I have a sprite that I have plugged into the normal of a material so that light can light him up as you would expect…
I have created a normal map for the belt buckle he has on him…
I want to achieve this (see image), what do I need to do in the material nodes to do this?
You need to plug in a texture for the roughness. Black is shiny, and white is completely rough.
Since you only need a grey scale image for the roughness, you can pack it into the alpha channel of your diffuse texture if you’re not using it for transparency. Or you could pack it into the alpha channel of your normal map. It just depends on how you want to set up your materials and texturing work flow.
I came up with this in the end, how can I improve on the shininess of the belt, I want it to be uber shiny…
Super simple example here (no normal map)
You create a Masks texture, this is similar to the suggestion to use the Alpha channel of the Normal or the Diffuse and in fact you can if you use both. You need a Metallic mask and a Roughness Mask.
The metallic one is 0 to 1 (black to white), Black is not metallic at all, White is fully metallic. A simplistic description of this is it colourises the specular color of the surface so a gold buckle gets yellow highlights.
The roughness masks is 0 to 1 (black to white), Black is smooth, Whits is fully rough.
So you could put the metallic mask in the Alpha of your Albedo/Diffuse Texture and the roughness mask in the Alpha of your Normal, I normally do them as separate mask so I can have R=Metallic, G=Roughness, B=Emissive, A=(Reserved for color overide mask or other required mask)
PS on the settings of the Mask texture, set its type to “TC Masks”
