Sun too bright; turning down possible?

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Hi guys,

It occurred to me that a lot of problems I've been working on after a track conversion, had to do with overly white objects (walls, billboards, real road, road).
I have been working my *ss of to get them all sorted, even got the RR looking "okay" now with adjusting the "specular rgb" of all the RR materials from creamy white to dark grey. But as in the original track where I got this stuff from, they are all creamy white; that should be the proper thing, right?

It seems like the influence of the sun is to high overall.......
Is there a way to turn it down a bit?

I have looked at the HDR stuff, but all I find are some older topics and its not really clear who to do that. Somewhere in my mind hoovers the thought that I read somewhere it is not possible anymore to change the HDR.

Again; I think all my problems would be solved if I could "turn the sun down" a bit :)
Anyone? Please? ;)
 
Wait until you turn off HDR and it changes everything again lol. But yes it is all in the textures. If you have 3d simed I would suggest importing the latest version of Indianapolis as I believe that's shaders are all correct to the current build.

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
 
Thanks guys,

I tried the shaders before I even asked this, but no solution there.
I did try out the "easy part" first; getting "all" from the Indy track. It did solve my problem for 80%. Thats to say; the road is okay now and also the lower white walls are a bit better to see now (maybe the road reflected in them?) so thats a lot.

I couldn't find albedo maps, so have not tried them yet.
Specular power did work also, but I have to make that value 10 times higher and thought thats a lot; I put it back for the road for now as it is pretty good now.
But I can work with that for the other parts that are to shiny.

Thanks guys!
 
Thanks Woodee!

I am still studying that one, hehe; its a bit hard to understand, but I get there.

In the mean time I wanted to let you guys know I have found another solution too! By coincidence that is of course.........I'm not smart enough to make my own ;)

I just converted the Detroit street track and in the .scn I saw this line:
Light=Direct00
{
Type=Directional Color=(220, 220, 220) Dir=(0.338743,-0.883505,-0.323532) Intensity=(1.055)
Click to expand...

The "intensity" I never saw before in the tracks I did and I was wondering......I thought: "ow what the heck, my wife is in bed with the flue and its either this or do the dishes".
So I looked at the dishes and hoped again my wife would get better soon because there isn't a free spot on the counter top left; I started trying.
I changed the value to 0.555 and there it was; much less sun!
I can turn it even lower and make it a sad day.
Then I went and put the line up in other tracks; worked just as well!!

0.755 works okay; its still a sunny day, but it gets the sting out of the white a bit. Also; when you do have an overly white track surface; this does the trick pretty well!
And as I say; up until now I never saw that part in the line before. I now add it to all my tracks.

Thanks again all!
Hope this is something someone can use too.
 
Hm I wasn't aware of that setting. In any case, it's probably not what ISI intended us to adjust, because the sun is supposed to be equally intense everywhere. What ISI does for every track is adjust the texture maps to albedo, which is what you should do on any HDR-based game engine (rF1 had no HDR, so textures had to be lit themselves).
 
stonec said:
rF1 had no HDR, so textures had to be lit themselves.
Click to expand...

Nope...that's not how HDR works. The difference is that with a HDR-based engine lights can [tend to] have values >1.0, and tone-mapping (exposure controls) brings the values into the 0.0-1.0 range that your monitor needs to use. The lights tend to be photometrically-correct (i.e. they're based on real-world values). In a non-HDR pipeline (e.g. rF1), the lights tend to be right around a value of 1.0, and no tone-mapping is 'needed'. Textures still act multiplicatively (i.e. if you have a pixel that is 50% gray [127 in integer values in linear color space], it reflects 50% of the light) in either type of engine.

The reason that lighting tended to be baked into the diffuse maps in rF1, was because normal maps weren't widely used. Now, you will get shading done per-pixel based on the sun angle, ambient lighting, reflections, etc. from the normal maps. In terms of importance of textures these days: normal map > spec (especially if you're using a roughness-based spec map) > diffuse/albedo. Getting baked normals from a high-poly sculpt would be ideal. Photo-sourced normals don't cut it and look like crap (unfortunately, most normal maps we see in racing sims are photo-sourced).

So, changing this direct light to a value other than 1.0, you're effectively scaling the intensity of the sun. I agree that if your objects are too bright, then you should be changing your textures (you could do a batch process on your textures in Photoshop with a simple Exposure adjustment). Lowering the albedo (diffuse) means that it won't get so overblown so easily, but you'll still retain nice hot specular highlights. If you lower the value of the sun, then the spec can potentially start to become dull-ish.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Some nice information guys, thank you.

The thing is; I am still busy trying to work out shaders and how to do it decent.......lots of struggling still.
With that; everything is over saturated and I should do that for all the things there are........as I am struggling with one; this might take a few years ;)

This way; I get the job done and I admit it is not the way it should be done. I know I'm not doing it right, but as its just for me and just temporary until I learn better; its not to bad.
I will show you two comparisons; one with default and one with 3/4 the intensity. Look at the white objects as the wall and the stands. On the second set of pics; look at the light poles too.
I hope you can see why I am happy with it for now.

GRAB_006.JPG

GRAB_008.JPG

GRAB_007.JPG

GRAB_009.JPG


Edit; the pictures are a bit larger and there you can see it better, but don't fit the forum.
Here you can see the originals and the change is much more there:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13313246/Blender/GRAB_006.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13313246/Blender/GRAB_008.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13313246/Blender/GRAB_007.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13313246/Blender/GRAB_009.JPG
 
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't do that if you had any plans to release it. While the track looks better, the car and driver are looking a little dull, now.
 
@ Woodee, yes you did.......but now its up to me to understand and do it.......and that seems to be the weak link; I'm still not there.

@ Blakboks, I didn't notice up until now; was looking at the rest to much. So; have to learn to read a guide and execute whats in there.

Busy! :)
 
The exposure you are getting especially on white or nearly-white textures is just like the overexposure of the clouds in the sky. Best of luck with this track, more Indy stuff is sorely needed and welcome.
 
Thanks Guimengo.

I'm afraid it will never come to a release as I will never get the proper skills to do things 100%. Also the original makers are long gone.
I would love to publish, but I'm just not the one to get it done.
 
White objects don't exist in my opinion. They are all shades of grey. A piece of paper seems to be white in bright sunlight, but when the sun is hidden by a cloud the color of the paper changes to grey. Your brain will tell you it is white anyway, because it is some kind of hard wired in our heads that paper is white. The definition of white in in RGB colors is 255,255,255. It's the brightest color that a monitor can display and it should be reserved for the sun and maybe specular reflections.
If you paint a car skin with RGB 255,255,255 it has the same brightness as the sun and it is impossible for the gfx engine to display fresnel or specular reflections, because there is no "room" in the rgb color space to show these effects.

When in doubt I always search for a picture of an object and open it in photoshop. I use the color picker and check the rgb values on different positions. You can do the same with an in game screenshot in similar lighting conditions and you know immediately what's wrong. A nice example is a white car. The hood has a blueish tone (rgb 195,200,220) because of the reflection of the sky. The doors are grey (rgb 192,192,192, scattered light from all directions). The reflection of the sunset sky is slightly yellow/red (rgb 247,243,232). The brightest part (specular reflection of the sun) is rgb 242,241,237.
In reality the car is not white. There are just shades of grey.

white-car-wallpaper-7.jpg
 
Tosch said:
White objects don't exist in my opinion. They are all shades of grey. A piece of paper seems to be white in bright sunlight, but when the sun is hidden by a cloud the color of the paper changes to grey. Your brain will tell you it is white anyway, because it is some kind of hard wired in our heads that paper is white. The definition of white in in RGB colors is 255,255,255. It's the brightest color that a monitor can display and it should be reserved for the sun and maybe specular reflections.
If you paint a car skin with RGB 255,255,255 it has the same brightness as the sun and it is impossible for the gfx engine to display fresnel or specular reflections, because there is no "room" in the rgb color space to show these effects.

When in doubt I always search for a picture of an object and open it in photoshop. I use the color picker and check the rgb values on different positions. You can do the same with an in game screenshot in similar lighting conditions and you know immediately what's wrong. A nice example is a white car. The hood has a blueish tone (rgb 195,200,220) because of the reflection of the sky. The doors are grey (rgb 192,192,192, scattered light from all directions). The reflection of the sunset sky is slightly yellow/red (rgb 247,243,232). The brightest part (specular reflection of the sun) is rgb 242,241,237.
In reality the car is not white. There are just shades of grey.
Click to expand...

That's all nice and all, but it doesn't really tell how to author the albedo. None of those values that you mention should be in the albedo map whatsoever--just what it should look like on-screen after all of the rendering.

On an unrelated note:
I think part of the problem that people have in creating textures that are too bright for the rF2 engine, is that we are missing a decent bloom as well--which is actually a key aspect of having good HDR rendering technology. Without it, everything that clips is just white. There's no visual difference between a value of 1.0 (after tonemapping) and 1000.0. However, with a good bloom solution--one done before tonemapping and using a sufficiently large kernel, we'd be able to see the difference, because something that's brighter is going to bloom more--and it doesn't matter if you're going for an as-seen look, or a through-the-camera look, it's present in both. So, if we had better bloom, we'd be able to see how much the textures need to be adjusted much easier.
 
Try using either bump specular map T1 or Gravel Traps which is bump specular map T1 mul T2. That should dull them up a bit. If not enough the try playing with the diffuse texture.
 
To me, it looks like diffuse maps are not "Albedoed".

Walls, grass, billboards even asphalt looks way too bright and need to level down.

If your bright white texture's "white" color (like that Konica-Minolta billboard) is over 180,180,180 RGB (roughly...), it won't work correctly in game.
 
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