So… everyone knows sims 3 creation tools aren’t the best when it comes to technical side, but another reason why people have problems with creating things for sims 3 is because of lack of proper documentation and tutorials.
I plan to change all of this over certain period of time with information and tutorials regarding sims 3 CC creation, all fully laid out in one place, this tumblr page.
I will start with how specular mapping works in sims 3.
Specular map, in any game that uses them, not just sims 3, serves to determine how shiny/reflective parts of an object material are. The more bright the map texture is, the more reflective corresponding part on the object will be.
This is an example of a sims 3 specular map:
So… Dark areas, less reflective. Bright areas more reflective. Now that we have this established… how do these maps work in sims 3?
Object specular maps have two separate data sets:
- Actual Specular Data (Color/RGB channels)
- CAST (create a style)/Object Specular Separation Data (Alpha channel)
Actual Specular Data is basically fulfilling a purpose of a specular map. By using Color/RGB Channels, you can determine where the most reflections will be and where there won’t be any.
But it can also determine the color of reflections. If you color the specular map in red, the reflections will be red. If you color it in gold, reflections will be gold.
This allow you to have some parts of the material look like actual metal in the game.
Sadly, changing the color of the material in game, doesn’t change the color of the reflection that you defined with specular map. You would usually only do this if you had an overlay texture that you can’t change color of in game, so metalic reflection color will always match the base material color.
It is important to note, however, that the actual reflection intensity doesn’t necessarily depend only on this part of specular map data. It also depends on…
CAST/Object Specular Separation Data, which exist because of how reflections are calculated in game.
Every Create A Style material has it’s own specular map. This map is then combined with your objects base specular map to determine final reflectivity of the objects material.
That is, if you set yor specular map Alpha/Transparency Channel under a certain value. But if you go over that value, then your material specular won’t be affected by CAST material/pattern specular map, and will have it’s shine intensity exactly how you defined it in Color/RGB channels.
Here are visual representations of values to closer depict how this looks:
- CAST Material with very dark specular map:
- CAST Material with medium specular map:
- CAST Material with fully bright specular map:
And here is a closer depiction of how it works in conjunction with detailed CAST material specular maps ( CAST Material VS Object Material ):
It is also important to note that when you edit the Alpha Channel in Photoshop, values will be different. I made sure to include those as PS Alpha in the images
Those are actually the true values the game makes disctionction between when reading this data. It seems that the border between two different states is 50% value.
Sadly, Clothes Specular Map doesn’t work this way. No matter the Alpha channel changes, clothes specular/reflectivity can’t be affected by CAST specular map.
So how you make your specular map in Color/RGB channels, that’s how intensity will behave in game.
Alpha Channel is completely disregarded and useless in this context.
Only relevant data in this case is Color/RGB channels.
For the end, here’s a little hint on what my friend and I have been working on for the past two months:
