VDrift Graphical Upgrades

[zimluura]

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'm mostly in favor of shared meshes and textures that can be tweaked and re-used in many different tracks. should help download sizes as well.
things we see allot of are tire-walls, chain-fences, trees, grass (add tufts maybe), and perhaps track-scenery vehicles. but it could require some lod meshes to be fast. otherwise we'd be rendering far-off tire-walls in way to many polys.

so we can model the race-team tractor-trailers, and then go about removing the instances in the .jpk (which is where i guess they reside) and replacing them with mesh and location. so the freshly imported track would look very bleak. and then you'd go about busying it with prefabs.

with the central shared track objects; if a single pine-tree on the ring sticks out as looking bad you could fix it and the results would automatically propagate to any other track that referenced that object.

grass textures could maybe be done in gray-scale once, and then use that texture and a glcolor (or equivalent, my knowledge ogl after 1.1 is limited), for every track. grass tufts make things look nice but i think racetracks keep their lawns short usually, maybe for weekend_drive type tracks.

i'd guess with cars, the next steps would be to build them piecemeal (so we can modify them and damage them) and the dreaded normal map, which i understand, but i suck when it comes to subsurf modeling so normal maps kinda scare me.

roads could be a great place to start, asphalt_texture + specular_map + bump_map + propagate universally = roads that look dreamy in the soon-to-be-setting sun.