Specularity Not Working as it Should.

TarotRedhand

In the course of making a number of placeables I accidentally discovered that what it says in the NwN EE Wiki, specifically in the Standard material inputs article, is wrong. For months now, I have religiously made sure that my spec maps are 8 bit greyscale. I have also struggled to get any sort of reflectivity from the placeables that I worked on. Then, just tonight, I made a serendipitous (means happy accident) discovery. In my attempts with spec maps I have used the gimp to brighten these maps (its the only image editing software I have access to that will save 8 bit greyscale TGA files). In order to make them even paler, I tried loading some spec maps into paint.net. After that I saved them and tried them, forgetting that paint.net can only save in either RGB or RGBA. Upon testing I found the glossiness of the selected placeables was spectacular. Afterwards, I realised that the spec maps were in the "wrong" (24 bit, RGB) format and used the gimp to convert them into the "right" (8 bit, greyscale) format. Upon re-testing, I found that the glossiness had vanished again. Reverting them to 24 bit RGB restored it.

Conclusion - Either spec maps are supposed to be 24 bit RGB (not 8 bit greyscale) or there is a bug.

@JuliusBorisov Was there an announcement in one of the NwN EE patch notes about this that I missed (has happened before) or have I stumbled upon something that was not intended, or what? BTW is @Soren still around? I pm'd them over on the vault about a month ago but got haven't had a reply. I figured that as it was August they were probably on holiday.

TR

Soren

Hey there, sorry about not getting back to you on the neverwinter vault forum message, somehow it slipped my attention. Will reply to you regarding that issue there.

As for what you are experiencing here, I suspect it may because gimp does some sort of gamma correction. Are you able to share the grayscale and RGB variants somewhere?

TarotRedhand

Thanks. I've sent you a pm with a dropbox link to a 7z containing them. You may be right. I am also aware that if the image you want to convert to greyscale has an alpha channel, the gimp does something funny to the result, so I always check under layer/transparency. If "remove alpha channel" is not greyed out I click on it before converting to greyscale. I discovered this by accident. On opening the image in xnview classic in the browser view, a greyscale image would have a colour cast to it instead of just being in shades of grey when the original image had been in RGBA.

TR