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A question about BeamNG's textures

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Bakasan, Jun 3, 2023.

  1. Bakasan

    Bakasan
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    Messages:
    1,486
    Hi, so I had been meaning to ask this for a while now, but BeamNG's vehicles seem to use some 'interesting' textures, specifically the new textures used by 1.5 materials/PBR.

    For example normal maps are this interesting yellow colour
    upload_2023-6-3_13-51-4.png
    as opposed to the purple you are likely used to seeing
    upload_2023-6-3_13-55-32.png
    The reason for this seems to be that these 'yellow' normal maps have the blue channel set to zero, whereas most normal maps have the blue channel set to one. For anyone wanting to render BeamNG's normal maps in Blender I created this simple node which will change the blue channel from 0 to 1 and thus make the textures useable in Blender:)
    upload_2023-6-3_14-0-58.png



    Anyways, I mostly just wanted to ask why BeamNG uses textures like this? and also for modders like myself is there any advantage to using such textures, or can we just use the regular purple normal maps that most programs such as Substance generate for us :)
     
    #1 Bakasan, Jun 3, 2023
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  2. Agent_Y

    Agent_Y
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    Jbeam/QA support
    BeamNG Team

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    Jul 10, 2020
    Messages:
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    The game automatically converts the blue normal maps to the yellow ones when creating cache so you should still use the normal ones. The reason why it does that is simple, by removing one of the channels we get a large file size optimization on the texture (33 - 66% depending how complex it is). There are other games that take this even further, using only 1 channel and alpha in RGBA format, saving up to 75% of the file size, but then it becomes a nightmare to convert them back to a usable format, so what we have is a great compromise.
     
    #2 Agent_Y, Jun 3, 2023
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  3. Bakasan

    Bakasan
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    Oh cool, so it is done for optimisation reasons then:) if I am not mistaken for modders, we can work with regular png textures and let the texture cooker take care of the rest right?
     
    #3 Bakasan, Jun 3, 2023
  4. Agent_Y

    Agent_Y
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    Jbeam/QA support
    BeamNG Team

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    Jul 10, 2020
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    Yeah exactly work on png and the texture cooker will convert to dds and fix all the colors and stuff
     
    #4 Agent_Y, Jun 3, 2023
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  5. over_the_reckoning

    over_the_reckoning
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    Aug 7, 2020
    Messages:
    19
    Can someone tell me how to disable translucent textures in Ninjago CITY (glow_cityMain) ?
     
    #5 over_the_reckoning, Jul 5, 2023
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