Rippled Paint Mirage Effect?

[EverTrainz]

I was browsing videos on YouTube when I encountered one by someone under the name of 'Squirrel' (who apparently made a discouraging video about TANE):

If I am correct, the bitumen tankers have a real-time reflection rendering rather than a cubemap. If it indeed is a real-time render, how would one achieve this in Trainz? If it is actually only a cubemap, I guess that this exact effect could be achieved using tbumpenv. Are there any examples of wagons or other assets, that have such a gloss/reflection as the tankers, on the DLS?

 

[S301]

Hi Ron
At the moment, Trainz doesn't have real time reflections for anything apart from water in T:ANE. Beyond that, there's only cubemap support. In TS12, this is only a sky reflection (including sky colour, and some environment effects such as lightning ). In T:ANE this is currently a 'static'/'generic' cubemap.

I'm not sure if the reflections on those tankers are real time, or a generic cubemap. It doesn't appear to be moving as the train moves through the scene, but can't really see it clearly in the video so may be the lack of resolution

Regards
Zec

 

[rumour3]

Thought I'd post these three shots of TANE lighting at different times of day, hopefully demonstrating the rippled paint effect- look particularly at the side of the front loco:

TANE lighting- morning by rumour3, on Flickr


TANE lighting- midday by rumour3, on Flickr


TANE lighting- afternoon by rumour3, on Flickr

Haven't figured out how to get TANE to work with NVIDIA's ShadowPlay, otherwise I'd have posted a video- the ripples change nicely with the viewing angle.

R3

 

[EverTrainz]

Thought I'd post these three shots of TANE lighting at different times of day, hopefully demonstrating the rippled paint effect- look particularly at the side of the front loco:

~snip~

Haven't figured out how to get TANE to work with NVIDIA's ShadowPlay, otherwise I'd have posted a video- the ripples change nicely with the viewing angle.

R3

That looks nice Not asking about your 31, but in general, is the method used on your model what makes the reflections on the tankers realistic? The different specular on your Brush looks fantastic, makes them look weathered.

 

[NikkiA]

Haven't figured out how to get TANE to work with NVIDIA's ShadowPlay, otherwise I'd have posted a video- the ripples change nicely with the viewing angle.

R3

Until nVidia recognise TANE as a valid game in their game list for GeForce Experience, you can only capture via the desktop capture option, unfortunately, since shadowplay is a fickle monster, I can't check if that works

edit:

After performing the satanic ritual to enable shadowplay, it does indeed work via the desktop capture, as evidenced here:

 

[rumour3]

@EverTrainz
Thanks. All of the texture effects on the 31 are achieved using m.tbumpenv (except the windows, which are m.reflect). M.tbumpenv is as good as TANE gets for reflections at the moment, but I think it can achieve results as good as seen in the 'other' sim.

@NikkiA
Thanks for the tip about capture via the desktop- if I get any results I'll post them here.

R3

 

[NikkiA]

That looks nice Not asking about your 31, but in general, is the method used on your model what makes the reflections on the tankers realistic? The different specular on your Brush looks fantastic, makes them look weathered.

The bitumen tankers are a simple generic cubemap, and up close it's real easy to tell - no reflections of trees, a general flat horizon and a lack of any reflection of things like gantries or other rail traffic.

To be honest it'd be fairly trivial to do a much more convincing cubemap - N3V could just have TANE render the current scene around the focal rail vehicle as a cubeenv texture - it wouldn't need to be very high res, wouldn't be perfect, but would still look 1000x better than anything TS14 does for reflective materials, simply because all the cues like an uneven horizon and movement would be there.

 

[EverTrainz]

If it was up to me, I'd have the reflective material render the actual scene reflection, but only suggested cube maps because N3V woudn't be focusing on possible features, but rather focus on improving current ones.

 

[NikkiA]

If it was up to me, I'd have the reflective material render the actual scene reflection, but only suggested cube maps because N3V woudn't be focusing on possible features, but rather focus on improving current ones.

Rendering the scene once for every railcar would be impossibly inefficient, if you're getting 40 fps *now* it might mean that a 40 car train would reduce that to < 1fps (since each render pass is almost equivalent to rendering a frame for display).

Rendering the area surrounding (roughly) where the camera is pointed, and using that on all railcars would be a good compromise, have very little performance impact (wouldn't need to be done per frame either), and look 'right' for probably 99.99% of the time since any cars far enough away for this to look hideously wrong on, would be too small to see well usually.

 

[EverTrainz]

If I understand correctly, this also includes moving trains on adjacent lines will also be rendered? Also, if the camera shifts, would this cause a spike when re-rendering for many reflective surfaces?

 

[EverTrainz]

Found this picture while browsing:

This is is most likely MSTS, and with that being said, the advanced 'polish' effect looks out-of-place, in direct proportion to the poor candy lighting and block textures. But, some way, any way, if we can get this effect into Trainz, combined with the beautiful shadows, stellar lighting, and AO, this would look really convincing.

EDIT: Found another picture, albeit TS2015. More subtle than the former picture, but still looks excellent. For some reason the photo would not embed, so I've attached a link to the page: http://www.engine-driver.com/static/article/2918b432-1cef-4769-bde9-8256d9cb685e.jpg?width=640 .

 

[EverTrainz]

Sorry for the 'bump', but if you look at the undersides of the Teddy, you can see the exact effect I'm concerning. The light and environment reflects off of the body in a certain pattern, giving the illusion of bumpy metal.

I've chosen this model because this is in both Trainz and TS, by IHH. However, there are no videos of the Trainz version, so I can't really tell whether the Trainz model has the same realistic effect, or if it's perfect, flat metal. I've never seen any of the effects, in the past 3 photos/videos I've posted, for Trainz, but I'm 90% sure that it's most certainly possible. Does this have to do with normal maps? Gloss? Env. settings?