Maybe i shouldve posted this thread here at first, its in General discussion now, devs are free to erase any of these two. Been thinking on and off about this shader pack and if it would be useable in Beamng, instead of continuously not knowing ill post it here to get an answer: http://www.liman3d.com/shaderpackvol1_overview.html Anyone know if this is possible and most of all, any of these shaders would have a FRESNEL'ish effect in Beamng? Some of them sure looks like it, reading about them in the manual on the same page also sounds like it. They can be combined too, according to another document on that site. 25 bucks for some fresnel, id go with that lol. Example of one of those shaders is number 12 "Shiny" (also shader #1, 2 and 3 does looks and sounds somewhat promising when reading the manual found at http://www.liman3d.com/docs/shaderpackvol1_manual.pdf). Number 12:
It would be great if fresnel was be an option with it's value, so all the old materials have the value set to 0 so they won't look wrong
Yeah, ive bugged the devs before about this and recieved the answer that fresnel is not possible, i guess due to not having PBR (that is actaully in the works for T3D according to a garagegames blog) but since BeamNG utilized/utilizes Torque3D and these shaders do seem to provide a fresnel effect it looks to me as if it actually is possible, but on another level. As you say, on a material basis instead of hard coded in the engine itself. I guess the devs have far more understanding of this than i do so theyd probably be the ones that can shed somelight on this.
Thanks, couldnt find it. So possible but not effective gfx wise the way they had looked at it before. It does sound like it could be a choice and could be up to each user or creator of a mod.
Add Fresnel to current render system is not as easy That library use custom shaders that will be a lot more expensive to render than materials we use now, and will be limited to 4 lights per object. Current render use a deferred lighting system that was designed to calculate big number of lights per pixel on old GPUs. This is because we store a very small GBuffer with normals and depth only for reduce memory bandwidth. During light accumulation we lack the specular color needed for calculate Fresnel, and after that step we miss the light vectors. This make impossible Fresnel as a general material property. Reflections is a big problem too, as we lack roughness a Fresnel-like effect will make any material 100% reflective at glazing edges and make rough materials look wrong. Even if we can change the current system, this will make all the current official content and mods looks different on the best case and broken on the worse.
I just recieved this answer from Liman3D: Hi David, In fact "car paint"effects can be achieved with different shader approaches. We have one shader in "Shared Pack vol.1" which does this - this is Shader No7 (Environment Cube Reflection + Specular). Actually what a "car paint" effect is - it is a surface which has reflection and specular. Shader No7 uses a cubemap for reflection and also specular. If you are not technically strong into shaders it will be difficult for you to adjust it and produce the wanted results. Although most of the shaders in "Shader Pack vol.1" are already adjusted to produce a particular effect consider them more like a base, which you can use to build on. As you can see we have provided in this shader pack shaders using different techniques. In most of the cases the final results depend on parameters adjustments as well as good art for the passed in maps (bump, normal, etc.) So I can't answer to your question with just "yes" or "no". That's why we have uploaded the shaders documentation, there you can see what can be adjusted, also the shaders come with pure HLSL code, which you can edit and build on. I hope I have answered your question. Best regards, Lyubo
Remember that our vehicle materials are not 'simple' materials. Those are made out of 4 layers, where each layer has different use (control the reflections, control the color, control which parts are colorable..). That makes vehicle material very expensive to render (if you spawn many vehicle and you have a decent hardware, you will get GPU limited, rather than CPU limited in most cases). Adding more stuff on top of that is not going to help (if it ever works adding more stuff, where the material system is already being pushed to the limits and considering Luis said above that this shader pack is more expensive to render than current materials).
Yes, kind of thought this was a dead end, still i like to explore different ways to attack an idea. Im running heavy Reshade 100% of the time so GPU demanding shaders is not an issue for me really, but thats just me, not an entire world/community thats running from the lowest settings to the highest with reshade. I dont have the shader coding knowledge (yet) to do this so im probably not going to try this. Had an idea i tested out using RBM in Reshade to create a fresnel effect, needed help with the distance coding so that it didnt effect everything from the eye to the horizon. Recieved help but its still not good enough to go with since it effects more than what is ok to get the effect. Found that its actually also effected by a bloom shader too so its a no go. This has been mentioned before but dammit, you guys are awesome, which other game has the devs so actively and openly communicating with the community. Such wow, much love.
To add perspective, with 1050Ti, I'm GPU limited with shadows on most of the time, that is just with single vehicle and compared to other games this game is really heavy on GPU. Now they have to balance things with available hardware, if you need 1060 or better GPU to play smoothly, then that limits quite big share of the market out. When Final Fantasy XV is heavier and pretty much else out there being easier or rarely same level of load to GPU, that is situation where more GPU load is not what is wanted. There is huge gap between visuals to those some titles that task my GPU equally hard as Beam, so developers are pretty much against the wall with that unless they figure out how to magically lower GPU usage by 20%, then they might be able to put some nice shader things, but at what is current load to GPU, they don't have much room to move. I think that Final Fantasy XV is one of the rare titles which has 1060 as a recommended GPU, they can afford that of course with their huge brand, but small developer have harder time to make a profitable sale for only to higher end gaming computers. My slow poor GTX 1050Ti is still quite high on Steam GPU lists for example, so any developer has to balance with what people have as you said, here is latest listing from Steam and as you can see 1060 and 1050Ti are what are most common and it makes sense to have recommended hardware somewhere around there, but game then has to perform on normal details on that hardware, which creates that wall behind to poor developer:
Answered Lyubo and thanked him for his response, he is very kind. I basicly said that it probably would be to heavy on ppls computers the way it works now and wouldnt happen. I want to be clear that i DID NOT initiate some kind of business proposal or made me sound like a dev, ive stated that im a simple modder from the community, but he might have misunderstood cause heres what i recieved: "Hi David, I understand now that you want something very specific. I can give you the contact of my brother Ivan, who is very experienced into 3d graphics and shaders, as he was the lead programmer and game engine architect for the Gameloft's title "GTR2 the real car experience" which definitely has such a shader implemented as you can see from the title. Anyway this is a custom work and I think he will be willing to do it as a paid service only. Anyway I don't know what your budget is, but Ivan can definitely do the job for you. Contact him if you want. Here is his linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-mandzhukov-b6b1112b/ Best regrads, Lyubo" Anyways, wont be continuing the communication with them but wanted you to see what they said, might also help someone in the future, googling for Liman3d or something.
