Tracks txSpecular - how it works?

[A1stov]

Hello guys, i'm 3d artist with some experience in creating textures.
And i decided to make a track mod.

I'm making a whole a street with creating textures in Substance Painter, and i met very big trouble for me.

Gloss/Specular variations. I thought this game have that feature, but no. This was a huge sticking point while texturing the architecture, because I was hoping to be able to create variations of Gloss/Specular maps, because all those cool graphics videos on youtube hinted to me that such a feature should be in-game.

But after doing some reserch, I found the updated shaders from Ilya x4fab and Stereo and it seemed to me that this is the solution, finally Specular channel can be edited by texture, instead of manually twisting a slider that changes the whole Specular.

But, I found out that the shader ‘stPerPixelMultiMap_Specular’ in general is not different from the main Multimap. There is no difference with and without loaded Specular map.

So here I am, with a question - why is it so?

KSEditor is kind of new, it was installed with Corsa. And it generally supports all the other functionality of the new shader, except for what I expected.

Then an additional question, has a way of mixing Glosiness-maps within the engine been invented before?
My mod consists of an entire street made up of houses and it would be very cool to see the difference in the roughness on the plaster material.

Thanks for your attention.

 

[Stereo]

txSpecular is for changing the colour of specular, because txMaps already handles gloss/specular controls in the base game. I don't know where you looked but yeah the reason it seems like it exists is because it does.

Probably you can't use substance-painter stuff directly because of the way AC splits up the functionality, you'll need to implement some specific versions of the textures. Red controls specular strength, green controls specular and reflection sharpness, and blue controls reflection strength. So if you want to go from a big soft specular to a small sharp one, you need both brighter red and brighter green. Unfortunately the actual sensitivity is really heavily skewed towards the bottom end of green since it's the usual exponential model of specular (it just multiplies the channel by specularEXP... so to go from 200 (sharp) to 10 (decently soft) you need 5% green.)

 

[A1stov]

txSpecular is for changing the colour of specular, because txMaps already handles gloss/specular controls in the base game. I don't know where you looked but yeah the reason it seems like it exists is because it does.

Probably you can't use substance-painter stuff directly because of the way AC splits up the functionality, you'll need to implement some specific versions of the textures. Red controls specular strength, green controls specular and reflection sharpness, and blue controls reflection strength. So if you want to go from a big soft specular to a small sharp one, you need both brighter red and brighter green. Unfortunately the actual sensitivity is really heavily skewed towards the bottom end of green since it's the usual exponential model of specular (it just multiplies the channel by specularEXP... so to go from 200 (sharp) to 10 (decently soft) you need 5% green.)

Well,
I was expecting a sceptical response regarding my efforts.

The problem with Corsa shaders is the lack of any specifically detailed wiki, even taking your updated shaders, Ilya on git wrote literally a few sentences that seem clear to you and partly to me, but in the end I'm still here with a question about Specular. It would be really cool to get an article on shaders, with specific examples of how a particular shader works and some kind of library of ready-made values.

Like for example sites with IOR libraries.
This would make life VERY much easier for modders like me. Who have dealt with simple shaders, but don't understand how to work with more complex shaders, much less custom ones.
It would be very cool if you and Ilya could write some brief guideline for working with environment shaders on the example of asphalt, bricks, windows and metal objects with different degrees of metalness.

Regarding the txMaps shader, in the native cars in Assetto Corsa I've only seen the Ambiet Occlusion texture inserted, so I had no idea it was a Gloss input.

 

[A1stov]

txSpecular is for changing the colour of specular, because txMaps already handles gloss/specular controls in the base game. I don't know where you looked but yeah the reason it seems like it exists is because it does.

Probably you can't use substance-painter stuff directly because of the way AC splits up the functionality, you'll need to implement some specific versions of the textures. Red controls specular strength, green controls specular and reflection sharpness, and blue controls reflection strength. So if you want to go from a big soft specular to a small sharp one, you need both brighter red and brighter green. Unfortunately the actual sensitivity is really heavily skewed towards the bottom end of green since it's the usual exponential model of specular (it just multiplies the channel by specularEXP... so to go from 200 (sharp) to 10 (decently soft) you need 5% green.)

I'm sorry to interrupt again, could you tell me where I could look at a full set of texture maps with the subtleties you describe on RGB channels?

 

[Stereo]

No, I've never seen such a thing.