Hey guys, I'm back with some info about specular surfaces. When shading, be observant of what texture you're trying to illustrate. Is it rough like a stone?
Or is it shiny like these smooth, highly polished, metal chrome balls? Notice how these balls are mostly just mirroring their surroundings rather than just being shaded from a nearby light source.
What do we see in this metal ball below? Do we just see standard shading, or is it mirroring something more interesting? Possibly it's mirroring the sun, a long street, and some grass or trees beyond the sides of the street. Now let's show what happens when we take a shiny ball such as this one and gradually degrade the polish of the surface.
Adding some scratches and grime, it's still shiny, but the shine gets a little more distorted and unclear.
And here are balls that are rusting. The bottom one loses almost all its specular quality.
As you can see, the more rough a shiny or mirror-like surface becomes, the less it's going to have that quality and the more standard the shading will be. Once you understand this concept, you can see how this applies to swords for example.
I hope this blog was helpful!