Hi, Though I've made a lot of textures so far I'm still trying to make them look better in CSP/SOL. One of my current problems is that for a black car, even with AO correctly applied the car is just way to dark when SOL/CSP is on, while it's okay in the CM and without CSP. So I was checking how Kunos did some of their cars and took the texture from a metallic part. To make it metallic they used a ksPerPixelMulti Shader and left the diffuse slot empty, so a .dds file that is basically blank or 100% transparent. And for the details the used the color, like grey for example. In the maps slot they used the RGB values to adjust the reflectivity. Now I just copied that approach, took their values onto every texture and reduced the RGB from 255 to lower triples for not glossy objects and colored the details channel. That worked for a blue bolt, for silver, for a rather less glossy white component, for amber colored parts, for purple, for red, etc. It worked basically for all parts in my car. Still it looks really dark in game ... Then I wanted to do the same thing to my main textures. It features two different shades of black and an dark grey. So again, I left the diffuse empty, had the motif with colors in the details and then for the maps channel I used the same motif as in the details channel but adjusted the RGB values so both aren't same as the reflectivity is slightly higher for the black part than for the grey part in the real life car. When I added that in ksEditor it was basically white with the motif barely visible. I adjusted all parameters but still it was white. What worked for all the other parts simply didn't work anymore. So I checked other Kunos cars and saw that for some, like when they have a red color, they add a white diffuse channel and for cars like the lotus, they add dark diffuse channels. I did that and now the mixture is turning rather grey BUT it becomes visivle with CSP. So my idea was that perhaps all the other components were so dark because the diffuse was empty. For black that doesn't really matter or bright red or bright blue, but for precise colors it suddenly went wrong. Now my problem is with making the diffuse the same color as the details channel I'd be ending up where I have been a few months ago. That works but in game it looks like a picture and not like a physical material. Hence my question is, what color is the diffuse channel supposed to be if you want to have a physical, shiny paint?
Hi, Okay, yeah I often forget about that since my car does not use any skins, but still, even if I use that BMW here and I take, say the red version of it, the folder has the "Carpaint_D_white_map" which is some sort of cyan now, probably for the glossiness and a red map for the "metal_details.dds", while the diffuse channel is white. So they go with the same strategy to make the diffuse white and add color with the details channel. I might take a look at the exact settings for their black here since using a white channel just doesn't add any black for me, it will always mix. On the other hand I've heard that you should not turn the diffuse to black or it won't work on Sol and CSP. Does the diffuse channel actually act like a physical material or is it rather like a picture? See, say I wanted to have a glossy looking carbon fibre optic. I could add it to the diffuse channel and the normal channel and add a bright maps channel and work with the shaders. But many cars just use a white channel as diffuse and create the carbon fibre optic with another channel. Hence I'm wondering, if the details channel is able to add those small spots and the color to something metallic, is using a colored diffuse channel the same type of metal, too? Or is it like adding a picture and then making it glossy and therefore reacting to the light differently in SOL/CSP (or when you make it really dark not scattering light at all?). Because I've heard different comments on this diffuse channel and I'm starting to wonder if putting the same color in diffuse and details might cause the issue for me...
