Specular map help

Hi. I wrote out some instructions here that may help. CAS speculars are a little complicated because you're working with five channels: red, green, blue, alpha, and a .mask.dds file whereas for objects you're just dealing with four channels. IMO, it's easier to work with a .dds. 1) you can use the specular picker (see my link) and 2) you have more control over how your specular turns out.

You can use a .dds or a .png. With a .png the shine is controlled by how transparent the .png, itself, is. That's hard to get right and not worth the trouble. The trickiest thing for me is trying to match up the UV islands in my UV layout with my mesh. Like, if I've got a belt buckle I want to have a specific shine I have to open Blender so I can see where the buckle's UV islands are. It's annoying.

Yes, I did mention how object speculars are different and don't include a mask. Apologies if I wasn't clear. As for size, I usually export the specular (and the other textures) from whatever I cloned and make my specular (and the other textures) the same size. 

Moon In the link in my previous post there is a link for the specular picker. It makes things so much easier but you have to use it with Blender 2.90. You don't have to install 2.90; just use the zipped version.  

And my link in my other post went to the wrong thing. I'd had written out a whole tutorial but the link I provided just led to the middle of it, not the part about the specular. Sorry about that. Here's a link to the post, itself and there is a brief description of what each channel in a specular does. 

There is some information related to the specular picker here, and one tip it includes is to bake an ambient occlusion map and use it for your alpha layer.