Now you may be thinking, geez, how do I even go about making normal maps. When making them, one would think what pixels should be shinier then others, etc. Though not completely true, a specular map could be thought to be similar to a reflection map. For the values 255, all white, means it will shine 100% were a value of 1 almost black, will gives it almost no shine at all. These maps use the alpha channel of the normal map, using 255 values to tell the in game rendering engine what pixels have to be given a harder shine and what not to have any shine at all.
With them we can make scratches stand out with a larger shine and we can make dirty smudge marks look less specular. Specular maps, are the maps we use to control the specular highlight or shine spot on any given spot of the object. Subtly is the key, we don't want the rivets popping out like they are gashing holes in the fuselage. Notice, its not as extreme as the first example. To give you another example, here is a link to the normal map I am using for the back half of my Q400. Any kind of dent that you don't want to add in as geometry you can do easily with a normal map. Normal maps can be very useful in making rivets and aluminum deformations pop out as the light or shine casts over the mesh in sim. Here is a bit of extreme example of what a normal map might look like. If this explanation did not help you understand a normal map then please visit where you can find a bit more in depth explanation. Unlike bump maps, normal maps don't use brightness values to define depth but use a color system to define the angle at which the polygon reflects light. Now what is a normal maps? Simple put a normal map is similar to a bump map but goes beyond using only 8 bit color(black to white) to give depth, but instead it uses full RGB to give each pixel on the surface of a polygon a direction to point in without adding more geometry. We have 3 types of maps now at our disposal, a color, normal and specular maps, all of which if combined right give a greater effect of realism to our airplanes. This means, one image map, separate from the color maps we are all familiar with, uses the Red,green, and blue(RGB values from the image to make up the normal map and the alpha channel(transparency) for the specular maps. X-Plane uses combined normal and specular level maps in a single texture. For some these two things may seem very unfamiliar and I hope to help everyone reading this better understand what these are and how to use them. Normal maps and Specular maps have recently been added to our set of tools we can use as of X-plane version 9.41. It is very important that we all know the tools at our disposal and how to use them properly to better our products. It has come to my attention a thread just as this is much needed for our community of developers.
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