Gloss Maps? Help,please........

[47th sAMuRAi]

Aloha, is there any tutorials on making your own Gloss map? I am aware that you can copy & paste whatever vanilla Gloss textures there are but I make my own uniform textures in the diffuse. I know how to make my own Colour mask and even learned to make my own Normal map just today, but I've been up and down pretty much all the threads on the total war forum and have found 2 or 3 explaining how to make Gloss maps but they are all used with photoshop and I use Gimp. I am lost but not giving up so whom ever is reading this and knows something pass the info by yeh? Would be much asppreciated.

[Primergy]

Creating a gloss map works the same way as creating a diffuse map..

In most cases you can make the area simply black, since you don't want any reflection on fabrics. If you have metallic buttons simply copy the layer where those buttons are stored and colour them green.

Or do you need actual a step by step tutorial which buttons you have to press within gimp?

[md1453]

I had issues with getting the files editable in GIMP: here is a link to this.

You can see how different it looks in GIMP and in DTXBmp, rather amazing.

When editing stuff I just add it into the layers, edit, and then copy/paste to its own file later.

edt: which version of the dds editor are you using? I'm using 2.0.10 and it has a YCoCg decoder, but that overwrite the original RGB channels so is not so good. Perhaps someone else knows how to use this tool.

[47th sAMuRAi]

I am using version 2.6.11 of Gimp. Wow, this info is very useful.....maybe you could try and make a little tutorial on what technique you use on making a Gloss map? As PDGuru advised me that "Gloss" is not all that necessary to add (since to me) making fabric shiny is a bit of a turn off. But could you please make a little tutorial specifically on (yes,lol) which buttons to press in Gimp Primergy haha. As to "colouring" the fabric parts black, exactly what technique would be done? A transparent black on the fabric textures? Or do we use a solid black? I have been using Gimp alot for the past 2 months so I am familiar with the program and I have discovered many kinds of tricks =) .I might as well learn how to do Gloss maps since I have been tought everything else , so educate me =)

[Primergy]

I'm not using gimp, so i can't help with the buttons, only with explanations of my workflow .

[47th sAMuRAi]

That's fine, hmm.......well can you just give a go ahead on the more specifics of your work flow? Just so I can study it and try to apply what you explain on Gimp's end.

[md1453]

I am using version 2.6.11 of Gimp. Wow, this info is very useful.....maybe you could try and make a little tutorial on what technique you use on making a Gloss map? As PDGuru advised me that "Gloss" is not all that necessary to add (since to me) making fabric shiny is a bit of a turn off. But could you please make a little tutorial specifically on (yes,lol) which buttons to press in Gimp Primergy haha. As to "colouring" the fabric parts black, exactly what technique would be done? A transparent black on the fabric textures? Or do we use a solid black? I have been using Gimp alot for the past 2 months so I am familiar with the program and I have discovered many kinds of tricks =) .I might as well learn how to do Gloss maps since I have been tought everything else , so educate me =)

Yeah, I will maybe write something. But for the gloss map, all you need is to make sure the faction color doesn't come through where you don't want it, and certain metallic parts get their shine. So in reality you don't need to do much with this unless you are a stickler for little details.

I'm using the same GIMP version you are, but the DDS plugin is v 2.0.10. To edit the gloss maps I had to use the program DXTBmp (easy to google and find) to send them to GIMP as a bmp, then edit, then send back to DXTBmp to save as DDS (DXT5 of course). So the map is:
DXTBmp->GIMP->DXTBmp

[47th sAMuRAi]

Thanks for that, I'll try that some day.