Have you considered using substances for the texturing part of the game? I think this will help speed up texture development tremendously, especially if you plan on having a lot of cars in the final game. For short, it's a technology that allows the quick creation of procedural textures with minimal input maps. More information here: http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer-4 And here: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-toy9WMImypmLAiU9h_SzQ This could be implemented in one of two ways: 1. At the engine level. This means that you can have the substance graphs coded in the game and each car would only require the geometry, uvs, a normal map, ambient occlusion (optional) and a material mask. The shader would then compute everything else with procedural textures and effects. This saves loads of disk space and allows for complex graphs to be controlled in the game. You could for example change the intensity of the dirt layers, make the paint more or less glossy, basically any parameter in the graph can be "exposed", aka controlled by the user with a slider. I don't think substances are implemented in Torque 3D at the moment but judging by the open nature of Torque and Allegorithmic's desire to spread its technology, we might see this soon enough. 2. At the asset creation level. You can create a graph that generates the textures of the car in Substance Designer and still reuse the same graph for all of your vehicles. The only downside is that the diffuse, specular and normal maps have to be exported as normal textures for the game you can't take advantage of the graph controls in game. It won't help with disk space either but that shouldn't be a problem, it would be on the same level as now (texture files for each car). As an example here are two muscle cars I did a couple of years ago. I had high resolution models for both and I used them to bake normal maps and ambient occlusion maps in Xnormal. Then I used these maps in Substance Designer to generate the output textures (albedo, roughness, metallness) which were then used for the final render in Marmoset Toolbag 2. Don't worry too much about the albedo/roughness part, I could just as easily extracted diffuse/specular from the same inputs. Took me about two days to create the graph with little prior knowledge of Substance Designer mostly because I was testing all the nodes to see which looked better. Each texture set then took something like an hour as I only had to tweak some parameters to make the various details look ok on each car. (imported from here) For the Cuda, I saved two texture sets to exemplify how the same graph can bake both clean and used/dirty textures. (imported from here) Here's a screenshot of the graph I made. On the right are the parameters I exposed, the ones I tweaked in order to get the two texture sets for the Cuda renders above. (imported from here)
Damn... Those models are beautiful, AND low poly... Just wondering, but do you have any plans to put anything in-game? (Yes, I know you'd still have to model suspension and things, but you seem more than capable.)
I'm working on a substance graph that outputs textures in the BeamNG format based on the one I used for the muscle cars above. Should have the same sliders and maybe a few more for good measure, I'm thinking rust, multiple paint layers with fade between them, these things. I'm planning on releasing it for everyone to use as substances can be tweaked with Substance Player (freeware). People will be able to input their mesh and a few input maps (normal map, ambient occlusion) and get BeamNG textures as outputs. I'll keep you guys posted on the progress.
