CrossPly
Registered
Hi,
The new IBL Carbody shader is awesome and a great improvement over the old carbody shaders, really nice job!
The one thing I do miss though (and something that is preventing me from switching some cars over to the new shader) is the ability to add a detail bump/normal map as an input.
I can tell from the recent S397 cars that the poly count has been upped quite a bit across the board which does kind of reduce the need for bump maps so I can understand why it hasn't been included but there are some details that are just better suited to being done with maps rather than with polys.
For example:
The body rivets on this car are a pretty big part of this cars overall look and they are all produced using a bump map and using the pre-IBL carbody shader. From most angles the effect is quite effective.
If I were to switch this car over to the IBL carbody shader the rivets would look much more flat from all angles and the highlights and shadows they produce would no longer be dynamic as they would have to be baked into the AO map.
For a different project I've been able to work around this limitation by using the damage bump map and setting the vertex alpha to make some small parts permanently "damaged". This allows me to still retain the use of bump maps for some details with the tradeoff that these parts are no longer able to show visible damage. Losing the ability to show damage on the entire body (which would be the case if I used this trick on the above car) seems like too big a compromise.
Another solution would be to model every rivet into the mesh (and although it would be a quite a bit of work I'd be prepared to do this) but to support different skins each rivet would need its own UV space and the car would become very difficult to paint skins for which again seems like quite a big compromise.
Considering the various compromises at the moment it seems the best solution is to simply stick with the old shader for these cars which is a shame.
Based on some of the recent roadmaps there is quite a lot of shader work going on at the moment so hopefully this is something that can be considered, not just because it would get me personally out of a bind
D) but I'm sure there are other cars and details out there that would benefit from the feature as well.
In the meantime if anyone has any other ideas or workarounds please reply here or send me a PM!
The new IBL Carbody shader is awesome and a great improvement over the old carbody shaders, really nice job!
The one thing I do miss though (and something that is preventing me from switching some cars over to the new shader) is the ability to add a detail bump/normal map as an input.
I can tell from the recent S397 cars that the poly count has been upped quite a bit across the board which does kind of reduce the need for bump maps so I can understand why it hasn't been included but there are some details that are just better suited to being done with maps rather than with polys.
For example:
The body rivets on this car are a pretty big part of this cars overall look and they are all produced using a bump map and using the pre-IBL carbody shader. From most angles the effect is quite effective.
If I were to switch this car over to the IBL carbody shader the rivets would look much more flat from all angles and the highlights and shadows they produce would no longer be dynamic as they would have to be baked into the AO map.
For a different project I've been able to work around this limitation by using the damage bump map and setting the vertex alpha to make some small parts permanently "damaged". This allows me to still retain the use of bump maps for some details with the tradeoff that these parts are no longer able to show visible damage. Losing the ability to show damage on the entire body (which would be the case if I used this trick on the above car) seems like too big a compromise.
Another solution would be to model every rivet into the mesh (and although it would be a quite a bit of work I'd be prepared to do this) but to support different skins each rivet would need its own UV space and the car would become very difficult to paint skins for which again seems like quite a big compromise.
Considering the various compromises at the moment it seems the best solution is to simply stick with the old shader for these cars which is a shame.
Based on some of the recent roadmaps there is quite a lot of shader work going on at the moment so hopefully this is something that can be considered, not just because it would get me personally out of a bind
D) but I'm sure there are other cars and details out there that would benefit from the feature as well.In the meantime if anyone has any other ideas or workarounds please reply here or send me a PM!
