Guidelines for Car Artists
- Albedo maps are now mandatory; with the PostFX integration we are now forced to balance our diffuse maps to work as albedo maps (looks our wiki for any further reference)
- Dashboards LCDs / Motec :
>Use shader called DashboardElementShader
>Set Ambiant Color to Black
>Set Emissive Color from Black to White to get more or less emissive properties
- Rev Meters / Leds :
>Use shader called DashboardElementShader
>Set Ambiant Color to Black
>Set Emissive Color from Black to White to get more or less emissive properties - Tail Lights; Use shader with 100% Emissive - Diffuse map for the Light ON must be strong in terms of sat and brightness to engage the bloom.
- Headlights; Create a mesh, with the shape of the bulb reflector (can be even a flat cap), and map it with the glow texture we provided in the sample, using the HighSunLum shader. Export this as glow mesh so it will be loaded when headlights are ON. Do Not Use any "fake" glow mesh or custom shader as we were doing in the past. It is VERY important to note that the size of the PostFX glow mesh has to be, at least, as big as the headlight reflector bell outer ring. Do not create small mesh, unless you don't want to simulate led lights, or specific shapes. If you want solid and strong headlight effect just be sure to create glow disks as big as your headlight reflector bells, on the outer and larger diameter.
- Color Gamut; let’s limit the saturation and brightness of your albedo map, to average 85%, max 90 for pretty strong colors. Never use anything above that range. If you have old textures you want to quick fix, you can try applying a Level layer and dropping the OUT from 255 to 200.
- Normal Maps; normal maps are more data files than art, so they should be exported non-compressed to avoid glitches in the spatial/color information. We will give you all details about formats and schemes, once we moved to the engine optimization tasks
- Atlass textures as much as you can; if you have many small texture with similar material attributes, try to atlass them into a singular material, averaging shader settings to a good compromise. This will improve performance reducing overall drawcalls.
- Try to use real time texture formats as much as you can; try to limit the usage of TGAs to just system/target files, and use .dds/BC for the entire main art. We will give you a complete set of optimized DX11 texture format as soon as we move to the DX11 optimization task.
- How to quickly update car skins / color maps
- Open your file in Photoshop
- On top of all layers add these two fx layers :
They will be used to lower the white output and the global color saturation :
Here is the skin before using the two fx layers :
Here is the skin with the fx layers set up :
Settings :
Here is a preview of the skin ingame :
