VDrift Graphical Upgrades

[portets]

What sort of graphical features do you think people would like to see in VDrift?

well, i think bump mapping would be amazing! but i understand that's kind of unfeasible. probably a lot of work to do that. the only other two things that i can think of have been said already. those are dynamic reflections back and motion blur. i'm starting to not want motion blur though, but that's just me. other people probably do.
actually.... it'd be nice to have exhaust flames. (realistic ones, not arcade-style). and different effects for different surfaces, like grass and sand.

I think some the most obvious improvements to graphics would require a lot of artist work on new assets: high poly car models with normal maps, higher res track textures, baking ambient maps for the tracks, normal maps and specular maps for tracks, and so on.

i've been experimenting with importing cars into blender and trying to raise poly count. i haven't made any look better but i'm getting close. i've also tried making some higher quality textures for cars. (just minor stuff). i've made a new road texture. it's 4096x4096 instead of 512x512. and it's 39.7 mb compressed vs 526.7 k for the previous texture! i'm going to have to lower the quality of it. it's 166.4 mb uncompressed. also, about the different surface effects, i'd be willing to make dust textures and sand-spray textures. grass too.

when i get the enzo imported i'm looking at getting it down to 30,000 faces because any lower, it looks bad. i'm also working on an electric car. (my first blender model). i already made a new electric motor sound in audacity and tuned the .car file. all i need to do is detail the model.
oh, and the electric car is my own design.