Racer DOF exporter plugin for 3DS Max

Mr Whippy · Sep 13, 2014

Yeah iirc there may be limited channels, but I've not looked at that stuff yet.

Assuming it all works though it will be very nice to just do bakes for certain aspects of tracks.

Ie, Forza 4 seems to use second UV channels for AO baking, then they can use more repeating texture types for things like car interiors and get nicer higher quality materials, but still get AO in there.

In theory with world coord UV for a detail map, then tc0 for a control map (say shading, colour variance etc like the asphalt shader), and then tc1 for AO or 'wetness' or some other cool features, you could get really nice looking and simple to author materials!

I'll have to grab the latest version to test things out and see if it'll play nicely.

Dave

Some1 · Sep 14, 2014

Mr Whippy said:
Forza 4 seems to use second UV channels for AO baking, then they can use more repeating texture types for things like car interiors and get nicer higher quality materials, but still get AO in there.

How do you know? Perhaps they baked the AO into vertex colors. I find that I get pretty decent results if the mesh has reasonable poly density (and cockpit meshes usually do).

Mr Whippy · Sep 15, 2014

I've found what look like auto-unwrapped AO looking textures in some textures found with Forza cars that you can download.
Perhaps this was added by a user after conversion somewhere, I've not double checked but I found it in several example cars.

I've also read it mentioned many times that they run radiosity/lighting mapping on their tracks. They have a whole farm of machines calculating the light maps from what I saw on that Inside Sim Racing Forza 5 video, and I'm sure I saw the same on a Forza 4 video.

I just put two and two together but I'm fairly sure they do it.

I remember looking at GT5 cars and seeing something that suggests the same approach. Repeating pattern texture swatches for the leather on dash boards etc, but with AO type shading in the recesses etc. This is really noticeable on the TVR Tamora dash board as it's really curvy.

Dave

Some1 · Sep 16, 2014

Fair enough. pCars for example, bakes the AO into the vertex colors, and it looks pretty good.

Mr Whippy · Sep 16, 2014

Yeah I guess it's just a matter of preference which way you go.

Baking info into verts is no bad thing if you have lots of density on your internal views.

There may be parts of interiors for example that have low poly counts but would need a relatively complex AO gradient and then you're adding verts just to get nicer AO.

I suppose this stuff will all disappear in another 5-10 years as we get real-time GI/radiosity solutions popping up

Dave

ammods · Oct 14, 2014

is tthere any way you could look at updating your dof exporter for 3dsmax 12, i tried to use your exporter with 12 but gives me a error is big as australia lol..

3dsmax 10 doesnt like windows 8, gives me no end of graphical errors,

Some1 · Oct 22, 2014

ammods said:
is tthere any way you could look at updating your dof exporter for 3dsmax 12, i tried to use your exporter with 12 but gives me a error is big as australia lol..

3dsmax 10 doesnt like windows 8, gives me no end of graphical errors,

Sorry, I do not have that ability. If you have 3ds max 12 sdk, you could try to compile it yourself.

Or switch back to Windows 7