I was pretty happy with that as my colour map. From colour, I went on to create the bump map. As you may notice, I stuck to my usual habit of keeping all my different details in seperate layers. So basically, I started off this bump map by taking the steel base I had originally made for the colour map, copying it to a new layer, and desaturating it to grey.
I then did the same for each of the other layers which I had created for the colour map. I now had a bunch of layers with all those details, in much the same order as they appeared in the colour map, all desaturated and ready to be adjusted accordingly.
What I do now is decide how each of these details will affect the bump map. Will it raise the bump, or lower it? Does it add any kind of grain, or does it merely add some kind of smooth adjustment? Once I have decided on these, I adjust each layer individually.
For example, the rust layers need to add a slight coarseness to the bump map. So I took the desaturated colour layer which had been originally made from photos, and firstly applied Photoshops High Pass filter to it. This ensures that no lighting information will remain in the images - luckily, none of the images I used in these textures had any major lighting of their own, but I use the filter just to be absolutely sure. I then play around with Levels and Brightness/Contrast until the rust layers look like they will affect the bump map in the manner that I wish.
This is the same process that I do for each layer. It's really a simple matter of understanding in your mind how different details with affect different surface properties. Below is the completed bump map.
As you can see, the pattern inlays are now more visible. Since I imagined that they would be beaten into the metal, I made them rather dark in the bump map, so that they would appear to be dented into the metal. The gold flecks that I had added to the inlays are raised, since the gold would have risen above the plating when it had been applied.
After completing the bump map, I create the layers for the Specularity map. Since the different layers for both of these maps will be desaturated, I start off by simply copying all the bump layers to new ones, which I then name accordingly.
The process for building up the different layers is pretty much the same deal as when I was making the Bump map - I decide how each detail will affect the specularity of the surface. Will the detail increase of decrease it?
Obviously things like rust will decrease the spec, since rust is not shiny. Whereas the gold flecks in the inlays will be slightly shiny, since they are gold, so I increase the brightness of that layer to get that effect.
I decided for each, and adjusted each layer accordingly, and came up with my spec map.
Since this metal was pretty damn ancient, I decided that making a reflection map would be pretty unnecessary. As a result of not making a reflection map, making a seperate diffuse map was also unnecessary, so I simply lowered the overall Diffuse amount in LightWave's Surface Editor until it looked right.
The final render of the torso armour is below. For the other pieces of armour on the character, like the armour on the shoulders, hips and the gauntlets on the wrists, I used pretty much the same process and techniques, so I won't really go into that now.
