Texturing a highpolygon weapon?

[kleinluka]

if you're skinning a weapon model for a game its a MUST to have reflections ect on the skin itself. for a render it depends ...but i'd still put them in just to back up the render effects

btw thats some nice metal you got there. good job

[Supernova]

No!!
You must not include anything but the color itself.
Your shader properties and lighting setup sould take care of things for you. By painting the reflections\highlights yourself you are losing a big pice of realism.

So i'f you are going to render it yourself using a rendering software (I mean, not inside a game engine) there are some different methods to do it... you will have to learn them yourself.

Good luck.

[JamesMK]

If you intend to render it (that is, not use in real-time game graphics) then you definately don't want to paint any highlights or shadows, just the basic color... Otherwise you will paint yourself into a corner (no pun intended) when starting to rig the lights etc. ::::BUT!:::: By looking at the image in your post, it's obvious that you'll want something more than just a color map. Add a specular map as well, something nice and gritty to break up the specular highlights.

[JonasNoell]

Sorry, I haven't been to this board for a longer time. Thanks for all the replies!

JamesMK, you are definitely right. But the question is if I get something of a drawn qualitiy by adding a base color and a specular map?

The problem is that I want a quite real looking metal, like shown in the pictures above. Is there any way to achieve this?

cANt

[JamesMK]

Depending on what renderer you are going to use, there is a lot of things you can do to make it look really realistic. But an exact how-to on that would be a bit hard since you haven't told us where you're going to render.

Some general pointers on it would be: Your material should have a high specular value, and a low diffuse value. The specularity should be affected by a decently messy texture, and you might also consider varying the specular fall-off with a texture to get an even more "live" feel. If you add reflections (environment mapped or raytraced) you would probably want to add some mask first (a texture in "stencil-mode" or equivalent) to cancel parts of that reflection. Use reflection blur if available too.

The rest of the answer lies within the art of light-rigging. But don't take my word for it - there is perhaps some texturing goddess around with further pointers...

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