Thanks John, Thats a real compliment, its definitely what Ive been trying to achieve.
Still not happy with the vert count on them. Gonna have to take more angle grinder to them.
Thanks man, yes its making a difference. Having that stuff in the background is adding to the "sense of place".
Sure. Well, the textures do the heavy lifting. So important to get the textures prepped to take advantage of the fairly simple shaders we have here.
1. The engine pushes contrast, and with SOL thats accentuated even more.
2. So the first thing is to make sure texture maps tonal range has lots of mid tones and little to no black or white.
3. Also its important that the tonal values of ALL textures in the entire scene are in the same range.
3. If your base AMBIENT and DIFFUSE values in shader settings are wildly different from each other to get them to look right together, then the texture tonal range across textures is out sync.
4. Color range. Make sure your hues are in the same spectrum as well. If one texture is red biased and another blue etc, its going ot break up the color harmony across the scene.
^ Tonal values across a selection of textures ^
You mentioned the yellow sausage kerb. Ill use that to illustrate the point.
SETTING UP THE TEXTURE
TONE
* The texture above is doing almost everything right except in one area, and that's the black. (B)
* The darkest it should go is around the value marked (C).
* Darker contrasty details like (A) add interest and indentations, but its nowhere near black.
* Note there is no white in there. The engine would otherwise blow out the texture if there was white.
* We want the dynamic lighting to give us highlites, and that would be obscured by the texture if we had white in there.
* Lots of mid tones is going to give us visual information. We want that.
NORMAL MAP
* R128 G128 B255 is the mid point value.
* Working "darker" and "lighter" within the parameters above is generally where I keep my normal maps.
* Using the values outside the mid point value will build up your highlites and specular.
* The RGB color channels in a normal map correspond to the respective X, Y, and Z coordinates of surface normals. Lots of online info to understand what color value is doing what.
Looking at the texture map and whats happening in the engine above.
* Where I have the black in my texture map (B) its creating a "shadow" transitional effect, but its too harsh, and breaking the illusion a bit.
* At the end of the geo, (where my UV mapping still needs to be tweaked), we have no dark line detail and that also doesnt look great.
* So, a lighter edge detail needs to replace the black in my texture.
VARIATION IN DETAIL
* The variation in the normal map, giving us areas of interest and contrast.
* This allows the highlite to vary across the surface of the object (high and low detail in NM)
* We can achieve sharper highlites mixed with softer highlites on the same object with this.
SHADER SETTINGS
As a baseline starting point, Ive used the base setting below for each material before setting it up.
MATT vs SHINY
* Bottom line: the wider or more distributed the specular, the more matt the object will appear.
* The more focussed the specular (highlite), the shinier it will appear.
* In this instance, we want the paint to appear shiny.
* Also remember, these setting are based on the texture map tonal values.
^ To focus the specular, we push up the KsSpecularEXP value
^ Then to push up the intensity of the highlite, we push up the KsSpecular value
^ This is the final value I came to which felt right to me.
Well that's one of them! But I think this is the basis on getting a cross section of materials.
