter areas go brighter and dark go darker. For my spec maps.

I have a lot of trouble with specular maps, it takes me ages to get it just right, and even then I generally end up saying "it's good enough" and letting it go at that. I think the trouble I have is because there are multiple methods to use depending on what kind of texture you need.

For example brick work needs the outline of the brick to be highlighted but the flat of the brick to be fairly dark with the gaps between the bricks being very dark, to do this you need to define the edges, so (in GIMP this is) you use a tool called edge detect to define the shape of the bricks, then you desaturate (make it grey scale) the image and use the black and white levels along with brightness and contrast to fine tune the image.

However, if you want say bathroom tiles, you need the tile edges and faces to e highlighted and the gaps to be fairly dark, to do this you would use the same method, however after desaturating and before adjusting the levels you would invert the colours of the image to make the tiles shinier.

I think the second method would probably work better for a metal surface, remembering the more white the area is the shinier it will be, so you would want to make the main surface area as white as possible while dents would be light grey, scratches would be darker grey and gaps between metal panels etc would be a lot darker.

An Alpha channel is the background layer of an image, it's the layer that tells the image what colour to be if you delete every that's drawn on it, it's the primary layer for transparency and an image cannot be transparent without it.

I hope that's understandable, and helps, obviously these are just a couple of methods i use that seem to work well enough, but there are literally dozens of different methods and views.

Thanks, everyone.

good tut , thanks Pirate Myke

Your welcome.