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A thought came by me a few days ago. I realised I’ve started texturing my specular maps this way about a year ago. Perhaps most people do it the same way but I’ve decided anyway to share how I actually derive my specular maps from my diffuse or colour map, hence, the uber title. Feel free to comment on my methods, I’m always open to new ideas and suggestions.

*Pictures will arrive shortly I promise!

Once you’ve created your diffuse map, chances are if you are working in the games industry, you have tonnes of ambient occlusion, extravagant dirt /scratch maps overlayed. This is all fine and dandy, but when you want to create your specular map, make sure you have all this elements removed, resulting in a clean base map which has basic colour tones and NO ambient lighting whatsoever. This would make the perfect base to start with for our specular map.

Also note that this base map should not have very extreme differences in tonal value, and by this i mean extreme darks and white areas. This can be tricky when you’re working with designs that have extremely contrasting tones, for instance, a cyborg zebra. Times like this, it’s always good to have masked adjustment layers to help you tweak those colours.

So once you have your base ready, go ahead and flatten it. What? Flatten it? Yes, flatten it. Some may disagree here, you would be losing a lot of control…but less is more, at least to me. I will elaborate more. Next, desaturate this map (unless you are going for a coloured specular map, to be honest, I haven’t had much chance to try coloured specular maps so if you have a tip or two, drop us a message)

Next, bring in those layers in your diffuse map that will help you mask out different elements. I assume most people work in multiple layers, unless you have a reason not to. You can then use this layers as selection masks and start adding adjustment layers and use Levels to control the tonal values for each different element.

Lastly, bring in your dirt map, scratch map, and ambient occlusion map. All this go after your adjustment layers. Multiply your dirt and ambient occlusion and dodge your scratch map, or whatever looks best in the final outcome.

At the end, you would have your layers in the following order:

• Ambient Occlusion
• Dirt
• Scratch
• Lots of masked adjustment layers
• Base specular map

Having your layers as such allows you flexibility. If changes are made to your colour map, you can simply desaturate it and bring it in as your base specular map. Because you have masked adjustment layers above your base specular map, you wouldn’t have to worry that much about tweaking your specular map all over again Always have your ambient occlusion map, dirt maps and scratch maps grouped individually so that you can bring them in as groups instead of individual layers.

That sums up this tutorial. I hope you found it useful. If you have suggestions or would like to share with us any tips and tricks. Feel free to drop us a message.

PS:Color or colour, whatever rocks your boat. I was educated the british english way.