Specular and Diffuse in maya 8.5

[Mattimusss]

Hello all,... i know this is prolly a stupid question but I'm in the process of finnishing a character with normals already applied... I'm (however) having trouble with finding where to put my Specular and Diffuse maps into the texture editor.. where do they go? And for that matter what exactly DO they do? I've noticed my characters (even with normals applied) lack that "finnished quality" and moreover the "glossyness" that professional models have, I'm assuming its something to do with these two maps... If anyone has some tut's they could point me towards that would deal specifically with my issue i would appreciate the help. thanks!

[FredH]

wish I could help, but I am a max user. But, what I can tell you is, if you use your normal map as a base in photoshop, you can apply colors on top of it and then save it as a diffuse sheet. When in maya, load up the diffuse somewhere in the texture editor and apply it to your model. You will see that all the colors you put on the sheet will show up on the model. For specular, anything that is white on the sheet will catch the light and anything that is black, will not show up in bright lights. To test this out, I suggest you put in a few white dots in key areas and make everything black. Then hit render and you will immidiatly understand how this important texture sheet works.

Wish I knew more about maya to help you. Good Luck with the rest:)

[Chasarsis]

There are a couple possible issues.

Make sure you have high quality rendering on, so that you can see your results in the viewport.

For your texture, you need to have a blinn material applied to your geometry, so that you get the specular shading options.
There's also a diffuse map slot there (though if you're coming from max, "diffuse = color")

As for your normal map, make sure that under bump mapping, you have your "Use As" set to Tangent Space Normals.

You could also use Valias's Normal mapping shader for Maya, which works awesomely (check out the thread here: http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=392

and his site here:
http://www.vailias.com/CGFX_Tut.htm)

I hoped that helped, but Maya's not my main package and I'm still learning, so I may have mentioned things that you already knew and tried.

[Mattimusss]

Dude, you rock. thats exactly what i needed, thanx!