Specular Textures

Specular textures are shiny textures provided only by a shaderpack, some shaderpacks give great shiny textures, and some shaderpacks dont allow specular textures at all.

By making a texture file that tells the game how shiny you want a block to be it'll apply it to the main texture, as you can see in the example image you can make completely chrome surfaces. or you can go for a more subtle metallic surface, or no shininess at all.

each shader pack will be different on their values of shininess, in this tutorial I am using SEUS PTGI which uses the LAB-PBR format.

Optifine requires that you name the file identical to your main texture but with _s at the end

e.g. end_stone_bricks_s.png

These textures are actually very easy to understand, you would use RED for how smooth you think the object is, the more RED you use the glossier it will be. At full RGB RED you will achieve 100% shininess like what you would see on glass.

But dont get this mistaken, RED is for smoothness(roughness) so what you're actually altering is the surface of the texture being smooth like glass or rough like rock. As most real world objects are made up of atoms, there is no real 100% smoothness, just a level at which to our human eyes looks completely smooth and reflects most light bouncing off of it.

GREEN is used to define the metallic level of then object, such as if your block is IRON or GOLD. you would allocate a colour that is a mixture between RED(for smoothness) and GREEN (for metallic) your result SHOULD be a metal surface HOWEVER I have found that that isn't the best choice.

For some weird unknown reason, allocating a very light BLUE results in a better metallic surface than the way it's supposed to be done with RED & GREEN. I cannot explain why it is this way, but I have chosen to do all of my metals with the light BLUE as the final result is much more pleasing, you can see an example below.