Anybody else wondering what place RGB has within their new HDR renderer?
The livery editor is looking amazing. I hope they can avoid the issue Forza has with theirs, where on track the custom paintjobs look like pixelated messes.
The method PD uses does not down-mix, down-sample or otherwise remove the complexity of the livery itself, it will display the liveries how they were drawn, with projected decals - hence the lower total decal limit. There may be a reduction in texture detail of the decals themselves in-game, using the renderer's in-built texture filtering, and how this shows up on the car will vary from design to design. I expect lots of tips and tricks to emerge...
Yes if that is possible. Be interesting to see how these images wrap around different profiles of the car, between the sides and roof etc.
Quite often manual tweaks to the Decals had to be done because of glitchy effects.
Time will tell.
Again, because PD don't use the old-fashioned "one texture for the whole car" approach, each decal will be projected onto the bodywork based on the raw underlying vertex grid, not a pre-made UV map that is prone to coordinate / wrap-around errors and distortions, and issues will probably be limited to extreme geometry like bumps and strakes etc. There is the chance PD might forget to mark certain parts of the cars as allowing decals to be put on them, potentially creating discontinuities across body panels - these are easy to fix.
Basically, what we've seen of liveries in the games since GT3 is what we'll get via the editor, it's the same overall concept and construction technique using in-game / in-app tools, with a possible caveat in respect of the below:
Do we know how far away liveries can be rendered? I know that at long distances, cars will be replaced by their Low-Object-Detail models. It might look strange on the Nurburgring straight if a car ahead is gradually losing color and detail, layer by layer.
Also, can liveries be seen in rear-view mirrors? I remember in GT5/GT6, cars would often look very strange in the mirror because their fully detailed models weren't used.
If the Level of Detail system can handle decals on their own and tie them to the car no matter its level of "tessellation" (how PD is doing LoD now) without distortion, relative movement etc., then this will be fine. Standard "MIP-mapping" will take care of the individual textures themselves. If the LoD had to be hand-tuned by artists per livery up to now, then issues are possible - e.g. popping and such. Thinking about the nature of the tessellation system itself, I think it should at least be distortion free - at least until the (un)tessellation starts doing weird things itself, like hexagonal wheels.
