Making glossy overlay for mesh

[Suki Hirano]

I'm trying to make this item I got from a mesh kit glossy, so do I need to create a specular map for it? I'm ok with building mesh but kind of clueless in texturing it. I want the entire object to have a thin layer of gloss, so what would be the easiest/quickest way to go about it? I do have the textures of the object provided in the mesh kit.

[Dora Gustafson]

You don't need a dedicated specular map for that, use an all white(select 'blank' in the editor) specular map and play with the settings in the editor

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Suki Hirano]

I tried setting gloss to 100 but I'm not seeing any difference whatsoever between gloss = 100 or no specular map at all. My advanced lighting is enabled in graphics. Anyone know what's causing this?

Edit: I don't want the ugly gloss effect through the "shininess" setting, in case I wasn't clear.

[Rolig Loon]

Take a good look at Drongle McMahon's reply in https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Building-and-Texturing-Forum/Specular-map-not-working/m-p/2912003 to see why specularity might not always be obvious.

[Dora Gustafson]

Your wind light may be set in a way glossiness won't be visible

• if the light from the sun and moon are set to black the scene is lit by ambient light only and you won't see glossiness
  and you have no point light or projector to light up you object
• You may have sunlight but stand in a position where you don't see the reflected light
  Glossiness shows by the reflected light from the glossy surface

The setting with no sun and no moon is recommended by some merchants who believe shadows are bad
Don't use it!
It is a step down from what advanced lighting can do
Advanced lighting together with normal maps and specularity provides real shadows and highlights, so it is about time skin and cloth merchants stop painting shadows and highlights on their products

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Drongle McMahon]

To add to that, here is an illustration that might help to explain why people get disappointed by the effect of specular highlights. There are three versions of the 2nd order Blender Menger cube. At the left is a simple flat-shaded version. In the middle, this has had rounded edges added by using a single segment bevel and vertex normals transferred from the flat shaded model. The bevels mean this has much less geometry. On the right is a smooth-shaded version with a normal map baked onto it from a high poly version with three levels of Catmull-Clark subdivision.

These were given a blank diffuse texture, blue colour and blank specular map. Environmental reflection was left at zero, and Glossiness was set to the figures at the top left of each panel. Glossiness is the specular exponent, which controls the tightness of the cone of specular reflection from a point. Te left had panels are in 3pm sunlight, with the sun behind the camera. On the right, there is just 12am moonlight. and most of the light is from a single local light source above and in from of each cube.

Looking at the pictures, we can see where the problems are.
1. The flat shaded model doesn't ever show any highlights at all.
2. So you have to add geometry and/or normal maps to get highlights.
3. As the glossiness is increased, the highlights get smaller and smaller in both the other models.
4. There are much more highlights with the local lighting, but at the lower glossiness settings needed to see highlights in sunlight alone, there is too much light from the rest of the surface. So there is always a compromise required for acceptable appearance under both sunlight and local lighting.

The reason the highlights are so sparse compared with RL is because RL has a huge amount of sources of indirect lighting, so that highlights, of all sorts of intensity and colours, can be seen at many different angles of view. In SL there is no indirect lighting, so that highlights from reflected sunlight are visible over a very restricted range of angles. There's a bit more with added light sources, but nothing like the variety in RL. Environmental reflection in SL is an attempt to mimic indirect lighting, but it only uses the sky and the sun, and has too little detail to be very realistic.