Can Cars Sparkle?

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JohnBM01

JohnBM01

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Hello, GT Planet.

As much as I have seen in games, I seen beautiful chrome mapping jobs (some not as impressive). Then GT3 kind of brought environment mapping. Almost anything you raced in, your car would reflect it. Try racing a track with all sorts of objects above and on the sides of the track you're racing. Have you had your lights on your car on, and you seen the headlights shine off of the guardrails, like on Special Stage Route 11.

But this is a special topic I decided to explore, among many. Can cars sparkle? Now, I would like to say that I am talking about if you raced at night on dark country roads with a beautiful sky, would all the stars reflect on your car. That would be interesting, but think about real racing and the environments thereof. Imagine if the sun shone on the lights of a tall glass tower. Normally, you'd see a bright shine on the buildings as you drive by. If you watch a NASCAR (for road racing fans, why would you watch it?), maybe you seen all 43 cars have the sun beam down on the cars. The light from the sun would put a big shine on the windshield, and it can be seen as the cars zoom through the turns. Remember when the Champ Cars raced Milwaukee and Clevland under the lights? You could see sparkles shine off the cars as they ran in the 150 to 200 mph range.

So do you think it is possible for light from bright objects (like the sun and street lights) can make cars shine in the daylight and sparkle at night? I think it can be done, but some extra mapping would have to be done to have the sun shine on the car and make the glare from the sun bright. Now, if it can be too bright to the point where it can be blinding, I don't know. I don't think any 3D game attempted this. Now, I'm talking about environment mapping whereas really bright objects tend to sparkle on the cars. Do you think this can be a nice consideration for not just GT5 (or 4), but for other games? I think it's possible, but the actual mapping may be bit challenging, as it can be impossible to do that.
 
I think they can. But making a car sparkle in a single frame render is very different than when you need to do it 30 times per second (or maybe more). It's just rendering load versus performance. Mate that up with the 5 other cars on the track as well as each car's AI and environment mapping.

When the car modeling is done in Maya, the shaders that are assigned to each surface have specularity settings, but at a hit to performance. It doesn't seem like much of a hit to performance (and it isn't) when you're thinking of an isolated instance, but it adds up with all the other computing that the PS2 has to do.

But who knows what PD's got up their sleeves. The TRIAL Celica SS-II Tuning Car has chrome rims. I do believe that's a first for the series. And the rims are PRETTY!
 
yea that would be really cool to be puttin the sun glare into the actual buildings and cars but i think if the did that then it would be extremely hard to see. Just like on settle circut reverse.
 
hello,
last year i saw a screenshot from gt4 with "backfire"from the exhaust i saw 2 pics of it... maybe it was a edit trough photoshop but have you guys seen that?
 
Originally posted by Hks_Fanatic
hello,
last year i saw a screenshot from gt4 with "backfire"from the exhaust i saw 2 pics of it... maybe it was a edit trough photoshop but have you guys seen that?
Click to expand...

do you mean this one? there also a wallpaper (which i dont have) of an integra type R backfiring
 

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Hving cars "Shine" is very much a mybe to GT4 because KY did mention that cars would have "Real" Reflections on the cars this time around and not the "fake" ones from GT3, so too me I doubt in GT4 we'll see "sparkles" but maybe in GT5 we'll see this happen, of course we cant get everytihng in one shot so I still say we have to wait until GT5...
 
I don't think sparkly mapping has ever been attempted. I mean, it was a lovely Sunday here in Houston. So I was imagining if my mother's van was driving around town today, I'd imagine it shining and sparkling in the beautiful sunlight and royal blue skies around where I live.

Now, let's imagine a race track that has a lot of lights around it. Let's say that this track had a lot of colorful lights at one part. Then past Intermediate 2, there were a lot of bright, white lights. Cars can sparkle the lights off their candy-paint race car (do they make good racing paint?) and make them sparkle in the lights. Then at Intermediate 3, you can enter a part of the track that starts dull and dark, but later brings you back into the heart of the track.

Think about driving on the road both in daylight and the darkness of night. Think of all the illuminative and sparkly stuff on the road. You know (and I'm thinking about on the freeway), the street lights, maybe some of the buildings, other cars, and things like that. Of course, part of my visualizations is imagining the situation. Now, put it into perspective. Imagine GT4 with the shiny and sparkly elements of the environment. Now when it comes to sparkle, Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero had some nice reflecting of headlights when on the rear of another car. Of course, I think that game has the most specatular visuals even if it isn't as visual as non-racing games.

Then again, I don't even non-racing games (such as action and adventure) even tried to be sparkly. Maybe at times, I've seen maybe sprite-generated sparkles, but I'm talking about going through a street lined with street lights on, or driving into the setting sun with your candy-painted, chrome-wheeled custom. Now, I'm sure GT4 may not allow customs, but if it does, it will be an interesting experiment to sample sparkle and shine effects other than chrome mapping.
 
Some amount of sparkle can be simulated using high dynamic range lighting. (As seen in Half-Life 2), where you can have lights that are 'brighter' than pure white. With this, the lights, reflections, etc. have the proper glare that you expect. So it's possible and has even been implemented in games (though games that are using hardware far in advance of what the PS2 has).
A cheat way of acheiving a similar effect would be to have a lense flare when there is a reflection of the sun off the car. Almost as good.
So it can (could) be done, at a cost in processing.
 
In my estimation, PC technology is much more advanced despite than the PC. The PC is surely programmable to where any fathomable effect can be made. Anything from realistic rain on the windshield of a car when driving to seeing every last detail of a beautiful mountain setting from a distance.

If PD can find a way to pull off this phenonmena, it will make racing in daylight a bit more realistic, in terms of visuals at least. So I agree with Glut.
 
I decided I'd bring back this topic to discuss if there is some sort of way we can have certain "sweet spots" on the car whereas when the sun shines, it's like the cars with the lights on in the darkness. What I'm saying is, if the sun is out, can we make the effect of having the sun's wonderful glare on the windshield of the car, and not to mention some of the sides of the car? It would be tough to pull off, but about the best way to tell between a real picture and a fake is to pay special attention to the environment mapping and if in a sunny day, can you see any light sparkles on the car? I think it can be done, but with "research."

Now, I wouldn't recommend this for GT4, but kind of look into it for GT5. But if this CAN be pulled off with little or consdierable success, then it's a sure fit for GT4.
 
Thread from the dead? Yeah, sure. As long as I have something to talk about, it's no big deal.

So when I was doing some PS2 gameplay, I came across "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." Despite the mature nature of this game, I recentely noticed some details in graphics. While GTA:VC isn't graphically impressive as Gran Turismo 4 or even GT3, what I noticed was the sun shining on some of the cars as I was going around Vice City. So in my 2-month old break from this topic, the update was about seeing the sun shine off of the windshield of the cars. Before I went into one mission, I even seen the sun reflect off of the water providing this nice shine job to parts of the water.

And I mean, there is no certain mapping to show the sun on the windshield all the time. Instead, on a sunny day when in the sun, you can see little sparkles on the windshields of cars. It isn't impressively bright, but it's there.

I had a tough time deciding on whether or not put this in "Do You...Little Details" or this one, I decided that this thread is about little details in games. I'd rather put something like this in a topic I know I'll be mentioning as I go along. But if you played Vice City, you may have already noticed such effects. So I still think it may be possible to implement this into GT4, but things will have to be programmed wonderfully to make it happen.

Old-school topic from me, but there you go.
 
Your topics are really whacked, I swear you need to settle down about GT4 and do something else for a while.

Reflections in the GT series are faked. PS2 is not capable of doing any 'realtime HDRI' or global illumination. Also, because of the resolution limitations of the PS2, little details like very detailed reflections are pretty much so impossible, as there simply isn't enough res to have them all. Plus, you can't have really detailed reflections if the scenery surrounding it isn't the same. If you haven't noticed, GT4 still uses 4 sided 2d bitmap trees. If I re-call correctly, I do remember seeing some earlier GT4 pics that had the sparkling chrome sun reflection, but I think that feature was canned.

From a developers point of view, I think alot of people are asking too much from Polyphony. There is only SO MUCH that can be done, and I think they've done enough.
 
JamieD
From a developers point of view, I think alot of people are asking too much from Polyphony. There is only SO MUCH that can be done, and I think they've done enough.
Click to expand...
I think these people don't understand how much goes into programming games. They never written even one line of code and magically think Polyphony can pop things into the game without any effort.
 
I've often wondered how cool It'd be to go to PD,s workplace for a week and see how much they can actually achieve. Anyone else thought this?
 
I have also thought of that sort of thing. I am going to Japan soon and would love to stop by PD's building.
 
Nice Idea there but i think somthing like a "sparkly mapping" would be a complete waste of resources. Just imagine what has to be calculated to get this working properly:
Seeing those sunbeams or those sparks soley depends on which angle the light hits the curvature of the cars mesh. As mentioned in a post above the PS2 not only would have to calculate the cars polygons, the enviroment, the reflections on the the cars and the AI 50 times (PAL) or 60 times (NTSC) a second. Plus the angle the light hits the mesh ? Nice idea but waaay to many resources would have to be put in this. I can think of many more things these resources could be spend on more wisley: more polys on the cars, more cars on the track, proper car sounds, better physicxs and so on. I think eyecandy like those sparks would be a complete waste of system power. But thats just my 2 cents :)
 
^^

It can be faked. Frankly, its the only way it COULD be achieved.

99% of people on this board do not understand enough about game development to be making such requests. Trust KY. If its doable, it will be done.
 
That's why they pose the question, so the more informed can offer their ideas as to why or why not it'd be possible.
 
(SPECIAL REPLY)

Awww I've deleted what I wrote, what I put before was WAY too harsh.

Can cars sparkle? Yes if you put glitter glue on them like a big girls blouse.
 
This has been a special discussion about something to be discussed in other GT games, even if it won't be for GT4. Okay, when I came up with this topic back in... whenever it was, I noted this as special... well, here's an exclusive from me. Why did topics special in the past? When I did topics in the past with that distinction, I wanted to make things as part as an exclusive topic. It was for something that if it didn't impact one aspect of gaming or whatever, I at least wanted a special look at it. So, that explains a special topic.

And Eagle, your last post about John vs. Code_kev, don't worry. I don't like rivalry, I don't hold grudges, I don't like ticking people off, and if I had a problem, I'd keep it to myself.

Now back on topic (thank God). And you're right. Fake sparkling is probably the only way to do it, and here's why. Look at the early days of chrome mapping. Ridge Racer Type 4. Le Mans 24 Hours. San Francisco RUSH. Time Crisis 2 (PS2). Over time, there is actually reflective mapping. Gran Turismo 3. Tokyo Xtreme Racers Zero and 3. Pro Race Driver. Now you have reflections. I think having sparkles to cars will have to be faked first, or at least take a look at the "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" and how the sun shines on the windshields of cars, then try to better Rockstar Games. Of course, if you prefer gameplay over studying graphical touches, go ahead and run over cops and invite hookers to your stolen car. Anyhow, what do you think (without mocking or knocking me)?
 
You know I'm only joking John, I don't really hold any grudges, especially against people I don't really know.

The only sparkles I can think of on a real car is when sun catches the edges, causing a bright white shine (pgr2 has this effect, it's faked ofc, but quite pretty). I guess it would be nice if GT4 had this, but not over the top.
 

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