SimRacingPL Shader Pack - discussion

Again - post your settings.
At first glance it looks like you didn't set your grass color texture properly. It should be the same size as grass map texture and it should only contain small color variations.

sti228 said:
Do you know some topic about animated textures ?
Click to expand...
Depends on what you're looking for.
If you want to know how to prepare animation itself and how to render it to texture - this would be something related to 3D modelling software you're using and you should be able to find some tutorials on the net.

Once you have your animation rendered into a series of images, you just give these images the same name and different numbers. Putting it onto gMotor material is pretty straghtforward - just put that name in your gMotor material, select cyclic animation ( or whatever it's called ) and type in all frame numbers.

I haven't done much modding for rF, so unfortunately I won't be able to give you more details. I hope this will be enough to put you on the right track.
 
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Yes, your grass color texture is way too random and that makes your grass colors to be random.

Decrease contrast of this texture and make it bright enough. You may also want to blur this texture to get smoother color transitions of grass. It works pretty much like vertex paint.
 
I don't even know your grass map texture size and grass color texture needs to be the same size.

Besides, you could have brightened your texture while waiting for my reply, so I don't see what's the point.
And you would have to wait for my texture until tomorrow since I don't have my old textures here.

I really recommend you just make your grass color texture as suggested or just use plain white or plain light grey texture to start with.
 
I have a little problem, on my hill climb track, on a certain height the SRPL sky is disappearing. How can I solve this?
 
really really fantastic shaders
i started to read the shaderpack pdf document a couple of days ago and now i'm trying to implement srpl shaders on my fantasy "Hope racetrack"

2x4n.jpg


dyaz.jpg


ondh.jpg


2h8x.jpg



and i'm really starting to like this shaders very much :D
 
Thank you for sharing your screens :)

It's nice to see you're investing some time into reading manual. Once you get a hold of these shaders, getting good results may become a routine :)
I like both your results and your artwork.

I suggest you decrease ambient lighting for nighttime. When using shaders with tone mapping, it should be very close to black.

And I'm guessing your next step will be light flares and light volumes? :) Unless you have water somewhere... ;)
 
You can add light flares anywhere you want - they're just visual effects and are not related to actual lighting.

You create flares by clicking on their desired location. If you click on a street lamp's light bulb, flare will be created there and attached to that lamp's GMT file.
When you export your track, you will have some extra geometry in your lamp's GMT file, that's all.

You may later change that GMT file to NIGHTLIGHT...GLOW. When you export your track again, lamp mesh will no longer have that extra geometry. This geometry will now be placed in NIGHTLIGHT...GLOW file ( or new file will be created for you if it didn't exist ).

So the process of creating light flares is based on actual track geometry. Light flare is just a quad added to geometry in any GMT file you want.
 
ok, thanks :)

but suddenly i have another problem - tree doesn't receive lights (also grass, shrubs, everything that uses alpha chroma transparency )

i tried to export all trees again from MaterialTool with vegetation 1, vegetation 2, unrestricted shaders, dynamic shaders....

nothing changes

everything works just fine with trees if i use original rF shaders or running the game in dx8 mode



Uploaded with ImageShack.us
 
lemax

All your work is just amazing and awesome ! I love people like you. Thank you very much for you great works !
 
I'm sorry but I'm not sure if I understand the question.

The only settings you have for shaders are those you see in editor. If it's not there, it cannot be changed (for various technical reasons).

In case of road shader you have 4 materials - all with individual fresnel and specular settings. That's more parameters than GMT file was designed for and I had to encode them using whatever I could find in GMT file. Therefore, some of "standard" shader parameters were removed, to make room for new ones.

Ideally, you would setup your directional and ambient lighting for entire scene, not for individual materials, to have lighting of your track unified. That was my assumption and therefore parameters like diffuse and specular lighting color were only kept for shaders where you may use them instead of texture (to set material color). Also, in real world it's impossible for material to have diffferent reaction to "diffuse" and "ambient" light. The reason why some game engines allow setting diffuse and ambient color separately for material is purely historical / mathematical and is entirely obsolete nowadays.
 
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Materials will look however you set them to look like.
It's always best to control reflectivity using fresnel parameters - it's the simplest and most accurate way of adjusting it.

If you keep your materials in database and have your car materials locked to their database equivalents, you only need to change material settings once and then just re-export other cars.
In my operating system, I have material tool project file extension assigned to be always opened with my material tool. So I only need to go to car folder, click on project file, confirm I want to re-synchronize materials with material database, then click on full export and close editor - I have a car re-exported.
I believe you would spend more time in .mas tool than in my material tool when applying these changes to multiple cars :)

If you have too many cars and that's too much work then you can adjust specular textures. But I wouldn't suggest that. You would have to repack cars anyway, so you may just as well adjust materials using approach I described above.


As last resort, you could just darken cubemaps.


In the end, I wouldn't worry too much. Wait a few months and you will look at your cars and think they're too glossy again or not enough glossy this time :) If it's not a big issue I wouldn't bother.
 
Is there any way to force 3ds Max loading SRPL Shaders?

I dropped VSH / GFX etc. files in 3dsMax \HardwareShaders folder but the new shaders don't turn available in Gmat material interface.

I guess it's something related to DLL / DLU files but ain't sure, maybe is there a workaround?
 
Ok, another question: is GTR2 able to manage any DX9 shader from SRPL package? I've packed SRPL shaders to gtr.gfx but I got weird in-game results... Since it's a ISI Gmotor simulator, I was confident that GTR2 would able to manage the same shaders but I cant get it working...
 
Satangoss said:
Is there any way to force 3ds Max loading SRPL Shaders?
Click to expand...
No.

These shaders have custom parameters that would not be exposed by 3DS plugins anyway. These custom parameters are then encoded into GMT files in a specific way ( because originally, GMT files were not designed to contain these parameters ). For example - I automatically generate some small textures that hold parameters for pixel shaders, or store fresnel parameters in UV coordinates.
There are some other actions taking place during export, like generating geometry for light flares, grass, sky, automatic detection of quad center for vegetation shaders, mapping properties of special shaders, like water or generating UV mapping for road shader, based on AIW file.
Not to mention replacing lighting model in all shaders.

3DS Max plugins for rF1 simply don't handle all that. You need to use my editor.

The good news is that my editor stores all settings in project file, not in GMT files. So you can edit your geometry in 3D Studio, export it to GMT files and then just reload project in my material tool, and re-export everything. All shaders will be applied again to GMT files you have just exported from 3DS.

The only thing missing is an option in my tool to remove GMT files from project - you have to do that manually in project file. It's best to start using my tool late in project, when you have geometry pretty much ready.


Satangoss said:
Ok, another question: is GTR2 able to manage any DX9 shader from SRPL package?
Click to expand...
It would be close, but no. There are some differences in GMT file format and engine between rFactor and GTR2. Minor ones, but sufficient to prevent my current shaders from being used in GTR2.

I could get them working but everyone was moving to either rFactor or Race07 by that time, so I didn't. At the moment I'm too busy with other things so I won't be adding new features anytime soon.
 
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Ok, thank you for detailed responses!

Would you be interested in a paid project for rewrite GTR2 shaders? I'm seeing 3dSimed (David Noonan) is able to manage your shaders now, and this software is also capable to export GTR2 GMT objects with SRPL shaders attached, but when those GMTs are loaded in the game they're messed up... but they're still are carrying the correct shader and textures, although GTR2 doesn't handle them correctly.

Anyway, you always can PM me if you're interested.

K Szczech said:
No.

These shaders have custom parameters that would not be exposed by 3DS plugins anyway. These custom parameters are then encoded into GMT files in a specific way ( because originally, GMT files were not designed to contain these parameters ). For example - I automatically generate some small textures that hold parameters for pixel shaders, or store fresnel parameters in UV coordinates.
There are some other actions taking place during export, like generating geometry for light flares, grass, sky, automatic detection of quad center for vegetation shaders, mapping properties of special shaders, like water or generating UV mapping for road shader, based on AIW file.
Not to mention replacing lighting model in all shaders.

3DS Max plugins for rF1 simply don't handle all that. You need to use my editor.

The good news is that my editor stores all settings in project file, not in GMT files. So you can edit your geometry in 3D Studio, export it to GMT files and then just reload project in my material tool, and re-export everything. All shaders will be applied again to GMT files you have just exported from 3DS.

The only thing missing is an option in my tool to remove GMT files from project - you have to do that manually in project file. It's best to start using my tool late in project, when you have geometry pretty much ready.



It would be close, but no. There are some differences in GMT file format and engine between rFactor and GTR2. Minor ones, but sufficient to prevent my current shaders from being used in GTR2.

I could get them working but everyone was moving to either rFactor or Race07 by that time, so I didn't. At the moment I'm too busy with other things so I won't be adding new features anytime soon.
Click to expand...
 
Satangoss said:
I'm seeing 3dSimed (David Noonan) is able to manage your shaders now, and this software is also capable to export GTR2 GMT objects with SRPL shaders attached, but when those GMTs are loaded in the game they're messed up...
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's because it only puts shader into GMT, but doesn't encode shader parameters in GMT file.

As for doing any extra work - at the moment I'm just too busy.
 
K Szczech, what you think?



I'm not using the cube from your srpl pack, instead I'm using this one.
There is something I don't like about. But I don't know what. Something doesn't look natural.
 
Maybe it's just too bright overall?

If you look at my cubemaps, you'll notice ground and trees are dark on them. Also, you always need to consider that these are static cubemaps, so they will never look matched with environment.
If you look at cubemap - it has bright sky on one side, where Sun should be. If in game, sun is one the other side of the ky, than on cubemap, you will have obvious difference.

My preferred approach is to have cubemap with pretty much uniform sky, and then use the fact, that I provide two specular lightings in my shader. Use one to brighten up sky ( small specular scale and power ) and the other to make sun reflection ( high specular scale and very high specular power ).
 
Hi K Szczech, xD first of all, great work with the shaders man, great work. :), im having a lil issue with the material tool2 how ever. as soon i start the tool it crashes. i will post the log at the end of the post, also it is possible to do the same kind of shaders avaible for GTR-2 ? how different both games are in terms of shaders. thanks in advance for the reply :)

Initializing configuration mdule.
Loading configuration file.
Gathering CPU info
CPU ID: GenuineIntel
MMX support: yes
SSE support: yes
SSE2 support: yes
TSC support: yes
CPU speed - 1.9 GHz
Using GLEW 1.5.1
OpenGL Shading Language not supported.
Max texture size is: 2048
Texture units: 8
Loading texture ui.cursor.default
Texture file not found. Assuming ui.cursor.default is a default texture.
Loading image ui.cursor.default
Framebuffer Object not supported.
Loading image font.default
Initializing HDR
HDR initialized
Loading texture ui.lightbulb
Texture file not found. Assuming ui.lightbulb is a default texture.
Loading image ui.lightbulb
Unable to open file .\image/ui/lightbulb.
Trying .dds
Trying .jpg
Trying .tga
Trying .png
Loading texture ui.arrow01
Texture file not found. Assuming ui.arrow01 is a default texture.
Loading image ui.arrow01
Unable to open file .\image/ui/arrow01.
Trying .dds
Trying .jpg
Trying .tga
Trying .png
Loading texture blank.diffuse
Texture file not found. Assuming blank.diffuse is a default texture.
Loading image blank.diffuse
Unable to open file .\image/blank/diffuse.
Trying .dds
It's a DXT5.
Will read 16 bytes.
Sending 16 bytes of image to GPU.
 
lopez said:
horizon very high error
imagen:red x is wrong the horizon
View attachment 9651
Click to expand...
Look into your .scn file. Perhaps you need to change some horizon settings there, to match settings from original .scn file ( maybe "Moveable" setting? ).

Other than that, I don't know - my shaders do not position the horizon. It's up to rFactor engine and your .scn file.

Nickylovesgisselle said:
im having a lil issue with the material tool2 how ever. as soon i start the tool it crashes
Click to expand...
I can see these two lines in log file:
"OpenGL Shading Language not supported."
"Framebuffer Object not supported."

Seems to me you're only using default graphics drivers from Windows? Download graphics drivers from NVIDIA or AMD.
You will also need a graphics card with Shader Model 3.0 support. That's GeForce 6200 or Radeon X1600 at minimum.
 
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Hi,

I work with shaders for some time and I try to get a good rendering of the road, which approximates closely to the appearance of the ​​Hope 1.10 road made by Lemax.
Would it be possible to have the parameters to enter in "Track surface" of MaterialTool2 ? (Fresnel base, scale and power of Road, Skid, Rubber, Paint ...).

I tried different things but it is not very good.
Thanks.
 
There are some example parameters visible in manual - you can use them as starting point.

The most important part is to understand this road shader. You need to remember you're working on 4 materials at the same time.
It will also require some patience - you need to test it for various times of day, different camera angles, then keep adjusting your parameters and repeating tests until you're satisfied.
 
Hi there! first of all thx for creating such easy t use tools! recently i added sky t a track. the thing is that clouds are rendered in front of horizon. i suppose it has t do something with the distances between horizon gmt and sky. the thing is that if i make the horizon smaller it comes closer but does not look good in proportion t the rest of the track. is there a way t make clouds be rendered always behind the horizon?
 
All you need is bigger specular lighting strength ( set specular scale to higher values ). It will work in game, but to see it in editor you should work with HDR enabled.

Keep in mind, that you should only use high specular scale along with high specular power. Otherwise you are likely to end up with white blowouts at some angles.
 
Hello,

I tried to insert the PLShaders SKY but it gave me some problems with transparent objects at the background of image (red arrows), they turned on completely blue. I tried the default Gmotor2 exporter settings as "no fog" but same results. Any ideas? (Those objects appears OK with regular Sky).

GRAB_016.jpg


Never mind about the mismatch sky / lightning it's a GDB stuff that needs to be fixed.
 
Hi. I have a problem with Material Tool 2 startup. Any texture is invisible but specular map t1 materials. Those mats load ok. I've checked texture folders, and must be ok because some materials load properly. The log file say the same with every texture, visible or not:

Loading texture textures.METAL_BASEM1
Texture file not found. Assuming textures.METAL_BASEM1 is a default texture.
Loading image textures.METAL_BASEM1
Unable to open file .\image/textures/METAL_BASEM1.
Trying .dds
It's a DXT1.
Will read 32768 bytes.
Sending 32768 bytes of image to GPU.

At the end of the log file all is unused and removed. Textures, materials, shaders, everything.

The problem persist under XP SP3 and W7. GeForce8800GT drivers are up to date. All instructions support and OpenGL are enabled.

Any idea? Thanks.
 
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