Shiny metal texture

[fairy]

I am working on a few upper stages along the lines of Centaur (shuttle centaur/Titan IV centaur).I was just wondering if anyone of you talented modders out there could share some techniques, or point me in the direction of tutorials on how to make seamless shiny/glossy metal textures, preferably using Gimp/PS or Blender. 

[martinezfg11]

The FASA mod has a plugin that adds reflective metal textures http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/22888-105fasa-540/

Other than that you will have to fake metalness with a high specular value and like a white diffuse color (or black? I could never figure that out).

Or you can wait until the unity 5 update and use the PBR shaders.

[NecroBones]

If you're trying to make things look metallic in the current Stock game, there are some tricks. The metallic sections should be textured in medium or dark grey colors, with some patterning that gives it a speckled or brushed sort of look to it. The alpha channel (Specular) on the texture should give it high reflectivity, possibly speckled or streaked here too. Then in Unity, under the Specular settings, set the "shininess" somewhat low (to give a wide reflective sheen), but increase the reflective color further toward white (to make it a brighter reflection).

[frizzank]

The best way to do this is find metal textures floating around on the net and use them as your base for your own textures.  Textures.com is a great place to start.

Here is a link to the PSD file for the Atlas engine in FASA (if you have something that can open PSD's)  It shows all my layers and how I combine textures to get a metal look to them.

http://www./download/nx8ulldncytryzz/Mercury_Atlas_Engine.psd

Alpha channel is used by the reflection plugin as a reflection map, and as a spec map by the default KSP shader so it looks OK without the plugin as well.

Of course this is all going to change with the next version of KSP and Unity 5 as it uses physically based shaders. I don't know if that version of KSP is going to use them but it will still be possible in the next version and would really help with metal textures looking metallic.

 

 

Edited December 16, 2015 by frizzank

[fairy]

1 hour ago, frizzank said:

The best way to do this is find metal textures floating around on the net and use them as your base for your own textures.  Textures.com is a great place to start.

Here is a link to the PSD file for the Atlas engine in FASA (if you have something that can open PSD's)  It shows all my layers and how I combine textures to get a metal look to them.

http://www./download/nx8ulldncytryzz/Mercury_Atlas_Engine.psd

Alpha channel is used by the reflection plugin as a reflection map, and as a spec map by the default KSP shader so it looks OK without the plugin as well.

Of course this is all going to change with the next version of KSP and Unity 5 as it uses physically based shaders. I don't know if that version of KSP is going to use them but it will still be possible in the next version and would really help with metal textures looking metallic.

 

 

I did pull your atlas textures into GIMP a while back to get an idea on how to go about making shiny metallic textures, but it was hard to figure out how exactly you did it by the .dds alone. Having the opportunity to look at how you layered everything is going to help me out alot. I'll go ahead and post some results here once I've gone through the PSD file.

Thank you Frizzank, appreciate the help!