In this case you end up with something looking like NFS. I dont like that. I like RF1's look, because its nice and colourful. I dont get the desire for ultra real looking cars and scenes. Reality is dull and dreary, racing sims should have some colour and life and character to them.
Thanks for your reply. I'm sorry for the recall of my question and I excuse me with L Szczech but can ISI confirm what K Szczech wrote? Is it possible to know if all the rendering process is in a deep color infos or is a standard 8bit process with an added contrast adjustment layer added?? Thanks in advance
Tim, I have a question about rubber build-up and marbles. How it will work? Will be able to maintain continuity in rubber build-up on track between sessions? For example. You have race weekend, including 30min practice, 15min qual and 60min race. If drivers will start driving in practice session, track will be faster with every minute and the fastest at the end of session because there will be more rubber on track. When I change the session from practice to qualifying (or qual -> race), rubber will disappear and track will be clean once again? Maybe it will be adjustable for race weekend?
Any idea if the intensity of the shadows will be adjustable independently of the HDR and other effects?
Shadows block directional and specular lighting on portion of an object, leaving ambient lighting and environment reflections only. The only way to change "shadow intensity" is to change contrast between directional and ambient lighting in the scene. At least, that would be the case with properly implemented shadows - there would simply be nothing to adjust in the shadow algorithm itself. If shadow intensity would be adjustable, it would only mean, they're implemented incorrectly and that would be a bad news for graphics realism.
It's interesting to see this discussion about HDR and what looks good and what doesn't. It's also interesting to see that some people like things a bit darker and some lighter. I'd be interested in seeing what people compare their version of "real" to. Are they comparing these screens to something they've seen on TV, or a picture they saw? This can be very dangerous. When it comes to pictures and television, you need to take those images with a grain of salt because you need to understand that they are taken with some sort of camera. Cameras process light and color differently than the human eye. You could take a picture of a beautiful sunset where the background has very dark shadows, but that's not what your eyes see. That's what the camera sees, and processes according to many variables such as F-Stop and shutter speed. Personally I do not care for HDR or Bloom. But that's my personal preference. Now, if we could somehow take pictures of what our human eyes see in daylight or nighttime, we'd really have something. At least they have implemented a way to adjust these settings so that the user can decide what looks the best to them.
GTFREAK...as you know there are as many opinnions as players how hdr should look...most difficult is to do how it looks really..not behind the camera lens. be cause , i don't think there are not posible yet simulate sun as well as needed..that why it's easier simulate how camera lens show it...unfortunately.
I don't know if it's just a WIP thing, but it's been like this since first screenshots, so it could be aswell something that you overlooked - there should be no specular reflection in shadow. I've mentioned this problem a while ago, but seems like no one noticed. In rFactor (2005) shadows were added on top of previously rendered scene and it seems like it is so in rFactor 2 aswell. Correct approach would be to do shadows first, and then pass them to shaders, so they can block directional and specular light in that areas, only applying ambient lighting to materials and environment reflections. I'm hoping this would be fixed in one of early patches after game has been released.
yes, I agree. Unfortunately there is no way to accurate emulate the sun or it's behavior in a particular simulated environment. It's unfortunate for sure. So we have to live with what we have. However, that being said, I've seen some screen shots that do come damn close to looking pretty darn real (in my eyes). But then again, this is one persons opinion =)
You know what? I'm more than happy they can't recreate sun light as in real life. When I come back home from work the sun looks like a big ball of fire, It makes you blind if you don't wear sunglasses and use this: http://nodetectivespeed.myblog.it/media/01/01/1103356131.jpg. It's really annoying. Real life drivers have proper anti-sun visors on their expensive helmets and the windshield band http://www.omniauto.it/awpImages/articoli/evidenza/mclaren_mp4_12c_gt3_15855.jpg We won't use that stuff in rF2 so there's no sense to have such an intense annoying light in the game.
No, it makes sense. The people talking about cartoonish graphics are usually referring to the bright and contrasting colours, which doesnt look 'real' because its not washed out and dull.
Good point.... Tim can you answer about this and my last question about deep color infos?? Thanks in advance.
@ZeosPantera Well, that's just the thing nowadays - making things more shiny, more brown, more green, more blue - you name it. Anything to make game look different and "cool", and then convince people this is the next level in computer graphics, never seen before On the other hand, I believe it's a mistake to try and recreate what you see with your eyes in real life. It's simply impossible to put all that color range in 8-bit displays of our monitors. Even if you would make hyper-realistic rendering engine that simulates all optical properties of real world you would end up with images not possible to display on screen. Accepting that fact is the first step in right direction. Look at any photo and it will not look "cartoonish" nor unrealistic despite the fact, that paper is no more capable of "displaying reality" than computer monitor is. The trick is in non-linear characteristics of sensors in camera. They can "squeeze" higher range of colors at expense of a little contrast and saturation. Unfortunately HDR is often misused for bloom and other "shiny stuff", while the true potential of this technology remains undiscovered by many game developers. I really appreciate ISI isn't aiming for "shiny and brown" and I hope they'll be willing to improve their rendering engine a bit after first release There will certainly be things I want to improve in shaders, but there may be some that can only be improved from within the engine. I realise that they're not a company specializing in computer graphics and many things they do now are new to them. I've implemented my first HDR a few months before first rFactor was released and I'll always be glad to share my experiences while trying not to be a pain in the ... I believe right now the most important thing is to get rF2 out. Since it's meant to be long-term, there will be time for improvements later.
Seeing no reaction on gfx related questions, suggestions and points to bugs, I'm starting to believe that ISI doesn't even understand what you are talking about
I'm interested in the difference of paper being a RYB subtractive colour mixing medium, and a self-illuminated monitor being RGB additive/optical mixing medium. Besides lights and the sun, the real world isn't back-lit. To compensate i turn my monitor to minimum brightness in an attemt to match the average luminance of the environment (grass, road aren't backlit, for example). That does limit the brightness of sunlight in-game of course, but hey, what can ya do within 256 shades? I wonder if there is some fundamental adjustment around the yellow/green wavelength that should be made when displaying an image on a backlit medium like a monitor, in an attempt to neurtalise/naturalise it? Any thoughts anyone?