x4fab

And more messing around with particles

Trying to reduce chunkiness and make some sort of continuous flow of smoke, although at the core, it’s still just a bunch of billboards.

More experimenting with particles

Still a lot of work to be done here until this thing will be usable, but I think in general, whole idea of some smoke covering tyre surface before flying out might be doable.

Learning more about particles

First of all, I wanted to say,  thank you for all the support! Sorry for the lack of updates, there were some things which needed to be sorted.

As for this effect, of course, it’ll be disabled by default, and in most cases, will not be used, but I think it might be helpful for some videos in a specific style. And it’s a good way for me to learn more about GPU-accelerated particles for something more useful (like rain, smoke, bits of dirt and so on).

New shader for distant emissives

Have you noticed that annoying flicker for distant lamp posts? This new shader should help to solve it, by dimming emissiveness with distance and instead replacing it by a glowing billboard, growing with distance (I think GTA 5 does something similar). No need to change any models, everything is handled by a config. Interesting side effect is that now, some tracks at night look almost magical. :)

Something new for windows

I really liked that shader in Watch Dogs, adding some depth to windows, so I tried to do something similar here. Sure it’s not as good as properly mapped interiors, but at least it’s much more compatible with existing tracks (no need to draw new textures, everything is set via config). I’ll try to record some video of it tomorrow.

Tessellation for track materials

There are still a few problems with it, and it might be too expensive to use too often, but as an option, why not. And if there would be some major performance issues, it can always, optionally, be replaced with new parallax mapping with soft shadows (or, simpler parallax mapping without self-shadowing):

 https://acstuff.ru/u/comparison/JSK 

  2019-05-24 00:13:56 +0000 UTC View Post

New car paint shader (one of)

Made some extra versions of “smCarPaint” shader, for some special skins: one for chameleon effect, one for some rainbow-reflecting wrap (reference: https://i.imgur.com/yOUQVjW.png), one for rainbow speculars (reference:  https://i.imgur.com/dI32nOK.png, that one is very strange), plus an option for metallic reflections, allowing to create car...

Physically based rendering

I have to say, it turned out to be much more complicated than I originally expected, but here are some first results — carbon with clear coat, so reflections (from clear coat) use one set of normals, lighting is based on another, but clear coat also adds a second specular. 

Here are PBR shaders set for P1:  https://acstuff.ru/u/comparison/pKm 

They’re compatible with original shader...

First specialized shader

An alternative to stPerPixelNM_UVflow, because, if I understand correctly, it’s still not patched for Weather FX. I used original normal maps, which aren’t that smooth, as you can see here, and the whole thing is made to be rather faster than nicer, but I believe it does look somewhat water-like. What do you think? Should I change something? Added more shots in attachments.

Also, I must apologize for the delay with upcoming update. I dreamed about having those local reflections for ...

Better look for shiny interiors

Before and after:  https://acstuff.ru/u/comparison/NkI

I must say, this one was the thing that annoyed me the most about original Assetto Corsa. When the steering wheel reflects white and red curbs underneath the car, as you cut a corner, that’s just silly. It’s not perfect solution, as it always with cubemap reflections, but at least it would mask things below the car reliably. As for performance, take...

GPU-driven particles

Trickier to set trajectories, but performance-wise, it works much better than I expected! And we can even get particles colliding with track at almost no price. Here are some more videos:

• Same session during the day, with more details on collisions;
• Some sort of performance/benchmark test; 
• 2019-03-08 13:17:45 +0000 UTC View Post

A small addition that might be interesting

As you might have noticed, there are still a lot of bugs to fix, so I have to postpone most of cool features, sorry about that. Still, some small new things are coming too (mostly to produce more bugs). :D

Dynamic lights bound to auto-exposure

I’m still thinking about how could dynamic lights be more obvious in tunnels. Here, as one of solutions, Weather FX script raises sun intensity, sets custom auto-exposure options and binds dynamic lights intensity to exposure value calculated by YEBIS.

I’m not at all sure if this is a way to go, there are some problems, but it’s nice to see tunnels being lit during the day for a change.

Sorry about the delay with Weather FX, with new visual options recently added, it might t...

Upcoming Weather FX: accurate sun, moon and stars movement

Part of upcoming Weather FX: accurate sun, moon, stars and planets movements, taking track coordinates, current date and time into account. Now, it’s possible to find north by stars! What else is there to look for. 

Notice how sun trajectory is changing depending on the season and such. I think it would be quite a nice addition to existing real conditions as well.

Of course, stars and planets… It’s a pretty silly thing, that’s not what simracing is about, but it didn’t tak...

Particles FX demo

Just a short test of how AC particles might look if they’re dynamically lit, on per-pixel level. As you could expect, it’s terribly slow, but there might be some ways to optimize it (if nothing else, by switching to per-vertex level for smoke).

Development progress

If you’re interested, here is how new clouds might look. Or maybe not, depending on if they’re any good or not. I can’t really tell right now. 😅

I hope it’s all right if I’ll make posts like that from time to time? I’d want to thank you properly for your support, but can’t think of anything else. Thank you so much!

New Trello board with all the details

Thank you for all of your support! I wanted to let you know, I decided to try and use Trello to make some sort of a webpage for shaders patch, describing all the implemented features, and with download links as well.

Of course, it’s not that convenient to read — sorry about it — but I think it still could be better than Discord, and later, hopefully, I’ll find a way to wrap data from that board into some neat webpage automatically.