Hello Racers,
For this month's progress report we will show you some images of the updated Westhill track.
As Westhill is one one of our more modern track areas, it didn't need to be reworked as heavily as some of the others.
Textures have been updated to take advantage of the new lighting system, new 3D kerbs have been added and there are various scenery updates around the track.
Read the whole report on the Graphics Progress Report: Westhill page.
Right from the beginning, LFS always had something really pleasing about its aesthetic.thornz wrote:kind of crazy (and maybe its the rendered images), but this looks as good as most modern day sims.
As many of you know from the forum and Twitter, Eric has been working on Kyoto and Scawen has been working on a new lighting system. In this month's progress report we would like to show you some of the work in progress and talk a bit about the lighting.
The Kyoto track is not yet finished. There is still more detail to be completed and holes to fill, but we thought you would like to see how it is coming along.
THE NEW LIGHTING SYSTEM
Because of the way the new shadow system works, there is no longer a need for a limited number of lighting setups per track. I tried an experiment to allow the user to set the time of day for the lighting. The sun direction is calculated from that and the geographical location of the track. It became very tempting to try to allow all times of day and night. If that was to happen we would need working headlights, so I had a go at that as you can see in these screenshots.
We now have a simple interface to control time. You can select live time, so the tracks are lit according to their geographical position at the current time. Another option allows the time in game to be offset relative to real time by a number of hours (and days). For example you can start your race in the daytime even if it is really evening. Finally there is still an option for fixed time, which is useful at least for development purposes.
Here is a video of a sunset at the Autocross area :
I've recently been experimenting with real time generated skies to provide a lot of variation for the different sun positions. It's an interesting subject but it brings up the issue of exposure that is encountered with cameras (and eyes) in real life. An iris control can adjust the exposure.
Here is a video showing the exposure being adjusted at Aston. At the start the sky is exposed correctly but the foreground is too dark. At the end the foreground looks brighter but the sky is overexposed.
Finally here is a video showing a 24 hour cycle at Blackwood, in the summer. The iris is automatically adjusted (by an experimental system) so the daytime doesn't look too bright and things don't look too dark in the night.
- LFS Developers
Hello Racers,
Our previous progress report was about the Kyoto updates and the new lighting system. Since then, Scawen has done more work on the lighting which may be interesting for some readers. Eric continued with Kyoto for some time. He has now moved onto South City, which isn't yet ready to show but we can show you some more pictures from Kyoto.
Originally the plan was to minimally update the existing track areas to make them work well with the new lighting and shadows. But some of the tracks were very old and Eric wanted to do extensive updates to bring them up to a more modern standard. It takes a long time to update the tracks, scenery and buildings, so Scawen has had the chance to do a lot of updates on the program side. We described in our April report the new lighting system that changes in real time from day to night.
Sometimes there is a lot of technical work do be done, which is not all that interesting to describe. Many readers may hope for a long list of cool things that we have done but the reality, most of the time, is a lot of research and experimentation for small steps forward. So for this month's report there are some technical descriptions, with random screenshots of Kyoto between paragraphs.
We mentioned in the previous report some experiments with a realtime generated sky, which is the best way to allow day to night transitions. The sky is generated by a system created by Lukas Hosek and Alexander Wilkie. The sky itself is an important part of lighting, especially in shadows where surfaces are not lit directly by the sun. The sky can produce quite different light colour and intensity depending on the direction a surface is facing. In older versions of LFS the sky light was considered to be a single colour but we now use a method called spherical harmonics, described by Ravi Ramamoorthi and Pat Hanrahan. This produces diffuse lighting that is different depending on the direction.
The Hosek and Wilkie sky system can also produce the sun lighting colour depending on the sun's position in the sky. When the more realistic lighting values were used, we found the solid surfaces in game appeared too dark. Researching albedo values in the real world and comparing them with LFS we were able to apply a suitable adjustment, bringing us one step closer to a physically based lighting system. We still need to work on the night system, allowing some lights to be on all the time (e.g. pit garages) while other lights come on only in the night (e.g. flood lights).
We mentioned the problem of exposure in the previous report. When lighting changes in a realistic way there can be very bright or dark scenes so the exposure sometimes needs to be adjusted, just as it does with a real camera. Also there is the issue of very bright and dark areas within a single image. Part of the solution can be to use a high dynamic range (HDR) backbuffer. It uses more memory but allows for very dark or bright pixels to be represented accurately. To present the HDR image to a monitor, which only has a limited range, some kind of tone mapping must be used. You can read a bit more on this page by John Hable. We can now select an HDR backbuffer and tone mapping options in our development version. They have not been used in these screenshots but they may become more important as the night system improves.
Planned development on lighting includes a system to produce clouds in the generated skies and better night support including the brightness of artificial lights and automatic exposure control. Other development topics include getting the new tyre physics up to a good standard for release, and hopefully a system to allow the physics and graphics to run on different threads, making use of the multiple CPU cores.
Finally here's another 24 hour timelapse video of Rockingham, this time a bit longer:
We hope that was interesting for some readers, though it was a bit technical!
Sarsippius wrote:Anyone notice this thread is now 10 years old
They're going to add it to their vintage car pack.norbs wrote:Sarsippius wrote:Anyone notice this thread is now 10 years old
Did the Sirocco ship whilst I slept?
Dear Racers,
Thank you for your patience as it's been a long time since the July progress report.
We aren't ready for a full progress report but thought we could say a few words and show you a few things. Eric has been continuing with South City. It's a long job and he has worked more on the roads than the buildings so far. At this point he would rather wait until more buildings are done before showing screen shots.
I've been working on the sky darkness, automatic exposure and white balance that became necessary with the use of the realtime generated skies. The lighting is now separated into lights that are always on and others that only come on at night. I increased the possible intensity of lighting to allow floodlights to work.
I worked on a system to allow us to use realistic camera exposure settings to allow comparisons with photographs from digital cameras. In a manual exposure mode I can now set the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed. It is interesting to see the massive variation in the brightness and therefore the exposure required for a night shot and a day shot. For example a shot taken in street lighting may require around 4000 times the exposure compared with a day shot. A more extreme example is the difference between moonlight and sunlight. The sun is 400 thousand times brighter than a full moon, yet our eyes can adapt to see quite well at those extremes.
I haven't had to make LFS adapt so much but it does have to deal with bright sunlight down to typical street lighting scenes. There is more to be done and the lighting is far from perfect. Anyway I hope you like the attached screenshots and the youtube videos.
Day to night transition at Blackwood:
Day to night transition at Kyoto Ring:
somebloke wrote:Does anyone even race LFS online anymore? Could you find a race?
Hello Racers,
In our July progress report we talked about the realtime sky that allows day to night transitions and showed screenshots of the Kyoto track area. Since then, Eric has been working on South City and Scawen has continued with the lighting. More roads have been opened up and you can drive into the multistorey car parks. Road surfaces, fences, barriers, objects and various buildings have been updated. There is still a way to go but we would like to show you some of the changes so far.
With realistic brightness values, the difference between night and day is very extreme. For example a shot taken in street lighting may need around 4000 times the exposure of a daylight shot. To compare LFS with real photos we have a manual exposure mode with the same settings as a digital camera. In normal use, exposure and white balance are automatically controlled.
A bloom effect has been added for the High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode. This spreads the light out from the brightest points in the image, to simulate the similar effect that happens in a camera or your eyes. In game this helps bright lights or the sun to look a lot brighter.ome recent updates: The sky is now generated on the graphics card, saving CPU time. The sky is updated more than twice per minute around sunset and sunrise. Sun brightness and colour is more accurate. Our shaders have been updated to allow better sky reflections on surfaces that are not perfectly smooth. Headlights now illuminate nearly all objects including other cars.
We hope you like the pictures and videos.
Please check out our earlier reports which show the changes on the other tracks.
