Will the paint and lighting improve?

[Deigima]

from the updates uploaded to youtube for the car designer, the paint colours look very basic, monotone and pretty yuck. will the paint see improvements to have some texture and depth? the shine looks alright, but if the colours were nicer and metalic was available along with better texture and depth to the paint, it would look ten times better.

many games get away with low-poly models by having high detail textures for the car. also a good lighting engine is essential to making the game look good. despite the fact this game is based around actual gameplay, people often judge a game by how it looks, and sounds. those are the first two things they notice.

[Daffyflyer]

Well, of course we'll try to improve them as much as we possibly can, and I'd say metallic paint is indeed on the cards.

Car Paint is hellishly complex to simulate effectively, even just to get it to the stage it is now, which I'd say is "kinda passable " took weeks of work and lots of referring to various papers by nVidia and a few universities that have studied car paint properties and how to simulate them.

So basically, yes, we will improve it wherever possible, but it's not as simple as it sounds, at this point it'll involve a lot more research and testing a lot of different methods of simulating the ridiculously complex layers of clearcoat, colour, flake etc that make up car paint. That's probably going to have to wait until we actually get a lot more of the game itself done, as getting the actual game playable is rather more of a priority

[Deigima]

is pearlescent paint possible? i use pearlescent paint to add depth to paint, ei- base colour is darker than you want the paint to be, and the pearlescent shine coat thing, is a lighter shade. so it shows up really nicely with curves and whatnot and gives it highlights lowlights.

[Daffyflyer]

Yeah, that's one of the things we plan to look at eventually when we do Metallic paint etc. But right now the priority is being able to build cars at all!

[MaVac]

And how about individual textures or stuff like "racing stripes" etc., what do you think? Will it be possible somewhere in the future? Lets say I want to use two color painting as one signiture of my future cars...I dont mean "chameleon color" but something like hood and roof and trunk in one color and the rest in other color, or painted mirrors and bumpers in one color different from the rest of the car.

PS: And how about "VW Polo Harlequin"? :-D:-D:-D

[Daffyflyer]

Racing stripes are super hard as the "UV unwrap" is specially setup to allow the fixtures to stamp their transparent holes nicely. Same with big decals etc. Hard to explain why this is a problem without explaining everything about how UV mapping works, but it's nasty.

Two tone would be possible as long as the car is set-up with that in mind when i model it.