Create the Matte Metal
by Philipk
Now I want to create some smaller details to make the surface more interesting. So I model up three different objects that I can then place out as I see fit on the base mesh.
Notice that the bolt and the rectangle handle has their border edges extruded, this is to get a smooth transition even on the border as they will be placed as "floaters".
Floaters are placed in the "air", this can be a little bit tricky if you will bake such details to a rounded shape or something similar since they may be rayed in a wierd way when being baked. You can usually go around any problems like that by just altering the distance the floaters are placed at. Or you can render them out separately.
This is how I placed my details.
When I am about to render the whole thing out I usually make copies of the base object and place one on each side of my original. This is to still get the ambient occlusion bake to not be white at the borders but rather be baked as if this was a piece of a tiling wall.
DIFFUSE, SPECULAR AND GLOSSINESS
First of all I have the baked ambient occlusion from my highpoly. This will help a great deal when creating the rest of the texture maps.
I proceed by creating a copy of the blue channel in the normal map and contrast that. I then go in with "Select > Color Range" and select the dark parts, after that I extend the selection a bit using "Refine Edge" and simply bucket fill my selection into a new layer with a white color. I then mask out everything from my original selection.
After these steps I should have a pretty good edge definition map, only that thing is the concave parts in the normal map are also present in it, those should not be included, so create a mask for my edge definition layer and simply paint away the concave areas.
A really easy way of generating a nice layer for this is to use the Photoshop filters you get with xNormal. One very handy thing is to use "Filters > xNormal > Normal2Cavity" on a copy of your normal map, then simply choose some settings of your liking, I usually use "EMB" as method and can then be able to extract the bright (convex edges) and dark (concave edges) information into two different layers.
I did not use this in my example texture as I thought the tutorial should not focus on extra tools, but it is a great way to get a good base layer for concave and convex edges from your normal map and xNormal does also include a lot of other very popular stuff that can be really handy when baking textures as well.
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