Specularity of materials - simple question

A simple question that I couldn’t find the answer for:



(1) does adding specularity to a material would result in a performance hit???



(2) I am creating my material from a .png file, I know we use setFloat(“shininess”, 5f) for ex to add the shine effect, but how about specular?



edit:

mat.setColor(“m_Specular”, ColorRGBA.White); did not do anything

  1. the diffrences in performance will be very low(i mean not many diffrence in fps)… just dont think about it.




  2. shininess without specularMap is creating default Specular based on color(color white ;)). SpecularMap is just a special texture that will override default specular color. when you change color to override white → white it do nothing… change to for example red color. or add a special Specular texture(specularMap) that will show details like you want.
  1. thanks


  2. mmmm interesting … the thing is I had a material created in a .mtl format and as I am using j3o now I was able to get the same material except it’s missing the shiningness/reflection that is actually white… am I looking at the wrong effect?

add 2)

shiness is only one, maybe you mean a glow? if not then remember that:


  • did you remembered to set all parameters?
  • higher shiness lower the area but give stronger light. so try for example shiness 0.2f.
  • if you want specular effects with normals you need a NormalMap + tangents - this is what you should learn now :slight_smile:





    without normapMap shiness just work on all model, if you add normalMap. then you set what places should be more “convex”



    normalMaps are standard in game developing, you need to know it :wink: every game like Skyrim, DeusEx / many more… or not… just Every modern game is using it :stuck_out_tongue:



    for your sure this is how normal maps look like:



    http://www.ericspitler.com/images/2d/normalmap.jpg



    next you lessons should be about parallaxMap, if you need more realistic material… but its future :wink:

If you want to have your specularColor used then you need to set UseMaterColors to true. Also then you will need to set reasonable ambient and diffuse colors. And specular defaults to black because of previous incomplete fixes to shininess.



At least that’s the mess that was left the last time I checked into it. I don’t know if any of that has been undone yet.