Request: Material tutorial

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
I had no idea before now how little information there is on creating materials, and how to make them this way or that way. Even looking at other materials' settings, it's very unclear what does what, and the Valve Dev Wiki is ... well, written like this:

$phongexponenttexture path/to/vtf
Filename of texture which defines Phong exponent per texel.
Gee, thanks, that really helps. :rolleyes:

For example, I made some yellow caution tape with a custom texture, right? And I'm making it a displacement and using Paint Geometry to make it sag and get sort of wrinkly towards the middle. So far, so good. But here's the thing: I want it to also get shiny where the light hits the wrinkly part. So far nothing I've tried has worked, and at this point I'm like, screw it, I'll just ask someone.

So, anyone who knows what all those mysterious terms in the .vmt files actually do, and can put it in normal human language rather than computer-talk, I think I speak for many of us when I say, can you tell us what it's all about?
 

Tapp

L10: Glamorous Member
Jan 26, 2009
776
215
A thorough analysis of the valve wiki page has indicated that the exponent refers to how 'smoothly' light interacts with your surface.
A smoother object, such as a cue ball, would have a higher (whiter) exponent while a rougher object, such as a tire, would use a lower (darker) exponent.
So, the exponent map is a grayscale image which has lighter areas for smoother, shinier areas and darker areas for rougher areas. May I recomment making your black section of tape white in the grayscale and the yellow parts gray. And always remember to read the whole article before you dismiss their advice. ;)