If you don't like how mirror-shiny this ship is (which I don't), you guy understand that changing that only takes a couple of minutes and a free paint.net plugin, yes? It's really not hard.
What filter would that be? I went into Photoshop, blended a battleship gray into the diffuse map, darkened the reflectance map massively, and did this to the
main map only. The result:
Unfortunately, FenrisGreeb is not neatly separated into painted and dark parts so I left it completely untouched.
The diffuse map looks kind of rough but it has a real
presence that no non-PBR ships possess. I think a real artist would be required to "paint" it properly, adding a sense of physicality and weathering to the paint, etc. Perhaps one could have easily gotten the impression that Terran ships were shiny metal from the way
textures designed without specularity in mind tended to get adapted to specularity. They "should" have been redrawn from scratch, but unfortunately the dev time and resources did not exist and especially capship tiles tended to end up at the bottom of the food chain in this regard. Instead, people twiddled with some sliders or applied crude blending techniques (sort of like what I just did
) to get it looking mostly acceptable. The TEI fleet in Blue Planet seems like it was always meant to be silvery metal instead of gray, so that's another possible source for the shiny Terrans brain bug.
Even in its damaged state, this is the best-looking FSU model that's ever been released. Perhaps the bare metal skin could even be kept and made a GTI variant or something.
[attachment eaten by a Shivan]