Its a big improvement Vraciu and its a shame the game wasn't set up to automatically add blank maps like this to old skins. HTC put all that effort into improving the AH3 scenery but now half the skins look a shiny mess.
I know you have the best of motives in preserving Fencer's work and many more really old skins could be substantially improved this way for little time and effort. However personally I wouldn't feel comfortable about just adding effect maps to a skin unless there was a way to keep the original skinner's name associated with it.
I feel that way myself. As you’ll recall I brought this issue up when the adoption program was started.
At this point I am leaving a disclaimer in the skins description page explaining that it is his skin. Perhaps Skuzzy will be able to implement Devil’s owner reversion idea in the future.
These skins really need fixing so we are between a rock and a hard place...
In this case I took a gray scale of the diffuse and went through it to customize the specularity for each different item--insignia, gray belly paint, etc. It was a little bit of work but not nearly as much as doing the entire thing over again would have been.
Honestly, a darkened gray scale map for each map and a blank Normal would be good enough on their own--compared to the glazed look. I just went a step further.
