I was playing around with integrating xen particles into sunburn and noticed a SOF file type on their dude model any idea what it is?
I looked in the model to see how they are getting the level of detail. I noticed they have a head, headN, and headSOF.
Obviously the head.dds is just the diffused head, the N is the Normal Map, but what is the SOF? I can't find anything online about it...is it perhaps some form of displacement?
Here is a pic of all 3:
Compiled result:
Hi,
I don't know what SOF stands for but the map is blueish so I think it's some kind of color specular map. Human skin reflects light in a slightly blueish color.
interesting...I wonder how I would create such a thing for my own models. I know how to create UV maps in blender, I imagine it would be similar but not sure on search terms to find the technique. Thanks for the insight.
Yeah, I don't really get how all this works. Our artist seems to understand it all intuatively but if any one has a simple this is how and why its done link, i would love to read it :-)
the uv maps are created from higher poly objects to lower one and baked to a map...i'm sure you were aware of that to some extent. I then think the magic happens in the shader on the GPU...where before rendering the 2D plane of pixels for a given plane, it will also look at the pre-rendered UV map and deliver detail based off the UV map and take lights into account. This would be the simplest explanation for it...I can give, from my understanding. Basically the maps save the render time, and then the pixel shader just looks at a given pixel on a map and returns the correct color/shade.
In the example from the Xen project, the r component is specular intensity, g is ambient occlusion and b is "skin / face regions"
The shader can be found here:
https://xen.svn.codeplex.com/svn/xen/src/Tutorials/Tutorial%2028/Shaders/Character.fx
awesome Luke thanks! so did they bake all these out separately and then convert to separate RGB channels in photoshop or something? I can find individual tutorials on creating a specular map and/or baking ambient occlusion in blender. couldn't find anything on baking regions unless this just happens naturally via the unwrap. Is there some where to assign a map to a channel in blender that you know of?
I would just do it in photoshop like you said (via the channels panel). Im sure you could do that in blender but I wouldnt know how.
The blue component of the image is simply a mask to show which parts of the texture are skin so that the subsurface scattering effects can be applied only to the regions of the texture that represent skin and not the clothes.
If you load up the upBodyCSOF texture into photoshop and click on the blue channel in the channels panel you can see that the region of the texture with clothes is all black and the region with the arms is white.