Metal texture

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

6 hours ago, Hellfire Markstein said:

did you put the spec to the alpha channel  of the normal map or did drag it to the spec map slot  in sl?

I made the following two images in GIMP, set the left one as the bumpiness image in SL and the right one as the specular image.

I was only testing how chrome-ish I could get the flat top, though. The model would probably look even better overall if you made both images have the alpha mask of the one on the right. That way you won't have little sparklies along all the edges. Those two alpha channels mean different things -- dark on the left alpha means local light reflections get spread out, while dark on the right alpha means weak skybox mirroring -- but rough areas on your model would behave in both those ways, so it makes sense they'd have identical (or at least very similar) masking.

Also, you should start with both Glossiness and Environment numerical values at 255 and your manual specular tint to pure white, then manually tweak them down after you've assigned your textures to see if you can make things look better. It's hard to know ahead of time exactly how bright or dark your shades of gray should be in all your textures to get the best reflection strength. These settings combine with your textures in much the same way as the face tint combines with your diffuse texture. Generally you don't want to plan on using both, especially since they can only adjust things in one direction, but since specular values are so much less intuitive, it's useful to experiment this way.

 

Edited January 21, 2021 by Quarrel Kukulcan

[Hellfire Markstein]

Thank you Quarrel Kukulcan,

So you uploaded the normal map and the spec map combined with alpha to SL, and you draged both maps to the  designed slots of the maps I guess.

I did it and this is the result. Not too bad I think.