Enable Shadows on Track

[undercover]

Hello everybody,


I am struggling with getting shadows working in Panthera: The Tracks I use have values for the sun in the corresponding .ini file and the textures on the objects are getting brighter and darker depending on the sun setting but I wont get any shadows from bridges, building, barriers and so on. As far as I understand there are two different shadow options and the newer one seems to be shadowmaps. I already "added lightning" in TrackEd as I thought this would add the shadowmap in the corresponding .dof file. But unfortunately this hadn't any affect at all.
Is there also a way to see the shadows in TrackEd or is this only rendered in Panthera. 


Furthermore, (not to important) motion Blur is enabled but it does not seem to have any effect. As powerful Hardware isn't a problem for me, I am thankful for any help how to improve graphics a bit.


Thanks in advance.
 

[T.Mulder]

Hi Undercover,

First of all, the "Add lighting" button in TrackEd is actually a legacy button from back in the day.
TrackEd has a big cleanup scheduled for the future, to remove any and all legacy (obsolete) features.
So it is not necessary to use this button for shadow mapping.

The shadows are a two part system.
The racer.ini controls the global settings for turning shadows on or off.
You can find the setting under renderer.shadowmapping.enable=1 to turn on the shadows.
Please note that if you use the GLSL shaders to run Panthera, shadow mapping will not work.

The second part of the system is controlled per track (or car) and is controlled in the shader file (track.shd & car.shd).
Per shader entry you can define the "shader_<x>.cast_shadow=1" variable to control if that material needs to cast shadows.

Controlling the cast_shadow per material might be a bit of work if you have a lot of materials/shaders.
Try to avoid to just turn on shadow casting for all your materials/shaders, since this can have a big impact on your performance.
It is better to check if your material really needs to cast shadows. This way is a bit more work, but might save you from performance issues down the line.
For example, turning on shadow casting for surface objects, like a road, is usually not necessary (unless you drive underneath it, like in a bridge situation).

Once you've added the cast_shadow to your shader and shadow mapping is turned on in the racer.ini, you should be able to see shadows in both Panthera and TrackEd.

Regarding Motion Blur.
We found that using motion blur usually does more harm than good, but if you would like to experiment with it you would need to check the following.
- Set racer.ini's renderer.motion_blur.method to 4
- Set renderer.motion_blur.blur_alpha to something like 0.5. This is the amount of mixing between the new frame and the old frame (in the framebuffer). Higher values (towards 1) mean more blur, although too much just probably gives more headaches.
- Set renderer.motion_blur.fs_filter1=bloom_shadows_blur_f.cg

Let know if this helps you along.

Terry

[undercover]

Hi,

thank you very much Terry, this helped a lot. I had a lot of textures but it was worth to go through all of them and enable shadows on the important ones.
Shadows makes the whole thing look impressively more realistic.
Additionally, orientating on some of the shader methods from the dynamic platform example I was able to get even better graphics with my own high res textures.
Thank you for the warning, I wont mess with blur then.

As I am only reshading and retexturing an existing track I have three additional questions which are a bit off topic but maybe you know the answers:
1) The standard_f shader seems to not have the scale option but "merges/bends" the textures. e.g.: The rectangular texture of gravel in a curve is bended around this curve. Meaning that it is more stretched at the outer radius.(I assumes this is done in the original modeling process). Whereas the the mix1_f.cg enables scaling but ignores that "bending" (But bending looks nice in curves). Is there a way to combine those features in one fragment shader. This is completely new for me and I wont understand the difference between "tc0*scale" and "tc0.xy" is (beside scale)
2) Is it possible to add .dofs to an existing track? I think of adding some details which I was able to export to .dof but I don't know how to add them. Maybe there is a (I guess complicated) way to achieve this.
3) Is there a way to make some "light shines between object" like this: 2.bp.blogspot.com/-S_Tjtmapv0s/TvDl8oOPGKI/AAAAAAAACZQ/3jMef08cmBQ/s1600/a_470x353.jpg I was thinking about adding (non-collideable ) volumetric objects and setting the to semi transparent but I don't know how this should work when you are inside the object (as only the faces are rendered right?).

I believe one could write several pages answering those questions but maybe you have at least some small hints for me.

Thank you very much and sorry for the late response I was busy playing with shaders

[T.Mulder]

Glad to be of service.

1) All textures follow their respective UV-mapping coordinates. The end result will depend on how the geometry is mapped in your 3D software.
If you would like to change the mapping, it would be easiest to do this in the source file. I am not sure if you have the source available, since you are re-shading an existing track.

A different approach might be to use a different shader, which uses something like world coordinate mapping (or a mix thereof).
It's a bit of a hacky work-around, but it might do the trick. You were on the right track with the mix shader!

The mix shaders are a multi-layered shader, mostly used to blend textures.
The different layers in these shaders have either a world coordinate mapping system or their own mapping coordinates (mostly for the control maps).
There are three different mix shaders available, which vary slightly (from the top of my head, so I might be slightly off ):
mix1w_f: I can't actually recall it blending stuff, since it only uses a single texture, but does use world coordinate mapping.
mix2_f: Blends two textures in world coordinates, controlled by a control texture (in original uv-coordinates).
mix2w_f: The same as mix2_f, but only does world coordinates for the 2nd layer and keeps the other in uv-coordinates.

The scale controls how the world coordinate texture scaling.
Try to experiment a bit with this and see if this might help you out.


2) Adding a .dof file to a track is not as complicated as you think.
- Just place the .dof(s) in your tracks root folder.
- You can add it manually by opening the geometry.ini and add a new entry for your dof file (copy-paste-rename).
- You can also use TrackEd to import new .dof files, by using the “(I)mport DOF models” button. Don’t forget to save your track afterwards.
- Reload your track.

3) Unfortunately we don’t have volumetric lighting, I’m also keeping my fingers crossed .
You can try you approach, but the end result might not be as nice as your example.

Please do keep asking your questions, it might benefit the rest of the Panthera users.
Keep playing with those shaders, love to see what you come up with.

Terry

[undercover]

Yes I have the original source file in 3ds max but it is not completely "panthera ready" yet. I am still trying split objects (due to the 16 bit limitation) and other modeling stuff to make it a litte more panthera friendly.
But sooner or later I will switch to the source file.

How are you exporting your Tracks? Do you have a .dof plugin for newer 3ds max version (the latest official is 2011) or are you going the .ase road? Exporting as ase doesnt take so long but importing in TrackED takes almost 45 min for approx. 300 objects.
All my materials are in one sub/object and TrackED seems to go through each material id for every object. Are you using one sub/object as well or multiple?

Explaining the shaders helped a lot. I will show you some screenshots when the track is finished to show the overall progress

Too bad there is no volumetric light as this improves the atmosphere but beside that Panthera can look really impressive (running on potential hardware).

I am almost getting short for questions but I still have one concerning cars:
I figured out that you can use the Camera type from-to (in car.ini) and combine it with the mass-spring-damper modell of an head/body to create movement of the camera inside the cockpit.
This works pretty cool for standalone cars but as soon as I use my Simulink Car Modells it starts to move loosely in the inside of the cockpit and even worse, the whole cockpit starts to flicker/shake. Have you encountered something similar?
I saw the camera pos and eye pos Input in Simulink but they don't seem to do the trick (with building my own movement model) as the first ones moves the whole viewpoint and the cars body (beside the steering wheel) and eye pos has no effect at all.

[T.Mulder]

We don’t use a .dof exporter for 3D Studio Max. From my recollection there has never been an official dof exporter plug-in.
I believe there was a plug-in developed by the community, but we’ve never adopted it into our workflow.
Plug-ins for Max are always a bit tricky, since every new version of Max introduces new fun unknowns. Which means maintaining them is a bit of a nightmare.

We export our tracks (and cars) via the export to .ASE route.
45 minutes to import a track into TrackEd is indeed a bit long.
You are correct that TrackEd goes through all the materials in a multi/sub material per object. Having one (very) large multi/sub material will definitely increase the importing time.
We prefer not to work with very large multi/sub materials since it becomes very cumbersome to work with.

Try organizing your multi/sub materials into smaller ones, we tend to group them by object type or area (track, pit building, grandstands, trees, etc).
This makes it a lot easier to add new materials without your multi/sub material becoming very cluttered or having to redo a part of your material-id assignment.

Regarding the camera, this is more a simulink question, which is slightly out of my comfort zone
I suggest you contact the Cruden support department to obtain a copy of the documentation ([e-mail]).
There should be a bit more information in there that explains how the cameras work in combination with Simulink.