Specular and skin colour issue
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Hello! I have been searching high and low trying to figure out this issue that I have. Unfortunately there is very little information around about it so I decided to ask here in hopes that someone can help me.
As the title states, I have an issue with the specular map not changing skin colour. I'll explain what I mean first so you can understand my issue.
I recently started doing shoes. Mainly I convert them from Sims 4 for MP female. I've mostly done boots but since it's summer I wanted to do sandals and other sandal high heel type shoes which obviously show the foot. I've had no issues making diffuse and normal maps, however no matter how I export the specular map, when I go in-game, the foot doesn't change the skin colour. I've found a workaround for it with taking GTAV's specular map from a shoe that's similar to mine and that works fine but obviously that doesn't help me much, especially if I want to add different styles of fabric to my shoe (meaning marking what's metal, what kind of texture it is (leather, satin) and etc.).
I use Photoshop, GIMP and paint.net and have tried DDS plugins for all 3 programs to export the specular into DDS and still the skin just doesn't change colour. I am also aware that specular uses DXT5 compression.
By checking GTAV files I have noticed that in specular maps sometimes the part where the skin should be is empty (cut out/transparent) and other times it's a mixture of blue/pink/purple colours as those are the colours used for skin in GTAV and that's how the game recognizes the skin.
So my question here is what am I doing wrong and if there is a step that I am missing. Because I would take my diffuse map and colour all the parts in appropriate colours by using a specular colour list and part where the foot skin goes, I'd cut out. Then I would export it into DDS with DXT5 compression. Is this the proper way to do it? Or is there another way that I am missing and don't know about. Any information will be helpful!!
