Hi Does anyone have any complete material specular section settings for the car body that they're really happy with and keen to share? thanks in advance
*Bump*...should i have written "Beta" in the thread name...those threads seem to be full of experts lol
Any time I've done a spec map it's just the cars template save at DX5. White off cause. The difference you can make is in the alpha. This is were it comes down to trial and error. I always use a good size at well. Some guy's resize right down to 256x256. On a white car this comes through and looks really ugly IMO. Other colour have flat spots. As in matt looking splotchy. Others use the spec as a underlay (Which it is to a point) to try and give the colour a deeper look. I totally disagree with this! I've had it explained to me that the spec is no longer needed to give the light effect it was originally used for because now that job has been replaced by the cube map. I've done a lot of testing on this theory and I'm totally convinced the spec and cube go hand in hand. Either one without the other just hasn't got the same effect as both together. Doesn't really answer your question does it? The thing is there's no one setting.
lol! I'm no expert, but I will try to help you. Try colour 192, power 6 and experiment with your spec map. Firstly, turn off hdr, you don't want to tune your spec map with hdr on because it will look completely different. People who don't use hdr will probably see it glowing white if it was tuned with hdr on. With the spec map, just start out with a single colour, make it 50% grey and see how it looks, if it glows, make it darker, if it's dull, make it brighter, then when you get the correct looking shine add your render to texture image to the spec map in PS and play with the blending, screen (add) will make it brighter, multiply will make it darker, adjust the contrast down to get the shades to match better. You don't really want black and white, as a rough idea you might want 45% light grey and 65% dark grey, if the shades on the spec map are too far apart it will look very rough, then tweak the brightness until you get a good average close to the single colour you found to suit best. Then test it in game, and adjust the specular power until you get the shine your looking for. Do you understand how spec power works? the higher the spec power the narrower the specular shine. ie, a spec power of 1 will give you almost a completely equal wash but a spec power of 100 will give you a small circle (which is actually the sun) try it. I think that's pretty right ^^, I'm sure if I'm wrong someone will correct me
what did you end up with? Been playing with specular lighting on car body's in ASR and rf2 for the last few days and Just can't seem to achieve the look Im going for. High specular powers seem to highlight the poly structure, but look great in flat areas. And low powers seem to hide the poly structure, but just wash everything out to much.
This was supposed to be in reply to this thread http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/3558-Specular-issues-with-car-body-in-rf2 but as I typed it a lot of it got covered, sorry for confusion +1 I like to add from my end. Indeed, seems to me as usual in these matters Mr K Szczech is right, kind of Gouraud shading. I am sure from rF1 experience this was the case and appears to be the case in rF2. I am pretty sure this is not a bug or issue of sloppy models normals etc. , but simply an artifact of old school shading methods. Also I like to add what Maniak said about typical specular setting I don't entirely agree. Many here and I used those settings tyically 10 - 15, not to use a too white colour is that it simply covers up the issue Much higher specular powers should be allowed on certain car type materials, and indeed if this were done on a per prixel basis it would look just fine even on a low poly model. One benefit of this old method is that it is cheap, so one way to work it is to make high poly models, the higher the poly density the less noticable the issue will become. In theory how the calculations works if I recall correctly, it will render correctly at the vertex but not away from it. That said with today's GPUs there is no excuse for per pixel shading of this part. See attachment, it seems to me what ISI does is this what is shown in the middle picture. what we like is on the far right. Really hope that ISI work on better car paints or let us at the insides of coreshaders so we can have at it so to speak What is now is a bit old shool by today's standards. Only just getting back to rf world a bit, just to explore today, like a lot of what I see, also a a lot I don't like mainly to do with car graphics. If don't mind me saying car graphics is somewhat underwhelming. Lack of good car paints, the bumpmapping implementation looks old too on the F3.5 very noticable up close. I mean we are 2012, not 2005 not to be rude, but upfront I guess Some of that can be killed as used to be the case in rF1 with high res textures and hig poly models, but it will only buy you so much in terms of quality in return. Seems much already has been touched on anyway reading around. I am sure ISI got their heads down doing the business. My first notice out on track, tracks do look very nice at times, loved Spa and ending up in a field as seems to be the case a lot, taming the old Formula cars only to find some animated cows in a field, that made my day, nice touces
