Excessivly Bright Textures

[boleyd]

Some ground textures are excessively bright. At time they have the appearance of a searchlight beaming on them. The link is to an example of one of the new 2009 textures. Is their any way to reduce the "sun" caused brightness of textures? Yes, you can change the time of day but then some other texture explodes in brilliance.

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/6685/040adz.jpg

 

[Bill69]

Hi boleyd,

If you have a photo editing program that will read and write .tga and/or .jpg files you can load the texture and use the brightness and contrast controls to alter it. If you are going to try that clone the item first then alter the cloned one and give it a new name so you will recognise it in surveyor.

Cheers,
Bill69

 

[StorkNest]

This is still being figured out by creators. As someone who is working on and off with ground textures, it is harder to do them with the addition of normal mapping added. There are new variables to consider all of which affect lighting. There's different ways of doing the normal that affects the finished look. Like with some times past when reskinning, bright textures like that one are the hardest. You should see my attempts at snow. One of them at sunrise looked more like sand on a beach until later in the day then it looked like snow unaffected by nature. White no longer cuts it. I now have a light gray and it is still a bit bright. Add on to that something I learned from whitepass' flatcar and anyone who does groundtextures will feel like they are starting all over again. You would expect groundtextures to be one of the easy areas to do but noooooo...:hehe:

 

[boleyd]

Is this something to do with
'specular lighting' which I know nothing about?

 

[vosloo]

I had the same problem when using OpenGl. Changing to DirectX sorted it.

 

[boleyd]

I have never been able to use DirectX. Have 9.0c version. It runs ok on Flight Simulator but on Trainz2009 there is extreme tearing. Chunks of texture streaking across the screen. I would love to use DirectX if only I had a solution. Your comment of the OpenGL overly brightening really makes this a big need!!:'( Have tried latest driver for nVidia 8600 256mb. CPU Dual Core 2.4ghz and 2gb memory.

 

[StorkNest]

I don't know if or how much specular lighting affects this as I am still figuring it out myself. Bill's answer currently is the only fix I can think of or asking the creator to make a new one.
Note this happens with light colored textures. The effects with dark colors is a bit different.
I would say at this point making groundtextures is a bit more like reskinning. You have to know the effects of in-game lighting on dark and light colored textures and adjust accordingly.

 

[boleyd]

Yes, if the texture is light colored then it really reflects to a great excess. I wonder if it is the use of the Sun to create ground shadows versus illuminated areas as it moves across the sky. The degree of light (brightness of the Sun) is a possible problem. Somewhere there is a non-linear set of values created to brighten an area based on intervening hills and the position of the Sun. The problem you run into is if you did find this there is a good chance that darker areas would really look bad. So the illumination curve needs flattened in a way that the minimum is not reduced but the max is. Just a set of guesses.

 

[Euphod]

I haven't noticed this issue in 2006, is this a bug endemic to 2009 WBE only?:hehe:

 

[jadebullet]

I ran into the same problem with a texture by JVC in 09. It was the perfect fallen leaf texture, but it was very shiny. The quick fix is to clone the texture in CMP, then edit the clone. Then all you have to do is to remove the normal mapping, and it should work fine.

 

[boleyd]

I ran into the same problem with a texture by JVC in 09. It was the perfect fallen leaf texture, but it was very shiny. The quick fix is to clone the texture in CMP, then edit the clone. Then all you have to do is to remove the normal mapping, and it should work fine.

When you say "remove the normal mapping" can you expand on that?

 

[StorkNest]

JVC and CM textures I just add alpha channels. I think I mentioned to one of the creators about the lack of that. If not sure how to add them, just take the same alpha channels from a TS09, TPR or WS texture.

EDIT: posted some images from experiments here: http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?p=466266&posted=1#post466266

 

[jadebullet]

In the file that contains the textures, there should be two image files for the texture. One will be the texture, and one will look purpleish when you open it. I just deleted the purple file.

 

[boleyd]

Very good, I opened it via the Explorer edit in Content Mgr-2. The file you mentioned looked black in Ifran but after playing around I found it was not, perhaps the deep purple you saw.. In this case I made it pure black and it really knocked down the reflectivity of the texture. This will really help!! Thanks.

 

[Euphod]

Okay, indulge me here, please. One of the great advances for 2009 is the ability to use normal mapping, but this causes an anomaly, so the work around is to delete the normal map?

Priceless.

 

[boleyd]

The anomaly is the intensity of the brightness. If the map was change to be less aggressive in the brightness of Sun illuminated areas all would be ok. Map idea good, implementation not so good.