This could possibly be done with scripting and materials.cs file. A simple change in the materials adjusting the hue to a more deep red as temperature goes up could achieve this. As a car is revved long enough or is overheated with forced induction headers can glow. we all know what causes rotors to turn red.
It's probably not very hard to do the scripted method like any other game would, but in BeamNG it needs to be more realistic & life-like
why? we already have brake thermals, just write a short script that changes the hue as the temp goes up, just like OP said. that's very realistic in and of itself. How would we make it more realistic?
One of the best suggestions i've seen! Just needs a glow map added to it, but they may have to create a more incremental glow system as the current one has only 3 states, definitely doable though.
increase hue through red through orange through yellow into white, increasing light it gives with it. There, done, you now have a light source and glowing brakes
that would work! But i think the white light seems wrong as the headers dont get white hot, it should be fire red (no glow but set the color strength to +2) then orange (glow) then light orange (glow intense). It would have to be hooked into the thermals system somehow, possibly via a script?
idk. Even the illumination is kind of a stretch since they dont provide much illumination to begin with. But yes, thermal light of metals do go through a bunch of hues to end into bright white. I dont know if i can find one that shows brake rotos going white bright from heat or even any kind of metal at all, after all by the point a metal is bright white hot it would have melted LONG ago. There's also a light point of purple between no color and red, which i think also is due to the metal warp. --- Post updated --- https://makeitfrommetal.com/why-does-steel-turn-blue-when-heated/
They are working on improving the brake models for all cars. In the Grand Marshall's update, it, the 200BX, SBR, Sunburst, and one of the ETKs as well (I think) got brake remodels. Maybe they will implement it? Plus as @Kueso said, they already have thermals, so they could script it to turn certain colors at certain temperatures. I always felt it was weird that blocks just looked dead on insane cars and brakes never had glow effects. It shouldn't be too hard if they use some taillight-ish work.
The problem is that you can't control the intensity of glowmaps. Making a script that calculates/estiwhatevers the "amount of glow" isn't hard and I'm 100% sure that @Diamondback tried to do this as well. With glowmaps you get these kinds of results: This works per wheel as you can see. Threshold is 400 deg C, just for testing purposes. I thought about controlling it like @HDR does with their powerglow skins but idk how to implement that in a non-colorable material.
To be fair, even like this it looks somewhat cool. So cant there be a small delayed effect by frames? that after some time above 400C the rotors start to glow, more depending on their temperature?
Yeah, that's want I want of course but that's not possible with glowmaps. Maybe that colouring the texture by lua directly works (like gull's traffic changes color) but the the brakes need to be colorable in some way...
It's been a while since i've developed anything for beam, but if you had a recolorable material for the brake discs you could use streams to set the intensity of the glow depending on the temperature of the brakes, but this would probably be a pain to make (maybe making a skin over the discs that is set to transparent by default could work).
