recoloring an outfit

jenniferhughey

So, if I am recoloring an outfit where I've replaced the normal map with the new color..if there is another color accent I want to add-neckline color, would that need to be added in my normal map as well, or would that accent go somewhere else? Hope this makes sense..

Richard Haseltine

You might well want a different normal map for a different material set, but the normal map isn't the colour map (it controls how the surface is lit, by pretending it's facing in a different direction)

jenniferhughey

Richard Haseltine said:

You might well want a different normal map for a different material set, but the normal map isn't the colour map (it controls how the surface is lit, by pretending it's facing in a different direction)

Sorry I meant the diffuse map but I figured it out..I use the diffuse map for all the recoloring i want to do on any given piece of the clothes..

SixDs

To answer your original question, Jennifer, it all depends on what are known as the material zones for the item. Some items may only have a single material zone - a skirt for example. In that case you could use what is known as a procedural texture to colour the skirt - a set of surface settings that includes a single colour in the Diffuse channel without the need for a Diffuse map. But a Diffuse map would allow you to make the skirt multicoloured if you wished. But what if you wanted the waistband to be different than the rest? Well, that could be done using a Diffuse map as well using a texture template that would allow you to make the waistband different. However, if you wanted the skirt to be one material and the waistband to be another, like satin versus cotton or some such, you couldn't do that if the whole thing were a single surface or material zone. You would need to create a new material zone from only those polygons comprising the waistband, which would then show up as a separate material named "waistband" or whatever you called it, and you could apply settings different from those you used on the rest of the skirt. If you had a Diffuse map of the whole skirt that you liked, you could still use that for colour by plugging it into the diffuse channel for both the waistband and the rest of the skirt.