VDrift Graphical Upgrades

[joevenzon]

Those are usually referred to as "detail textures," but they haven't been used for a while because the type of small detail you usually want are variations in the lighting due to surface normal variation -- normal mapping is used instead. Adding support for normal maps wouldn't be too tough. We could do detail normal mapping too, although I'm not sure if it's needed to get the desired effect.

I've been fiddling with deferred rendering and the BRDF on page 2 of this thread. Here are some rambling thoughts about it. One issue is that with deferred rendering you must minimize the number of material properties that need to go to the lighting pass. The BRDF I mentioned earlier looks good and requires an RGB for the specular reflection value plus a float for the roughness/shinyness. Normals go to the lighting pass per fragment so we could get fancy with normal maps without any problems. Unrelated -- I'm not sure if we'll need a double-lobed BRDF or not for car paint yet. We could sum multiple BRDFs based on multiple shinyness values.