Specular Channel- Reflectance Layer tutorial

[Steve Bentley]

I think is this what you are asking:

When they changed the reflectance channel set up half us scratched our heads and half of us said “thank god!”. Not everything has a round hilight!
I think they mean the “layer” in the reflectance channel, not the color channel of the material.

Lets say you had a circuit board with the classic green background with gold circuit traces. You could put a map of those circuit traces in the color channel of the specular (and reflection) channels to both color the light bounced back and to increase/decrease the level of brightness a specular (or reflective) flare might give back based on the kind of material each should be. So much less modelling! A texture map is worth a thousand polygons I always say.
So in the specular color map the traces would be bright and perhaps a light amber while the area of the board would dark green. As the spec hilight passes from one area to the next the texture map will change it’s color and it’s brightness. Things that are metalic or have a metalic paint structure tend to reflect or have a specular hilight that is the same color (but lighter) as the metal they are made from. A christmas ball is a great example. The highlights are rarely white , usually they are the red or green of the ball color. In fact there is a metalic setting in the reflection tab now that helps take this into account.

Another way to think about this – reflecting objects (like chrome) don’t often have much color in their color channel, in fact it’s one way to broadcast that it’s a cg object – its like the chrome got fogged. But you can put some color in there to help tint the metal. This is perhaps what they meant.

Let me know if that’s what you meant. I love the new reflection area – so much more powerful – but as for the manual – it’s riddled with errors.