siddhantph

Appreciate the kind words. I would say there are a couple ways to get better with spec maps.

First off, expand your gallery. Right now everything I see is stone. Your stone is good, but a good artist and a good portfolio shows off a myriad of different materials. And spec maps are how you sell materials. Materials are also further enhanced by gloss maps; something that I recommend looking up if you're unfamiliar with. But gloss maps are basically how you sell an object that has several materials on a single texture sheet.

Second is noise. "Racer445" is the username of a kid who's sort of a legend around game design. If you don't know him, do some research but the short of it is that he has a tutorial somewhere talking about noise. I personally hate noisy textures because there isn't anything for the eye to rest on; it just darts around to all the details on the image. Racer puts a lot of details around edges and leaves smooth surfaces mostly untouched (short of s scratch or two). That allows the eye to hone in on various details throughout and not dismiss an object as being evenly roughed up.

Thirdly is the specular on your stone. Stone is naturally noisy because it's a very porous surface but if you look at stone, it is actually pretty reflective. That is often overlooked because the specular highlight (or glossiness, as referenced above) is very broad. Right now it looks like your spec maps for the stone are almost completely blacked out. I wouldn't recommend putting it in-engine because texture maps are such large files and the effect your spec maps offer is too subtle to be worth it.

Lastly is optimization of the texture sheet. I'm going to reference this file real quick: siddhantph.deviantart.com/art/… The thing about this model is that you don't need all four sides to be unique. At any given time the camera can only see two sides of the pillar, so I would only texture two sides and overlap the other two. That would free up a ton of space on your texture sheet; enough that you could fit a second stone pillar on the sheet and both models would read from the same texture.

I'm rather blunt and offer no sugar coating when I critique. I mean no offense and do not intend to discourage. If you're still feeling up to it, here's one of Racer's videos; something that helped me learn to texture long ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnh01W… He's super charming in his narration