Hello, With 0.18 we are introducing important changes to the lighting system ( https://blog.beamng.com/color-space-lighting-and-hdr-rendering/ ) These changes also requires us to introduce some precautions, in order to retain the already existing content look (for what's possible), without requiring changes to textures or materials. This thread is meant to serve as knowledge base for modders, so that you can better know about these changes and plan eventual improvements to your mods accordingly. General: Some colors could appear slightly shifted, due the new color space. Colors with dark tone could appear brighter than they used to be. Specular power, previously broken and barely visible, are now fixed. Old content that had blown out specular values, may now appear with very bright specular. Levels: The ScatterSky entity now has a 'enableFogFallBack' field. This is used to try converting old color values to the new color space. We suggest not using this, but actually try to re-pick your colors. This field may be deprecated in the future. Because we use correct lighting and HDR now, you should not exaggerate with your sun values. While we have some safeguard to prevent everything to blow out in levels with really bright sun values, it's better keeping it to 1 or around that. Vehicles: Vehicles received most precautions, due complexity of their materials. Dynamic Reflections, previously dim and kind of hacked, are now properly rendered. As result, they can appear brighter and therefore more visible. Vehicle paints can appear more or less chrome than before, because these changes influences on how the alpha value of the color-map is calculated. There's a precaution to automatically convert those values to something close to their previous result, although results may vary on mods. This is applied to any material on vehicles using cubemaps. Flares could appear brighter than before. You can usually control the intensity of the flares using the alpha value in the spotlight/pointlight color. To be eventually expanded
Excellent! What part of the changes has added that light reflection on vehicles? e.g. the pick up roof rack lights also reflect off the hood.
That should be the specular, which now properly reflect the lights sources. Also noticeable on the sun.
Is it possible to employ metallic workflow for assets currently? I took a quick look at the shader code and it seemed to have metallic and roughness parameters in there, but I couldn't find how to define roughness and metallic maps into the materials.json file. I saw mentions of colorMap, specularMap, overlayMap, normalMap & reflectivityMap and some others but those two eluded me.
We don't have support for Metallic materials as of now. What you found may be some old experiment, but none of that is in use. It's a non-PBR workflow mostly (although you can use PBR software like Substance, and try to re-use/convert those metallic textures into something usable in other 'maps', with some minor edits)
