Digital Art Zone

mjc1016 - 03 October 2012 04:13 PM

Pendraia - 03 October 2012 03:21 PM

lol.. I must admit that was where my head was initially heading not sure if it could be done without maps though…

There should be a way to read an existing map and slot it into the appropriate brick.  It would probably have to be a scripted operation…but my idea would be click on the icon (from the content library) and it checks for the appropriate map (spec or displacement) and if it finds one, slots it into a conversion to black and white (found that works best with everything above a medium-light grey going to white and everything below going to black) and then applies a gold, bronze, brass, silver or chrome reflection map…all while leaving everything else except the reflection channel unchanged…but I haven’t got a clue where to begin with it.

lol neither do I ... that’s way above what I’m capable of!

I had been thinking along the lines of using the displacement to decide what went where but I don’t know if that would work or how to go about it. Something along the lines of if displacement greater than .05 apply gold reflections.

I didn’t realize this until recently, but adjusting the specularity and bump maps is a great way to “gild” something.  Choose the surface (advanced, not basic), change the specular color to a gold color, leave the strength @ 100%, but then select a texture map for the strength tab (not the color, but STRENGTH).  The texture map will work like bump maps do (and depending on what you want, you might actually use a bump map for this).  The white parts of the map will show up completely, fading off in shades of gray, w/ black not showing up at all.  If you want it to be shiny, change the lighting model to glossy plastic or metal.

In the picture below, look at the girl’s headband.  The bump map (or displacement, I forget which one I used here) is set so that the gold leaf design is noticeably raised.  I used the same map for the specular strength map, w/ the color set to a pale gold (the base texture is a grayscale texture w/ pink diffuse color) in order to make it look a bit more like embroidery.  Ignore the transparency glitch.