SOLVED Why so shiny? rFactor 1 -> rFactor 2 vehicle porting

You'll have to place actual texture entries in the __DIFFUSE and __SPECULAR locations. Those are just placeholders.

 

I can no longer open 3DSimEd, so that option is out, which I've already mentioned. The VEH file does not provide any indication regarding materials. Are you sure you don't mean the GEN? The VEH does indicate the livery, but that's not a material...

Looking at the Skippy in Blender I see that the shader on body parts is "L2CARBODYPAINTWITHDAMAGE" which is a "special" shader. There are a number of textures associated with the shader.

I went back into my model, changed the shader to the special "L2CARBODYPAINTWITHDAMAGE", and that resulted in a number of __ textures on the shader.

I simply set all the newly "undefined" textures to the same WCCARBODY.DDS. When I export and attempt to load the car in DevMode, now I get:

Code:

Error getting stats for texture MATH.BMPError loading texture MATH for material WCCARBODY

 

@Traveller couple of questions :

* Which is the right shader to use? Is it the same as skippy "L2CARBODYPAINTWITHDAMAGE"?
* What am I supposed to put in the diffuse and specular locations? There's already a specular.tga that came with this thing. Put that again? As for diffuse, no idea what to put. And L2.... has several material slots which all say diffuse or specular, with no indication of which is which or for what.

If I compare to the Skippy some of them are for damage and blah blah. At this time I'm not particularly concerned with damage or etc, so does that mean I can use one of the "simpler" shaders?

 

So, tried something "simpler". There's a special shader just called "Custom Car Body". Selecting this one only added an additional expected specular texture. I duplicated the existing specular.tga and exported the car. Success! It now doesn't glow, and this also fixed some of the interior issues, although the dashboard doesn't fully work, I at least see an RPM gauge.

I had also changed my skin to be white, and the car is now white! This is significant progress.

I guess a serious question for @Traveller is whether or not there's better shader documentation yet, especially regarding what type of textures are needed for which "slots" in the shader.

Thanks!

 

you must also export the new textures in your maps folder, the error indicates that you can not find the image file

 

I think you have the chicken and egg mixed up.

Changing the shader ends up with new "placeholders" for textures. It's not so much that the textures need to be exported, but it appears that the textures need to be selected from something. The question is which "texture slot" needs to be populated with what kind of texture. The error I got was because there was a placeholder filename that was in the texture "slot", but no actual file (DDS/TGA) existed. There wasn't anything to "export" from Blender, at least not that I could tell.

For example, the skippy body has a regular body texture and then a damaged texture in the "second slot". My guess is that L2CARBODYPAINTWITHDAMAGE has slots for damage and other things, but it's not clear which slot is for what type of texture. That's what I'm hoping @Traveller knows and can share.

 

I don't have any better documentation. I use the latest from Studio 397, now, for car and track materials. All the others from examining released GMT's via the Blender importer or a hex editor. Unless the rF2 community has some information somewhere.

 

@Traveller OK. I'll post questions separately on a few things. But I'll mark this as solved. "Custom Car Body" works well enough but my guess is it will have shortcomings for damage and blah blah.

 

texture map: principal map
channel 1: damage texture
channel 2: specular the principal map
channel 3: bumpmap the principal map
channel 4: cube map
channel 5: damage bump map
channel 7: bump map rain

 

NICE.

But what does that all mean?

 

bumpmap are apecularmap is files that are generated in photoshop by means of the NVIDIA plugin
example

 

@dazzer to the rescue again. awesome.

Is there an equivalent GIMP plugin for the NVIDIA stuff?

What is the purpose of the Cube map?

 

Using paint.net and photoshop, paint.net contains .dds built-in plugin
https://www.getpaint.net/download.html
Cetemap de ceate in photoshop

cubemap is the reflection file

 

@dazzer Gimp has a DDS plugin. I don't have Photoshop. I'll check that video and see what I can figure out.

 

I don't know if gimp will have the nvidia plugin

 

Can you link me to the NVidia plugin?

Does paint.net use the NVidia plugin?

 

no, I only use it as support, the nvidia plugin only works in photoshop

 

Can you link me to the Nvidia plugin for more information?

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

^^ is it this?

 

https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-normalmap/

hmm