Reflection on Batman Tumbler - Part 2: Reflection Color

In the previous post, we saw how I got back reflections and hit another problem with bump effect as shown here.

Figure 1. The last render we covered. Notice the bump effect problem on the metal piece near the back wheel.

There is a metal piece near the back wheel that should be smooth but looks bumpy. I checked the Bump map slots and found that the Bump map slot was assigned an incorrect bitmap. Easy to fix. Other than that, I felt the bump was too strong, so I reduced the bump amount from the default 0.3 to 0.15. I got this render.

Figure 2. Bump effect fix. Note that the metal piece near the back wheel now looks smooth.

At this point, the render looked fine and I could have stopped. However, I thought I should make use of the painted texture maps in some way. To begin, I assigned the Specular bitmap to the Reflection Color map slot.

Figure 3. The Specular bitmap

I know that reflection color for an Arch & Design material should be close to white. How do I make the Specular bitmap, which is rather black, close to white? I needed to cheat and I cheated in 2 steps.

First, I forced the image to be interpreted as if it had gamma value of 1.0 even though it actually had sRGB gamma (which is approximately gamma 2.2).

Figure 4. Forcing gamma 1.0 interpretation

Next, I manipulated the Output Curve of the bitmap to make it even closer to white.

Figure 5. Manipulating bitmap Output Curve

Here is a comparison to show what these steps do.

Figure 6. Specular bitmap comparison. 1: original image; 2: forcing gamma 1.0 interpretation; 3: manipulating Output Curve

With these manipulations, I got this render.

Figure 7. Render with manipulated Specular bitmap

Note that I got back the dirt details painted in the Specular bitmap. However, I found the reflection color of the dirt too dark. I know that the Diffuse bitmap has color for dirt areas, so I made another cheat: I added the Diffuse map, interpreted as having gamma 1.0, to the Specular bitmap. I used a Composite map to do this. Here is my setup.

Figure 8. Adding Diffuse bitmap to Specular bitmap

And here is the render that I got.

Figure 9. Render with Diffuse map added to reflection color

Now it is time to check the render from other angles.We will cover this in the next post.

Credit: The Tumbler model and textures were created by Henry Chan.