Skinners need help..

[-Rudel-]

PM'd Robo :)

 

I've been working on a little something myself. See attachments. I'm using gray scale charts within the SPEC over some common colored stripes. The base coat color is from the stock Bare Metal skin.

 

The left wing is matte. The pure black turned the wing white-ish.

 

The right wing is using the same layout, but now inverted for shine.

 

On both the leading edges, is a grey scale stripe, with a duplicate grey scale in the spec.

 

I think I found a happy medium near the outer side of the .50 Cal's muzzles.

 

You still get reflections, but the blue is not as strong.

[O_Smiladon]

S!.

 

So if you want to bring the shinny back to matt do u have to bring every layer up on the G,,out of the R.G.B of just the main colour layer ?

 

cheeers

 

O_Smiladon

[Ali Fish]

only the R and B channels are used. R for specular B for reflection intensity,

 

R,G, B values seperatly are grey scale.

 

in photoshop via channels tabm simply select a single channel and edit away. IGNORE what the main viewing of the RGB channel tells you.(thats all channels together viewing, normal viewing capacity)

 

the reason why when you open it it looks strange is because the green channel is inverted, re invert the green channel which isnt used yet back, and for viewing and understanding it becomes clearer. maybe in the future they will implement the green channel for somthing else. who knows, i dont.

 

working in multichannel is simply working on 3 greyscale images via the independant nature of using the independant channels, very conveniaint instead of using 1 canvas per shader etc.

 

so power up those red and blue channels for increased shader power where specular light and reflection intensity are concerned. white is high black is low. you want a matt effect which equates to little reflection and dull specular light bounce make your individual channels darker.work your art in there and it can work wonders. especially a simple contrast between differing materials or differing types of paint. etc etc. the more you work it the better it can be and its no different to working in colour. 1 thing i have not done yet it work with the weathering and the specular/reflection, its good to balance the clean style first then work on to create more realism with grime and dirt etc....match it all up and itll look great.

 

HOWEVER. at midday in game you will see your metalics look too metalic given we are simulating light and its not entirely perfect. it will cause the shader to be overly powered and unrealistic. and possibly overly taxing on your system, developers sometimes dont push these attributes for various reasons and in accordance with any design remit ofcourse, that does not stipulate usage of shaders as such. so maybe that can be why i personally dont see devs going for it with the possibilities. imo theres no reason why the whole sim cant be overhauled to accomodate for such usage of shaders. oops im off on a tangent..

 

working on alpha channels is similar. always the greyscale. and very reminscient to whats called height maps. conventional normal or bump maps are made in the same way incidentally however there are many variations in implementing such shaders,

 

hint: a greyscale image can be the R, the G or the B or the Alpha channel of a texture(if working in RGB ofcourse!), for further understanding, take a random colour picture open in it in photoshop. look at individual channels, think on a percentage scale of the involvment of colour represented by the notion of black to white depicting the percentage colour involvment of red green and blue. or use the dropper and measure the percentage greyscale of the colour dropper, translate that to colour of the channel you are viewing and associate the 3 values and translate it to colour and you have your ingame colourfull picture. <nothing to do with designing just some theory, where dcs is concerned it reads these textures not as 1 texture but as 3 presently but only uses the R and B channels. conveniant for containment you see !

 

it has been done other ways for example in rfactor racing simulator, the specular may not be an individual channel but the shaders want to read the full RGB channel. so for example there you could add coloured light locally by design to your favourite motor car and the results that i found were spectacular, Pearlescent paint ! because one day i realised whilst looking at pearlescent TVR sportscar that the light that hits the car is not of concern its the light that the object emits thats important. and when you transfer that notion into the shader system presently on offer you get pearlescent sports car driving around = cool !

 

i didnt realise that dcs offered some form of realtime reflections prior to doing my metallics work ! the saving grace for the project due to the inability to colour the specular files which i feared would be necessary was quashed which was cool.

Edited May 21, 2012 by Ali Fish