• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

MSFS20 Specular map?

B

BrBlazer

Messages
481
Hi all,

I've tried to use the good ol' FSX way of specular mapping to get reflection on windows, using white or light tones where there is reflection and black where there is none. I have inserted the specular map in the specular color field as previously but it doesn't seem to be the way in MSFS. Any clues on how to get that nice shine on the window parts of my textures?

Kindly,

Blazer
 
I think you'll find that it is the "transparency" of the specular file that determines reflectivity and the "darkness" of the image determines the degree of specular highlights.

Edit: That appears to be the way MSFS handles legacy xxx.spec.dds files. 2020 textures are different.
 
Last edited:
BrBlazer said:
Hi all,

I've tried to use the good ol' FSX way of specular mapping to get reflection on windows, using white or light tones where there is reflection and black where there is none. I have inserted the specular map in the specular color field as previously but it doesn't seem to be the way in MSFS. Any clues on how to get that nice shine on the window parts of my textures?

Kindly,

Blazer
Click to expand...
What i do too get Those shiny windows is this
Open Up your teture.Select the area you want to be shiny
In the red channel for that part of the texture paint it white.Paint the green and blue channel completely black

Then select the inverse and paint the part you dont want to be reflective as follows
Red channel white
Green channel Gray (color code A6A6A6)
Blue Channel black
At the end of the Process the shiny part of your texture should be completely red and your Non shiny part would be yellow like this


AbujaNewTerminal_comp.png


Also if you want a part of the texture to be metallic instead of Shiny Paint it to get the yellow texture first.Then open up the blue channel and start painting it white with like 30 percent opacity or however much opacity you want.Paintint it 100 percent white should only be done on things that are completely metal.Also if you have An AO map ive heard you are to copy and paste that AO map in the green channel after painting it grey
 
My understanding is ....

Red Channel = Ambient Occlusion
Green Channel = Roughness (Specularity)
Blue channel = Metalness (Reflectiveness)

Alpha Channel = ??

I stand to be corrected.
 
Diffuse/Specular workflow and PBR workflow are not compatible with each other. Copying the specular map to the comp input of the standard MSFS material will in most cases result in completely wrong outputs. The big difference is that the specular map is an RGB texture, whereas the comp map of PBR is holding 3 different types of information at once.
So yes: R is ambient occlusion. This is something that we used to bake into the diffuse map in FSX.
G is roughness, but that's not specularity! It determines how flat the microsurface is and thus how much of the incoming light gets reflected, vs. how much of it gets scattered. The more you shift that value to "0", the shinier the surface.
B is metallness of the material, which is a value that we used to tweak by adjusting the fresnel ramp if the diffuse/specular material.
The alpha channel is omitted in MSFS.

There's plenty of excellent resources on the web about the ins and outs of PBR material vs a diffuse/specular workflow, but if you just look at something this, you'll get the idea pretty quickly:
xb2tm.png


What you'd need to do to design a good material in, say photoshop, is to work with the individual channels of the comp map. But the better way is to use programs like Substance Painter or Materialize to create proper PBR material.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top