F1 Specific Skin Guide!

[MoR137]

Alpha channels can be used to reduce the gloss shine on the main paintwork also and can make numbers more shiny also

 

From my experience, I've only ever come across alpha channels for one use only and that is for transparency (black=transparent, white=opaque) and have never heard of it being use for gloss like you say, unless rFactor has some kind of hidden setting which I don't know about.

 

However, if what your saying is correct, I think the requirement of no alpha channels will still be the same, because we want rF to be loading as little as possible, without it having to worry about alpha channels, which are already in places on the chassis models themselves and parts of tracks.

 

[Fourwinds]

Alpha channels can be used to reduce the gloss shine on the main paintwork also and can make numbers more shiny also

 

From my experience, I've only ever come across alpha channels for one use only and that is for transparency (black=transparent, white=opaque) and have never heard of it being use for gloss like you say, unless rFactor has some kind of hidden setting which I don't know about.

 

However, if what your saying is correct, I think the requirement of no alpha channels will still be the same, because we want rF to be loading as little as possible, without it having to worry about alpha channels, which are already in places on the chassis models themselves and parts of tracks.

 

 

This is the tutorial I was looking at:

[freew67]

Instead of a cube map, you could affect the gloss by an alpha. What he is saying, say your numbers are shiny and your paint is flat, you could make the numbers reflect with the "cube map look" thru the alpha channel of the skin, and the rest of the car would have very little or no shine at all. And yes, its confusing! These alphas have nothing really to do with transp, which adds to the confusion.

 

My Kentucky Street Stock mod uses Alphas this way.

Edited January 30, 2008 by freew67

[MoR137]

This is the tutorial I was looking at:

 

Thanks for the tutorial Fourwinds, very interesting and something I didn't know existed within rFactor - you learn something new every day

 

I will have a chat with a few people about whether it would be ideal to let ukdirt skins have alpha channels - its a very small change that could potentially give rFactor a lot of think about.

 

Also one thing that struck me was that he was using DXT5 'because DXT3 reduces the shades of grey in the alpha channel'. The fact that that option is there to reduce the shades of grey (and DTX1 turns off alphas altogether) suggests to me that it could have a negative impact on performance, but then again, nVidia didn't make the plug-in specifically for rFactor..... lol. But my gut feeling is, loading an alpha channel will impact performance in some way, however small, when compared with not loading an alpha channel.....

 

Thanks for pointing it out though and I'll have a chat with a few people