ingame paint selection

[zimluura]

after playing with ambient occlusion textures for a little while i was thinking about ways to do car paint.

cars could be build with a separate body & body_trim meshes.
then the body would just be everything that gets painted. a single ambient occlusion texture would give you a gray car.

iirc opengl draws everything in white by default. so the ambient occlusion texture could be brightness/contrast adjusted till it's white-ish. and then the body can just be drawn with a glcolor3f();
using more advanced opengl than i know might yield a way to lighten the gray texture for a white car (thus preserving precision for more mid range colors).

to start out with the colors could be specified in the .car file for all the stock colors the car comes in (which is much less data being svn'ed around than a unique texture for each paint color).

so basically after you select a car, if that car has a [colors] section you just use the body.png (which is never in use at the moment and could always be a generic gray or white texture)
though you could still select numbered textures (like body 00 for special paint jobs or for racing liveries) , but they wouldn't be color tweak-able.

at some later date a color wheel could be created. but it really sounds difficult to do, menu wise. so it would probably be easiest to do 0-255 rgb sliders if someone wants a custom color.

am i making any sense??

p.s. le is coming very slowly, it's a very curvy car. i need to pour over it's tail-lights and all the vents some more.

[joevenzon]

This mostly makes good sense, but how would you deal with things like logos or something on the body that you always want to be the same color? Maybe use the alpha channel as a mask for the color application... ? The only downside of using a mask for that is it'd only work for people with shaders enabled.

[zimluura]

i was thinking the paint selection would only be for solid colors.
i was thinking do car branding logos on an additional "trim.joe" or some such, mesh. as well as windshield wipers, grill-work,
logos actually on the paint would be body00-body99 texture.
so racecars or custom paint jobs wouldn't be affected by this. except insofar as it would interact with the trim mesh.



// on topic still, but a lengthy digression
a while back i was thinking of how to do an ingame body decal system. like they have on console games. which is not really necessary on pc cause we have gimp. but could still be good for people who don't know gimp and also for some kind of sponsor system in the career mode.

if you haven't played on of those (forza and need for speed: pro street) you basically get a front, top, back, left, and right side views of your car and can position decals on them.

ways to do it would be to give each face a texture number as well, and then have a different texture for each side (all othogonally projected from view) so you can then do 2d paint routines to add decals to a car without leaving the game engine.

still that'd be lots of work for the off-chance the career mode would have a sponsor system. and without a sponsor system you might as well just draw your racing livery in the gimp.



i've been playing with some programming lately, and haven't been getting much modeling in. was thinking about applying the ambient occlusion texture to the tc6, but then this idea hit me for a way to not have to update and commit lots of, err more than one, .png files.

[joevenzon]

Hmm, what about things that you want to stay the same color, like brake lights and so on? I think you'd need to do some kind of a mask... the colorizing could be done at load time so it could work with shaders....

[zimluura]

was thinking to separate them into a different mesh. so only the painted body panels would be in body.joe

things have been slow working lately, lots of bad stuff happened to my main computer. firefox somehow launched internet explorer, and after that my whole system was hosed. no data loss really. but i'm now trying to get fully acclimated to ubuntu.

i must read about how to get things compiling and running in linux. had an idea for the le. since it has a targa top. i've been modeling it with the top and mirrors as seperate meshes. 'cause it should still look ok without them. then it could be a testbed for the accessory mesh of the roof. and also maybe for mirrors that break off when you rub them against other cars. any thoughts?


edit: svn checkout and scons compiling went without a hitch. haven't found the correct command for svn data checkout in the wiki:
http://wiki.vdrift.net/Installing_on_Linux
suggests there are still minimal and full (150mb) data options rather than svn data.

[joevenzon]

Thanks for the heads up, I'll update the "installing" page.

Here's the info about checking out the data repo:
http://wiki.vdrift.net/Getting_the_devel...t_the_data

[joevenzon]

I finally added this to the issue tracker.

[joevenzon]

How do you want this to work with the multiple-mesh-per-car feature? Something like this?

[colors]
color0=128,255,255
color1=255,255,255

[mesh0]
mesh=body.joe
basetexture=ambient.png
decaltexture0=nodecals.png
decaltexture1=racingdecals.png

[mesh1]
mesh=fender.joe
basetexture=fender.png
decaltexture0=fender_nodecals.png
decaltexture1=fender_racingdecals.png

[zimluura]

that looks pretty good. i think it's missing something that, on a per-mesh basis, you could use to say if_and_what colors are applied.

perhaps

[colors-body]
color0=128,255,255
color1=255,255,255

[colors-interior]
color0=0,0,0
color1=128,128,128

[mesh0]
mesh=body.joe
basetexture=body_ambient.png
paint=colors-body
decaltexture0=nodecals.png
decaltexture1=racingdecals.png

[mesh1]
mesh=radiator.joe
basetexture=radiator.png
paint=none

[mesh2]
mesh=seat.joe
basetexture=seat.png
paint=colors-interior


does that sound useful and not too cumbersome?


btw - i'm still working (very slowly) on the le - it's lo_beams have 4 smaller lights in them that have been determined to make my life more difficult.