tc6 - wip - now with download link (i think)

[zimluura]

lets see if googlepages works

http://zimluura.googlepages.com/TC6.zip

this thing is pretty beta. mesh, texture, uv map, all of it.

[joevenzon]

Checked it into R136 data SVN. It looks pretty good so far.

[zimluura]

thanks. i think, when the next release comes and i can draw a specular map, i'll be able to refine it allot.

[zimluura]

Nearly done, needs some texture work, and some mesh tweaks. but is allot better than the last one. some 16.6K triangles.

http://zimluura.googlepages.com/TC6.zip

[joevenzon]

Looking really nice! The interior is great.

[zimluura]

a much improved tc6 is up in svn.
drastically updated meshes and textures.
reduced drag a little bit for a higher top speed.

still not 100% done; but its way better than the last one.

edit: the mesh is now some 16K faces.
the main big textures are 1024x1024.
i'm guessing these will work ok, even on older hardware; but i'm not sure.
please tell me if anyone runs into graphical performance problems.

edit: image

[joevenzon]

Looks really good. My only suggestion is to touch up the texture a bit by overlaying a baked ambient occlusion texture generated in blender:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Render_Bake

[zimluura]

i gave that a shot and the texture that blender bakes up is really really grainy. and then looks really grainy in the game.

tried a few gaussian blur settings, and a browsed layer overlays in gimp. but i ddn't think i got anything that looks as good as vdrift's normal lighting engine. maybe if i manually smear/blur it into shape?

tried to construct the suggested blender noodle and couldn't get any results from it. 1st time messing with noodles so maybe there's something i'm missing.

[joevenzon]

i gave that a shot and the texture that blender bakes up is really really grainy

I think you can fix the graininess by going to the shading panel (F5), then click on the world buttons, do ADD NEW if necessary, find the Amb Occ panel, and crank up the samples parameter (about 16 should do it). It makes it take forever to bake but it looks much smoother. Recent versions of blender also have an "approximate" mode instead of raytraced (on that same panel) that create much smoother results.

I find it also helps to add a big plane object that simulates the road to the scene. The ambient occlusion baking takes it into effect and you get nice shading in all the right areas.

[joevenzon]

Here's a shot showing off your updated TC6 in-game with some of the recent shader effects cranked up:

http://vdrift.net/Gallery/media.php?f=0&...1113943767

Looks cool....

[zimluura]

sweet!

i'm working on the ambient occlusion texture. but, even with the approximate mode it needs to be tweaked a little to come out ok. mostly due to the panel seams.

i uv mapped the textures so it'd be easy to make racing liveries if one were so inclined. just straight project from view. so the edge of the fender (like near the seam between the hood and front fender) get a ambient occlusion pass as well, even when they occupy the same pixel as the fender. so if the fender edge gets rendered first, and then the actual fender surface, all is well. if it goes the opposite order the pixels will come out black.

other than that there are a few more areas that show up too dark in the game. under the license rear license plate mount. some of the front nostrils. but for the most part i think it'll look pretty good.

[joevenzon]

I think the normals are flipped on the wheels. Make sure double sided is off in blender, then flip the normals if they look wrong.

[zimluura]

in blender the double sided button isn't pressed. though i did delete some of the faces on the inside of the wheel.

the rims are made up of about 6 seperate meshes all combined into 1 object.
tire, outer rim, three-way piece, then 3 seperate shapes on each "spoke"

and they have tons of specular + environment.

what's looking funky on them?? the tri-angle-ey-ness is probably lack of subdivision level. there doesn't appear to have been any edge_split. which would make the outer rim look kinda funky (toroidal). either of those the culprit?

[joevenzon]

I was fiddling around with the shader that does the lighting, and put it in a mode where I can visualize the angle between the view direction and normal. The tires and wheels were always showing up like the normal is pointing away from the camera. If you update to the latest SVN code & data, and then uncomment data/shaders/full/fragment.glsl line 316:

Code:

gl_FragColor.rgb = vec3(env_factor);

you'll see what I saw.

Also, with normal rendering, the tires show up pretty dark and flat, like the lighting isn't working.

As a side note, I noticed the F1-02 model has a normals pointing the wrong way in a couple of spots... I'll see what I can do about that.

[zimluura]

k, did that. strange white wheels. went into blender. wheel looked fine. exported. strange white wheel. went into blender. wheel looked fine. flipped normals. wheel looked messed up, showing only back-faces. exported. wheel looks better in vdrift...

actually a long time ago i noticed some really strange shading with the wheels on early work with the LE. this was months before the re-factor. any chance vdrift draws wheels differently? i mean, i doubt it. but uhh. this is quite a conundrum.

have you ever noticed something similar on linux? maybe something platform-ish with...blender? probably not because the rest of the car seems to work. i put the wheels in a different layer, the one right below the first layer, any chance that blender is doing something strange there?

i'll commit my slightly more recent tc6. with the wheels i just flipped.
i'll also put in the .blend file (with wheels that look great in blender and bad in vdrift...for me at least) so you can tell me if blender is doing something different on linux. blender seems to have saved texture paths absolutely so the textures will probably start out missing.