   Outdoor specular lighting
  Hi everyone,Let's say I light my outdoors scene using a directional light source (i.e. the sun) only. If I now use specular (normal mapped) lighting, won't there necessarily be a certain viewing angle for every surface so that it is completely flashing white? This would of course be quite annoying. Clamping the specular coefficient also reduces the intensity of "right" specular effects, so this is no way. Do I make a general mistake here?Just wondering, Gerd   
  yes. and no.the way most APIs calculate normals of surfaces gives a "per-vertex normal" rather than a surface normal to use in calculations for things like specularity. this makes it so you will see more of the specular "shiny dot" you expect to see and less of the speclar "shiny triangle" effect that surface nomals give. believe it or not, almost everything in nature has a specular reflection... at some angle they reflect a HUGE amount of light (sometimes only of certain color bands). this amount of light reflected goes well beyond what a monitor is capable of displaying (in terms of intensity) so the solution is just to make it a very bright (whiteish) color that you will see.even large objects display this effect. around 2 or 10 in the afternoon go look at a billboard, if you find the angle where if it were a mirror you would be looking at the sun you will find that it is VERY hard to read the sign anymore! most vehicles have slightly curved exteriors on all sides... not because it is more aerodynamic (a flat rear end for example would be better in some cases) but because it can literally blind other drivers with specular reflections and make the car hard to spot (flat windows are also avoided for this reason).if you notice too many jagged looking specular reflections in your scene, there are a couple things you can do:- on the texture, reduce the specular value to <30% and the bring down the glossiness (size of the dot) as well- add more polygons... more polygons = smoother looking "shiny dots" on curved surfaceshope that helps a bit   ;Quote:Original post by cheez_keeper- add more polygons... more polygons = smoother looking "shiny dots" on curved surfacesHe's using normal mapped specular ... so he doesn't need more polygons -_-@ g33rd0 : show us the equation you're using, it's easier to spot anything wrong with your shader.Specular lighting should be something like :(R.-L)^swhere R is the reflection of the "eye-to-point" vector, -L is the inverse of the light direction, and s is the specular power. This last variable is a constant, and you can play on that to modify the specular area (the higher s is the most "concentrated" the specular hightlight is)I also clamp the result on certain scenes to avoid big white areas. And you could also use a specular map which stores the specular color in RGB and the specular power in alpha. It can give pretty good results.   