Hi.

I'll make this quick. I'm working on OS shaders for several of the zteam h3 assets using content extracted with Adjutant. For all of the h3 weapons, and a handful of other assets, I've isolated all of the bump maps, as well as the specular lighting maps from the diffuse alpha channels, which I'm using as both the normal maps and specular highlight maps in the OS shaders, respectively.

Everything's pretty straightforward until I get down to the final portion of the shader model extensions, "Specular Lighting."

How do I determine what values I should use for my lighting coefficient and exponent? All the examples I've ever seen (including the evolved tags) have values that are all over the place, and are generally inconsistent, and the guidelines I've seen discussed in previous threads are vague and don't provide me with anything concrete to go off of.

help pls ty
Edited by Bungie LLC on Jul 2, 2017 at 12:34 PM

You might wanna check this out, as it'll be easier to determine those values ingame rather than constantly recompiling maps.

http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm%3Fpage=topic&topicID=49886

I've found that it's completely trial and error.

From what I understand, one value controls how powerful the lighting effect is, whereas the other controls the width of the lighting reflection.

IE, one controls how bright the light is on the object, the other controls how big the glare is. So shiny objects should be bright and narrow, whereas dull objects should be dark and wide.

correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that more of the role that gloss would take, not specular? (in more general terms, not just CE)
Edited by MEGA_VKNG on Jul 2, 2017 at 04:23 PM

"A specular highlight is the bright spot of light that appears on shiny objects when illuminated (for example, see image at right). Specular highlights are important in 3D computer graphics, as they provide a strong visual cue for the shape of an object and its location with respect to light sources in the scene."


Specular is the gloss, it's that white highlight that appears when light bounces off an object. The width of the white highlight and how intense it is, that's what the values control. Hence the above, shiny things that highlight is sharp and narrow, whereas dull things have a wider and less intense highlight.

The TLDR i found is this

Specular Coefficient = Specular Level
Specular Exponent = Glossiness

Generally using values of 75 and 35 tend to work for most everything halo

I was approached on Steam and told to have a look at this thread here, which gave me a straightforward enough answer for my purposes.

http://forum.halomaps.org/index.cfm%3Fpage=topic&topicID=49482

This, and the other replies have been helpful, and I can say that my problem's pretty much been solved. Hopefully, for anyone who may have the same questions down the line, this thread will provide the right answers.