[B3.1]Suggestion(??): Specular maps calculation for sunlight

[HawkGer]

I do not know if the game is supposed to behave this way or not .... but I find it highly distracting and unrealistic.
Basically the problem is that the game doesn't seem to use specular maps when calculating how sunlight and moonlight gets reflected on surfaces.
As a test I created a texture that has a 100% black Specular map. Here is the texture in sunlight:
http://www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania2/Fo ... tSunon.jpg
And here it is illuminated with artificial light:
http://www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania2/Fo ... Sunoff.jpg
What a difference!
Any thoughts on this?

[TMarc]

what if your texture is white?
I guess you only modify the degree of reflectivity here, like with the car skin.

And you can't really compare a smaller spotlight to the sun, which is much more powerfull
Besides this you did not place the camera at the same viewing angle and distance in both pictures.

[HawkGer]

yeah okay that comparison of mine was not that useful....but my point still stands: the reflection of the sunlight in the first pic can't be changed with specular maps and it should be changeable in my opinion. I don't know much about skins but I'm sure you can change the reflectivity of individual parts of the skin. Something like that would not be possible for textures....you can only reduce or increase the overall sunlight.

[Fix]

Specular map affects all speculars.
The sun specular is always present: it's the one used to tweak specular map.
The sun is a lot stronger than local lights, so the specular are more visible most of the time (unless in dark contrasted areas where tone mapping will boost lights)
Launcher/Advanced/Compatibility/Lightmap Light index adds speculars for local lights. Adds some loading time, but looks better.
Your screens show Sun Specular versus Local Specular, do you have LightIndex On ?.

[HawkGer]

Oh wow, I didn't know this Light index feature. It changes the local light completely.
Here is how it looks with 100% white specular map:
http://www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania2/Fo ... index1.jpg
and with 100% black specular map:
http://www.vinummusik.de/Trackmania2/Fo ... index2.jpg
The only thing that really changes is the light reflection on the ceiling. The reflection on the main block is not really affected. I thought you could control that reflection with specular maps at least a bit....but it doesn't look like that to me. The block looks like it has some sort of liquid on it on both screens and I really don't want that.
The same thing goes for the sun specular. I don't really see much of a difference with 100% black and 100% white specular map.

[Fix]

if you make your green channel black, the wall won't have specular highlights.
Edit : If this doesn't work, maybe you compress your specular in a wrong .dds format.
(ex : DXT1 without alpha : the rendering engine sets alpha to white if there is not alpha and it needs one).

[HawkGer]

Okay I finally figured this out. It has to do with the Normal map. I got these textures from someone who asked me to fix these reflections coming from the sunlight. I didn't bother to check his Normal map because I assumed the Specular map to be the culprit. After saving the Normal map with the correct 3Dc Normal Map setting it all works now

[Skeleton]

I was going to say check the normals when I first read this post but then thought no, it's HawkGer, he would have already checked this

[HawkGer]

I checked the normals and they looked fine in Photoshop, only you can't see the compression...so it was a bit tricky. But yeah, the first thing I should have done should have been to save the Normal map again

[TMarc]

Oner more thing to add to the FAQ then

Would you mind posting a screenshot of the actual results with correct textures?