I was asked this a few times, on how to get your reflective specularity aka light reflections and bump mapping in to SL, and of course non of these things get baked straight out of blender, so i pulled together a little tutorial with lots of screen shots in order to show how its done. This is my first tutorial of many I hope, and it may seem a little disjointed but i hope you find it usefull.
Initial Setup
Go to your UV editor window and right click the joining bar and split screen, change the bottom window to Node Editor
Once you have done this you can move on to the next step of apply the textures and materials to your mesh.
Step One - Selecting the Vertices and applying a Vertex Group
In edit mode (F9) Select all the vertices you wish to apply a material too. In the link and Materials tabs under the vertex groups select New (material) and assign it to those highlighted vertices.(fig 1)
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| Fig 1 |
Step Two - The Node Editor
Once this step is done go to Shading (F5) and under Links and Pipeline select Nodes then in your Node Editor window you should now have the default node configuration. Right Click on material and press delete
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| Fig 3 |
This will remove the standard node material, you will now need an extended material node so right click in the node editor window and select INPUT - Extended Material, this will now get you the extended material bar up as follows (fig 3)
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| Fig 4 |
You will now need to right click the node editor window again and create a mix for your nodes, in this case it will be a colour mix so right click, select colour and then mix (Fig 4)
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| Fig 5 |
You now need to connect all of those nodes together in the right format, so click and drag from the yellow Spec button over to colour 2 on the colour mix, change the type to addon the colour mix section and make sure that the colour output is connection to the OUT node. as per Fig 5.
Go back to your Extended Materials Node and you will now see
highlighted in red an ADD NEW tab, click this and it will generate a texture in your shading window. For now, thats as far as we need to go in the nodes window as we move to the texture part to select a texture.
Step Three - Selecting the Texture
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| Fig 7 |
Now we have set up the nodes we can choose which texture is going to be applied so Press F6 ( the button that resembles a leopard skin) and press the "ADD NEW" button under the TEXTURE tab. This will then create a new Texture in the stack called "Tex" at which point you need to select the texture type so press the drop down box and change the type to "Image" (fig 7) which will then open up further tabs for you to endulge in,
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| Fig 8 |
Now once we have done that we can move along to the third tab called "image" and you can load in the
texture you wish to apply to your mesh at this point. As I have already loaded the texture i require it is available to me in this case "rusty metal 2" (Fig 8), at this point there is no further action on the texture selection as we move to Materials to change our settings there.
Step 4 - Materials .... Huh
Unfortunately there is no keyboard short cut to select the Materials tab, however it is represented by a red marble icon next to the texture button (f6) but at this point, it should be starting to look like we have
something very much as we wanted, yet with a very distorted texture in our preview window wrapped around a sphere.
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| Fig 9 |
If you move along to the last tab set you can see an option for "MAP INPUT", if you click this tab you can see that the texture is mapped to "Orco " (Fig 9) Later we will change some of these settings but for now, we shall leave them as they stand while we look at other items in the materials section.
As we are doing a rather shabby looking texture in this tutorial we will only be placing a slight amount of reflectiveness on our texture, so under the third tab you can see the Mirror Transparency Tab. (fig 10)
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| Fig 10 |
Within that there are two options, "Ray Mirror" and " Ray Transp" , Selecting Ray Mirror we will increase the Ray Mirror option to a low figure such as 1 and the fresnel also low around 1 and change the fade to fade to material colour, This should give a slight reflective surface yet wont reflect anything around it such as wayward partial items. If you just wished to have only specular and some reflective surfaces you could stop now ... and bake that texture to the sculpted mesh, yet we are going one step further in this tutorial and applying a baked bump map as well. so we shall continue from here.
Baking Bump-Mapping
This was something I wanted to do for quite some time, but i couldn't quite get a grip with how it was done correctly, With a lot of reading, and groping about in the dark I finally worked out how to do it and this is how.
As we have already set our nodes up we don't really want to have to delete them to bake our bump mapping on the texture so this little work around will apply a bump mapping to our texture.
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| Fig 11 |
So what we shall do here is change our mapping to UV. under Map Input, and then press F6 to go back to our texture window and we want to upload our texture once more as per Step 4 to give us another copy of our texture in the stack as per Fig 11. and we have selected the same texture as we will be using this texture to generate our bitmap for our final texture.Once this has been done we can return to our materials window
(the red marble) to assign the bump mapping properties to this texture.
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| Fig 12 |
In the Texture Tab you will see both your textures in the stack, and we now need to change one to a
bump mapping so select the SECOND texture to edit .. and click the tab to " MAP INPUT" and we need to change the name of this UV to "UV-Text" and press enter (Fig 12)
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| Fig 13 |
Once this has been completed select the last tab in that group " Map To". Click the Colour button off and select the Normals Button ON we can adjust the amount of effect that is applied by adjusting the "nor" slider, however around the 0.5 - 0.6 setting is normally sufficient. (fig 13)
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| Fig 14 |
You may not at this point see much difference in how this effect is applied to your texture, however if we returned to the texture tab and deselect our top texture on the stack , we can see how strong the bump map texture is applied. (Fig 14).
Being happy that the texture is how we want it, we can at this point , bake the texture to the mesh.
As default, if we bake on a regular sculpty we will always get a low resolution image , so we would like a better texture in this case so, while all your vertices are still selected go to your UV window and select IMAGE - NEW and anything around the 512 x 512 should be fine, But you can do more or less depending on preference, and then select BAKE and if all is well you should have a nice texture you can save with both specular and bump enabled.
I hope you have found this tutorial useful, and if you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to post, and remember to follow us as I am certain i will be posting more as we go along.
Bray
