Sorry, I didn’t mean the whole environment, I meant for example a render of the environment with some trees and sky, as the sky isn’t the only thing being reflected. If you’re just going for a “shiny” look though, why not just set high specular and hardness values in the material’s shader settings? I think the reflection mapping is better suited for objects that need reflections, look at Yo Frankie!, the water has a screenshot of the environment mapped to the reflection coordinates, but it would still look “wet” or “shiny” without it.
The tutorial is about using reflection mapping. Not about setting high specular and hardness values in the material’s shader settings.
You say:
but overall this seems too complicated.
Please. Look at the tutorial. If you know of an easier way to use reflection mapping, let me know. I will be glad to update the tutorial.
And yes, you can use any texture you want to use. As is clearly stated in Step 4.
You can use any image as a reflective map. For best results, try to match the colors of the reflective map to the game surroundings.
Ok, I think your tutorial is great, I’m just saying reflections aren’t the only way to make something look shiny, which is kind of what your tutorial is saying.
Reflective maps can’t be one solid color. (I agree) *The brightness of the colors and the contrast between the colors determines how shiny it is. (No. How much the reflection texture is interpolated with the base material determines how glossy it is, by using the Col slider (which you do mention later).).
I still believe you can make a material look shiny just by using hard specular lighting… This saves computing power as well.
In the real world, when an object only shows specular, it’s shiny enough to reflect very bright light (IE directly from a source) but dull enough to scatter incident light (IE light that bounced off of other surfaces)- if it’s shinier, it will also clearly reflect its surroundings.
You can save computer power by using specular only to indicate shininess, but there’s a limit to how far that will take you and after that point you need to introduce some sort of reflection map. The human brain can easily sell the difference between a specular-only and environment reflection in an instant, but it takes a closer look to see whether the reflection is a random image or actually the surroundings- so usually you can get away with just a single generic image for reflections (especially on an object with fairly complex surfaces), accurate environmental reflections are generally unnecessary.
