SimRacingPL Shader Pack - discussion

ok, skidmarks show properly in Materialtool2. But after export, in game they are in completely different places - always the same places no matter what i do in material tool. So my guess is im doing something wrong with packacking files after export.
Im doing this on ISI's Brianza.
I put GMT files into Brianza.MAS.
TGA & DDS files into BrianzaMaps.MAS
All other changes i make are shown in game (road shaders, new materials like glass, vegetation) so my guess would be im doing something wrong with this file "aiwMAP.TGA" but not sure what:p
 
First of all - rFactor applies it's own racegroove, that's defined by AIW and TDF files. Typically it uses racegroove.tga texture. You can make that racegroove.tga texture wery weak so it won't come on top of racing line you have made with shaders. Perhaps that's what you're seeing.

My editor will of course not affect standard racegroove in rFactor - it doesn't export AIW files nor TDF files, so you have to weaken/remove that racing groove yourself.
To make sure that your materials got exported, try changing one of road materials - put some weird testure on it and see if it gets exported.
If not, then it muse be something related to pathes set in .scn file or it could be that some other GMT files, that you haven't added to your project contain materials with the same name as road and they get loaded by rFactor first. rFactor always takes material from the first GMT file it's been found in.

Also - try full export option if you haven't allready.

aiwMap.tga contains strength of race groove across lap - if you look at this texture then you will see one long line travelling left/right and slowly up/down - this way it's one continous line and represents one lap. If you paint some vertical line on it, you will see it on racetrack - repeated 64 times in regular distances.



And of course you don't need to pack anything into .mas files for testing :)

What I usually do is this:
1. Create 'SrcFiles' folder and unpack all contents of .mas files there (textures and GMT files)
2. Create 'MAS' folder
3. Create project and set 'SrcFiles' folder as texture path
4. Add all GMT files from that folder to project, except for SKY.GMT (or any GMT that contains sky)
5. Set 'MAS' folder as my export folder
6. Remove references to .mas files from .scn file
7. Add reference to 'MAS' folder to .scn file and reference to 'SrcFiles' folder (must be below reference to MAS folder)

Now I can just make changes and perform full export.

When packing, I just take everything from 'SrcFiles' folder and overwrite it with what's in 'MAS' folder.
 
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Thanks for the answer and all the information! I will try all the things you write about. I think i should read some basics about track creation in RF but had very little time before:)
 
Started new project from scratch and now skidmarks are where i want then to be:D not sure why cause i seem to be doing everything the same way.
Thanks for the tip about not packaging and puting references to folders into scn files - saves tones of time!
 
I managed to add road shaders, vegetation, 3d sky, some materials but im stuck with grass generator.
EDIT: sorry, after 6 or 7 attemp i found out that i had wrong both color map and grass map. now its working.
 
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Great. Are you using shaders with tone mapping? If yes, it would be nice to see some screenshots with your results :)
 
yes its with tone mapping:) right now im changing grass, cause i cant find right color and im not sure if it looks better with 3d grass or without it... i will post something soon but im no artist , did this just for fun so dont expect anything special:) I should tune vegetation overlay texture and sky but have no more energy for now so will leave it as it is.
 
Yeah, grass is very tricky to get right.

That's because you would expect it to look different when looking from different directions, but ground texture will be the same. So it's all down to finding a good compromise with textures. The ones I provide with shader pack were designed for shaders with tone mapping which I see you're not using (I suggest you try them).


Getting things to work with shaders is not that difficult, but getting really good results takes some work.

For example, if you look at trees here:



You can see that shader is adding some light scattering, making contours of trees brighter. It looks better on some trees and worse on others, but you can of course provide your own map for thiss effect and then it will look exactly the way you want.
Also it works a bit faster if second texture is provided, bacause it doesn't need to do blur on the fly :) I sometimes get lazy, when working on a track and don't create these extra textures, but It's always better to do so.


Grass is another example - you can create a grass map that will place small, dense grass near edges of the road, while using bigger, less dense gras further away just to fill the space without using too many polygons.


And there are often some changes needed to track modelling. Look at the barrier on the left side - it's bright, even if sun is on the other side:



That's probably because this is a doublesided material facing the other way. In such cases I always disable 'doublesided' flag and reverse faces and sometimes I make duplicates so it's still visible from both sides but with separate lighting.
 
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K Szczech said:
Yeah, grass is very tricky to get right.

That's because you would expect it to look different when looking from different directions, but ground texture will be the same. So it's all down to finding a good compromise with textures. The ones I provide with shader pack were designed for shaders with tone mapping which I see you're not using (I suggest you try them).
Click to expand...
will try them and will see if i can get it looking better
 
K Szczech said:
For example, if you look at trees here:



You can see that shader is adding some light scattering, making contours of trees brighter. It looks better on some trees and worse on others, but you can of course provide your own map for thiss effect and then it will look exactly the way you want.
Click to expand...

Its not shader adding light scattering. I did those second/overlay textures and thats how it looks. If it looks like added by shader then i wasted my time making them:D Anyway, as i said before i want to work on them some more as on other things too when i recover some energy:)
 
Haha, yeah - the other shader just samples some nearby pixels to determine distance from from the edge of tree. It produces similar results to what you have, although now when I look at it - not identical.

Good to see you try to take advantage of as many features as you can :)
 
yep, i wanted to test everything thats in shader pack and see how it looks and whats possible. Its amazing tool, thanks for it! easy too use even for noob like me. Only painting map grass is a nightmare:p
 
Yeah - it would be probably more convenient just to put grass straight in 3D preview, but that would turn out to be more time-consuming than preparing an image in some good painting program.

For example, I usually enable material highlight in road surface editor so when I take screenshot of a grass map I have road very distincly visible on it. I can just select it in painting program, enhance selection by a few pixels and I have the outline of a road. I can fill that outline with color that represents small dense grass to have it nicely match road's edges.

So in the end - it's not really difficult or complex, but there's more work involved than in changing a few materials. And exporting track to 2D map and painting grass layout on it is actually the quickest way.
 
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K Szczech said:
For example, I usually enable material highlight in road surface editor so when I take screenshot of a grass map I have road very distincly visible on it. I can just select it in painting program, enhance selection by a few pixels and I have the outline of a road. I can fill that outline with color that represents small dense grass to have it nicely match road's edges.
Click to expand...
Sounds good:) must find it in Gimp.
Anyway, i found grass color im happy with, changed tree overlay textures to less saturated, added some direct lighting and i think im done:) I will post some shots in screenshot thread.
 
hi K Szczech
i get bored and build a fantasy track from scratch just for fun :D
two layouts >point to point<, 3km long straight for testing max speed and second layout is just a simple road near sea

and i did not plan to release this track, but if....someday....can i have your permission to release this track with srpl shaders ?
some objects and water(sea) use this shaders







already using this fantastic shaders on almost all mods that i have on my hdd :D
 
Sure thing - you may use these shaders :)

Check out light effects in manual - you may want to put volume lights and light flares on your track aswell. And some vegetation shaders would be nice :)


Here's an example of light flares and volume lights on both cars and track:

00008450.jpg


EDIT:
Oh, and one more suggestion - play with "Water Normal Bias" parameter for your water surface shader. Set it to 5000-10000 and experiment from there. Should get you more rough water, typical for larger basins.
 
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Diffuse color is set to 0.6, 0.6, 0.6 in your material. Use much higher values, especially if you use additional diffuse texture that acts as a mult map.

By the way, your fresnel settings seem a bit extreme :) Try fresnel scale below 1.0, higher fresnel cutoff and fresnel power around 4.0-5.0 for car body.

For night lighting you may want to use higher "Spec. omni" value on car body and windows to get some reflections.
 
uhmm..i am trying to understand and use the shaders also.. the thing is though i cant even load the gmt's... i mean when i load a gmt file and tick it, the only thing i see is a plain grey screen and no values on the fields below the screen.. not even the grid u see before loading any file is visible. i follow the steps from the manual exactly..
a)are there specific gmt's to load?
b)are other files like dds textures needed to be in the same folder?
 
roby13 said:
i follow the steps from the manual exactly..
Click to expand...
Do these GMT files appear in the list on the left and did you check them to make them visible?

As for textures, you specify texture folder yourself in project options.

Also, my tool doesn't support locked (encrypted) GMT files.
 
K Szczech said:
Diffuse color is set to 0.6, 0.6, 0.6 in your material. Use much higher values, especially if you use additional diffuse texture that acts as a mult map.

By the way, your fresnel settings seem a bit extreme :) Try fresnel scale below 1.0, higher fresnel cutoff and fresnel power around 4.0-5.0 for car body.

For night lighting you may want to use higher "Spec. omni" value on car body and windows to get some reflections.
Click to expand...

Perfect, thank you :)
 
K Szczech said:
Do these GMT files appear in the list on the left and did you check them to make them visible?

As for textures, you specify texture folder yourself in project options.

Also, my tool doesn't support locked (encrypted) GMT files.
Click to expand...


Yes they appear and i checked them... i tried a very popular mod, i dont think they are encrypted, mas files opened fine with isi tools. the thing is that i can't even see some example gmt's you've included in the pack..
 
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Mas files may open, but GMT files have their own system for locking them.

Look at the end of GMT file and see if you can see material and texture names there. If not, then file is locked and therefore not supported by my editor.

If you think your files are not locked, then just create some small project with one GMT file and send it to me (both gmt file and project file) - I'll check what's wrong.

Also, try Render => Center View option - perhaps camera is somewhere far off.
 
First of all thx for your replies mate! I am embarrassed to admit that it was something so very obvious like the camera positioning :D I already completed my first project and i have to say youve done some grate programming man! its easy even for a noob as long as u understand some technical stuff and some values! thx a lot!
 
Hehe, don't be too hard on yourself - you're not the only one who got caught with camera looking the wrong way ;)
Glad to hear you got it sorted out.

I have automatic camera centering (after loading GMT's and such) on my TODO list, but I'm currently pretty occupied with new GMT files in rF2.
At this point I can load most of Monaco into my tool, so I'm slowly making progress on creating tools for rF2. Advanced normal vector generator will be probably the first one.
 
Where i can get the Material Tool 2 to put the SRPL Shaders to the cars/tracks?
 
Right here :)

There are two threads in this subforum - one for discussion and one for announcements, where you will find downloads.
Links to both threads are in my signature.
 
Hi guys,

having a little problem with rFactorMaterialTool2, too. All my imported GMTs are black, and even if I put a texture on it, it stays black. Even the texture path is set correctly.
When I was still on my old version of Windows, everything worked fine. Maybe I need any .net framework or DirectX updates?
 
Material tool uses OpenGL, not DirectX. All you need it drivers from AMD or NVIDIA installed and it should work.

It's not using .NET either. Send me a log file and I'll look into it (log.txt in MaterialTool2 directory). Also, try enabling / disabling HDR - it may help.
 
I had (and still have) the same issue with an old Radeon. I've tested it with my brother's HD4850 without installing a newer driver and it was working fine. Maybe thats why the track surface editor doesn't work well for me.
 
Yeah, it could be.
In such cases it's always best to look at log.txt file - it will say when some shaders failed to load. If graphics driver will tell why, log.txt will contain that information. NVIDIA drivers usually state reasons for shader compilation failure quite nicely, but Radeon drivers sometimes just don't say what went wrong.
 
Earlier I've sent you my log file, then you sent me a quick fix but that didn't solve my problem.
For a quick log file generation I've set up a test project, here's the log file:
View attachment 3594

I think my VGA card is mute.
 
Updated my graphic card's driver... rFactorMaterialTool2 works now :)

Thanks to Kristof!!
 
Hi there,
I have a material error that I'm trying to find if its rFactor related or SRPLshader related: on 1 rF install with SRPL everything works fine, but on another one without SRPL it shows a Global Material Error trying to load a texture called _RGBMAP, which doesn't exist on my project... Since rFactor sometimes works without errors for no apparent reason, I'm wondering :)

Also, why doesn't anyone share their settings for carpaint, windows, etc?
 
AFAIK if you have materials without textures mapped using diffuse color, you'll need a texture called _rgbmap.tga. It's a 256*256px picture with the 3+1 basecolors (red (top left),green (bottom right),blue (top right) + white (bottom left)).
Sharing material databases is a great idea IMO.
 
Lancelot0501 said:
AFAIK if you have materials without textures mapped using diffuse color, you'll need a texture called _rgbmap.tga. It's a 256*256px picture with the 3+1 basecolors (red (top left),green (bottom right),blue (top right) + white (bottom left)).
Sharing material databases is a great idea IMO.
Click to expand...

Thanks, made a 2x2 black texture and it worked. Strange thing is it showed correctly on the Material Tool 2 but not on 3dsimed, go figure.

Anyway I'll share my settings once I'm ready and got permission to use the shaders.
 
You don't need permission for anything else than a mod release. Other than that you can share any screenshots, videos, material settings or material databases as you like.
 
I have a question:

I configured the shaders for a huge number of cars (~200). But now I noticed that bright colors (white etc.) are too "bright", darker colors are looking very good (red, black, blue). Is there a way to fix this without modifying the shaders again for all cars?
 
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