Create the Matte Metal
by Philipk
Now I start blocking out any colors I want in different base layers at the bottom.
Add a couple of overlays to get some surface detail up.
I want to add some rust and edge damage now. I simply add layers with the colors and brightness I want and mask those out by hand using a pretty small and quite sharp brush with an opacity of 70-100%.
You can of course use photos or any of your generated edge definition layer or ambient occlusion for masking, or just have those as a base that you paint some by hand on top of.
I also added a gradient layer that goes from black to white from the bottom and up. This usually help your texture to look like it has some more depth, however it does not work on every kind of texture obviously since some may be repeated a lot vertically and you would not want a gradient to repeat like that usually.
These are pretty much the usual elements I use when creating the diffuse for similar textures to this, and I always keep the same structure no matter what kind of material I work with.
Moving over to the specular, in the image below I kind of extracted the main areas of interest. The edges are brighter to help the shape pop out a bit. Be careful with this when it comes to metal, it is easy to go overboard with such details and it will just make your texture look like somone went on brushing all sides with sandpaper if there is too much of it.
I also want the paint to have a higher specular intensity, but not too much more, when it comes to the glossiness that is more important to differentiate the paint from the base metal.
Other than that I usually try to change the brightness somewhat between different parts of the material to avoid having it feel like it is all made out of one big chunk of metal, these variations can and should be in all the texture maps.
With the glossiness map you can do a lot when it comes to metal especially. I made the paint brighter so it will look like it's smoother than the slightly rougher metal surface. I also made all the edge worn darker in the glossiness since those hacks are probably pretty uneven and coarse. You may want to experiment with that a bit.
There are a lot of different types of metal, but when it comes to large wall segments and plates they are usually pretty matte, meaning you will mostly work with darker glossiness maps and bright to semibright specular maps. But it is always fun to play around some with some brighter details here and there in the glossiness, and a lot of times you do not even have to use various specular intensities but just playing around with varying the glossiness may be enough to create such variation.
Lastly I created some larger bevels in the normal map to just make the plates a bit uneven. For this you can either create a new layer that is white or black and paint some large soft blobs in the opposite color or even use "Filter > Render > Clouds" and blur the result. Remember to work in 16bit (Image > Mode > 16 Bits/Channel) color depth if you want your gradients smooth. This is extra important if you are to apply any type of reflection/cube map reflections on your surface. When done with the details you can convert the image back to 8bit and the smooth gradients will be maintained.
The final maps when everything is applied on each texture map.
The end result with all maps applied.
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