I am worried about rF2 graphical inconsistency

Yes, I know, again another graphics thread. But this one is first for me.

I noticed something quite dramatic as I tried Longford. All cars for my mod look stunning at there. Same cannot be said of other tracks and locations, at some places they look crap and mostly they look mediocre. And this is completely track dependent.

I am little bit worried as a car modder how to approach this challenge. To be honest, I would not like track makers to have such and heavy impact on my cars how they look either in good or bad. Ideally, cars should look pretty much the same in every place and only major factor should be time of day or artificial lighting.

Why is this? What to do with this?

 

I have the same issue, the cars i put in rf2 never look the same in tracks, even in ISI tracks, in others look completelly worse, like Imola, i think it have the reflect plane inverted or something, even i think my cars have inverted normals but no, i dindt try Longford yet, but, yes, unfortunately its a common issue, it makes hard to mod because you never have an standart "lookness".

I must say that best track for benchmarking cars is the last of ISI, Silvertone, right colors, right light, etc.

 

You cant do much actually, there are alot of diferent modders taking diferent aproach to how the tracks are build to and there seem to be some to quick track conversions that are not up to rf2 standarts at all and sometimes people just dont add simple stuff like reflections for the cars into tracks SCN. Ive noticed that to and becase of that im testing all my cars sofar only on ISI tracks and on feels tracks.
Orient on that but on everything else let ussers decide if they accept the tracks in quality they are or not. Its there choise if cars should look like in f1c as some tracks barely match rf1 standart actually, if its you that wants youre cars to look on all tracks good than there are 2 choise only, eather update them or ask the modder who did/convert the track should update it.
The must have is strong in some and that doesnt give the best result in all conversion. Its the price we have to accept on moddable games, there are good and bad stuff coming. It was same case in rf1, gtr2 or any other game but this will and is more visible with new games as they need bit more will to learn and bit more time to do it right.

 

Mills is good to, not the silverstone quality but lightning is good and the track is bit more closed, colorfull than silverstone and you can get the reflections settings good there.

 

Such inconsistencies will always be there for as long as modders have to do everything manually.

Ideal situation is when artist only needs to worry about how object should look like and doesn't need any technical knowledge about given game engine.

 

Can you explain what you mean exactly? Do you mean body reflections? HDR?

In which way your cars are looking "stunning" in a track and worse in other places?

Just trying to understand what you mean exactly...

 

Yes, hopefully it's either/both HDR or reflections or else we're all in big trouble if a track can alter the look of a car!!!

 

No way a track can affect the overall quality of a car mod. Should looks more "dramatic" or aggressive...using a particular HDR profile or more interesting on a track with lot of trackside objects reflected on the body. But this "stunning" versus "awful" sounds a bit weird for me.

REFMAPs into SCNs are something limited to few parameters (speed of the updates and the map size) and a list of what you want to reflect on cars. This is usually based on a compromise between performance tuning and what deserves to be reflected. So you can get nice reflections on a track with plenty of trackside objects (listed in the REFMAP) or another place where there is almost nothing to reflect most of the time...

 

Same HDR, 4 pm, clear

View attachment 9391

 

Remember each track is using a different geographic location and a different time of the day. This affects the main sun color and this is going to affect the REFMAP job as well as the HDR...which is working in this particular place with his own main colors scheme and his own stuff to be reflected on cars.

In real life it's pretty similar. This is why a photographer is using different times of the day/sun angles - to get a particular effect on a promotional car shot.

View attachment 9392

I still don't get the point, honestly.

 

For me personally silverstone and mills look the best but on all tracks the sun is reflecting from diferent directions to i guess? Maybe you should park the cars to all the same like front to north and so that rear will be to south?
But its true that for example lightning in sebring is very dark, poznan looks good when im driving it, imola doesnt seem to be setuped right there and longford i didnt test sofar.

 

Of course it is.

No matter he's using the same time of the day as the sun position is lat/long/time (month, day, year) correlated.

For 4PM on the same day of the year.

@ Silverstone you've: 38.49° for sun elevation, and 237.74° for azimuth
@ Sebring it's 52.36° for sun elevation and 255.85 for azimuth
@ Poznan it's 36.78° for sun elevation and 240.59° for azimuth
@ Imola it's 43.73° for sun elevationn and 241.21° for azimuth
@ Longford it's 23.02° for sun elevation and 316.12° for azimuth

etc..etc...

and of course the relative position between the sun and the car on the comparison can't be the same for obvious reasons.

Real world is not a studio set.

 

HDR, shadows and env reflections are the three main factors defining the look which cannot be controlled by car maker. I believe the Longford is pretty top notch at the moment, but it can't possibly be explained only because of its location (Tasmania)?

So when I say my cars look "stunning", I mean that the chrome looks like chrome and cars throw pretty nice and heavy shadows on the ground. I don't really know what HDR does except for that it has big impact on everything, but it also seems to look very good.

 

Dear ISI!!!! Adjust please work without HDR lighting. A HDR leash should slightly increase the photographic effect.

Аnd then you will not hear reproaches to the graphics side. Do not create big problems for themselves.

 

Not sure if it's a subjective thing but in most of the conditions rF2 cars don't provide adequate reflection for me to look natural. The reflections you get in sunny midday conditions are reminiscent of a cloudy day afternoon. Someone tried to adjust the alpha channel of Megane some time ago and the modified version below looked much more realistic to me.

http://imageshack.us/a/img19/9171/uuc0.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img842/8001/b2n5.jpg

 

without HDR the colors are always dull and washed out. With HDR, there's too much contrast and the dark colors break, and when it goes into darker hours everything goes kaput as black turns to purple, etc. Without HDR the game is too bland, with HDR it's partially drivable but distracting.

 

At this point could be nice to see a couple of screenshots showing what you're seeing exactly.

Try to make a proper comparison between different tracks, using the same weather condition/sun angle/sun position relative to the car (same shadow projection and same camera angle) so we can see if the same car it looks so different between different tracks on same conditions. You can even use dedicated HDR profiles to see how they're affecting the car overall quality.

I tried with the BT20, Clios and Meganes on different tracks...but I do not see anything affecting cars the way you're saying but I'm curious to see what's going on.

And no, car shadows are not controlled by the track artist (nor by the HDR atm), nor car materials (like chromes) but you already know that. There is a big and important difference between controlling a material (static after exporting) and affecting a material (dynamic light interaction).

Controlling a material means you've the access to key parameters, as fresnel, spec, exp, alphas etc. And this stuff it's on the car artist side. All those parameters will work the same on all tracks as they're exported with car parts.

Affecting the material means the light, the sun and postFX are affecting a material due the nature of the material/light relationship..which is what the GFX is doing.

I'm not saying you're wrong and/or anything can be improved...just curious to see what you're seeing.

 

That's cloudy vs sunny weather, actually

But of course you have a point here - the same thing will happen when looking at bright or dark side of car on a sunny day.
When car is lit by strong light, observable proportion between diffuse lighting and reflection is different ( reflection remains the same, while car gets brighter and therefore seems less reflective ). That's why cars seem more reflective during cloudy weather or when in shadow. That's also why black cars seem more reflective than white cars.

The problem with tracks in rF2 is simple - some of them don't have properly set reflections. It will of course affect appearance of cars.

 

Agree, but this is not what happen on ISI tracks and honestly on most of the good tracks released for rF2 by modders. It's a very easy task. Just a list of instances to be reflected (and the documentation about this is available since early releases).....

 

Why ask for perfection when in reality it does not exist ...