Please Ruud, or Mitch...
Just reading the Crytek 3 engine specs, and they apply specular reflection maps to all scene objects (so envmapping on everything)
Obviously we can do this in Racer right now. The issue is flexibility of what we can do with the env cubemap.
Is there any way to enable the mipmap bias on the envmap, so we can force a more blurry version? That way road surfaces can use the envmap blurred up a load, so when driving into a dark bluey sky, the road surface picks up a bluey specular, and when into a big soft orange sunset, the road picks up an orange specular.
Right now Racer looks fairly limited because specular is driven by only the sun light, while real specular is more a function of light in the scene reflecting diffusely or sharply, which we can get really nicely from our HDR envmap!
So, to sum up. Can we mipmap bias the envmap per shader as we can for any given texture map we reference?
Can we also then maybe have a tweak on the map so we can colourise it, and adjust contrast perhaps? Ie, define rgb values to pass from 0...1, so we can just take the red info for example... 1 0 0... not sure how you would do contrast... perhaps an exposure adjustment (not sure if that is needed really, hmmm)
Just feels like we are missing a HUGE trick here with regards to realistic looking material response. Currently all track materials are just flat and respond only to sun specular, and only look nice on a sunny day... or we can only reflect sharply if we do use the envmap.
However, with a softer envmap response, we can do cool things like have soft wet-road reflections of street lights on a night for amazing looking city tracks etc...
The sooner we abandon the old specular, mainly for the primary 'reflection' on track items especially, the sooner Racer will look a whole lot more realistic again
Hmmmm
Dave
Just reading the Crytek 3 engine specs, and they apply specular reflection maps to all scene objects (so envmapping on everything)
Obviously we can do this in Racer right now. The issue is flexibility of what we can do with the env cubemap.
Is there any way to enable the mipmap bias on the envmap, so we can force a more blurry version? That way road surfaces can use the envmap blurred up a load, so when driving into a dark bluey sky, the road surface picks up a bluey specular, and when into a big soft orange sunset, the road picks up an orange specular.
Right now Racer looks fairly limited because specular is driven by only the sun light, while real specular is more a function of light in the scene reflecting diffusely or sharply, which we can get really nicely from our HDR envmap!
So, to sum up. Can we mipmap bias the envmap per shader as we can for any given texture map we reference?
Can we also then maybe have a tweak on the map so we can colourise it, and adjust contrast perhaps? Ie, define rgb values to pass from 0...1, so we can just take the red info for example... 1 0 0... not sure how you would do contrast... perhaps an exposure adjustment (not sure if that is needed really, hmmm)
Just feels like we are missing a HUGE trick here with regards to realistic looking material response. Currently all track materials are just flat and respond only to sun specular, and only look nice on a sunny day... or we can only reflect sharply if we do use the envmap.
However, with a softer envmap response, we can do cool things like have soft wet-road reflections of street lights on a night for amazing looking city tracks etc...
The sooner we abandon the old specular, mainly for the primary 'reflection' on track items especially, the sooner Racer will look a whole lot more realistic again
Hmmmm
Dave
