Brakes... Can be quite essential for high speed driving I find, and I've spent the last couple of days circling round my car and thinking it needs some work. As I've stressed in several posts before, I'm no artist so I find the progress to be slow (but rewarding when something ends up looking decent -- although I'm only judging it against my own low standards)
So I started working on the car again, the dashboard has had a complete overhaul, gone is the 4 poly box that had a wheel mounted on it, and in it's place is a much higher detail dashboard, complete with dials and readouts. I've also implemented a high poly steering wheel, with a digital tachometer on it so the player can see their speed (although the HUD version will probably remain for now)
Onto the brakes. the wheels have always bugged me about the car, generally the tires are pretty poor (my limited experience with normal mapping is showing through) and in general the whole object looks a bit 'weak' - so I've been thinking about some visual flare in this area...
So I added brake discs.
And although I liked them, I thought "wouldn't it be cool if I could figure out how to make them glow hot when the player used the brakes?" - so I started thinking about a texture-mixing shader, and eventually came out with this:
A neat little glow effect that gets more 'glowy' when you warm the brakes more and more... It's not too expensive but it is adding a few more draw calls to the game.. (the frame rate seems to be stuttering at the moment, and without a profiler, it's proving difficult to guess what it might be)
Here's a final shot of it in game, I'm quite pleased with the outcome, what do you guys think?
Note: V0.4.2 is currently online, it has the dashboard implemented in it, you can play it here - and I plan to release the new wheel update very soon. (I've altered the mapping on the tires too so that it doesn't look so rubbish)
Once i've modelled the calipers so that they sit on the brake object (but don't rotate like the tires!) then I'll release V0.4.3
And then I plan on moving onto trackside objects and details... I found this picture the other day and dreamed of having artistic talent.. Maybe one day...
Comments and Suggestions always welcome, thanks for the support everyone!
Chris
Good news as always!