Quote from samyip :

The wheel you are using is not refined enough to render like a chrome wheel convincingly. edges are too sharp, need to be smoother for the reflection to work well (blend in better). Model your own wheel will be better. You can search in the internet for tutorial of how to create one. It is not that difficult.

Yeah, I've been looking at that, there's a really good video tute that I found someplace. Creating a wheel object from the picture of a wheel or some such thing.

Quote from samyip :

I think you already know how to apply displacement effect.

Right, I just need to figure out how to improve my map, or find the settings to reduce the aspects I don't like.

Quote :

Try not to use Sun light, it usually too bright, try put a small amount of sky light for overall lighting, then put a mental ray area spot for your main light. Remember to use Final Gathering for better rendering result.

That's good info, I'll work with it. The number of lighting options in 3ds is a little bewildering.

Quote :

Also put a fall off to your car's reflection, so the reflection strength will fade in distance, which is more natural.

Yeah, I have a falloff reflection map on there, but thanks for explaining why it's there (I just blindly copied it over from the Morrow scene when I converted to mentral ray).

Last edited by noise_is_life, Tue 21 Nov 2006, 13:43.

Quote from XCNuse :

as for chrome wheels; you find me a race car with chrome wheels and i'll say im wrong

It didn't really take much effort you know...

http://www.mrt-wheels.com/chromewheels.html

Anyway, I'm not defending the chrome wheels, it was just an easy cop out on my part, I've been mostly focused on the scene.

Last edited by noise_is_life, Tue 21 Nov 2006, 13:36.

Quote from XCNuse :

if you aren't using vray or mental ray, chances are thats not actually a displacement map; yes it says displacement.. but it just screws it over its not actually a true displacement map; you'd be better off modeling it if you dont have mental ray displacement or vray displacement mods

Not exactly following you here, I am using mental ray. Are you saying mental ray does do actual displacement maps or that it doesn't.

Quote :

also, get rid of the chrome wheels its really messing it up imo (no race cars have chrome wheels anyway)

Really they don't?? Gosh I've never heard that. Anyway, it's on my list of things to sort out, didn't figure it was really a dealbreaker since I've got a slammed track car on slicks sitting on cobbles 11 K from the nearest track.

Quote :

for me the scene is just way to plain looking; no reflections outside of the wall and the floor.. its just not very lively..

I'll give you that, the environment map I did have got blown out when I switched to a mentralray Sun lightsource.

Good input though, gives me some goals.

Here is the latest version of my scene (with a different skin).

I figured out displacement mapping for the cobbles, changed the lighting and tweaked a couple other things.

I'm pretty happy with the displacement map on left side of the image, but on the right side I'm getting some unwanted bumpiness. I just grayscaled and gaussian blurred the diffuse map to get the displacement map.

Any tips on improving the displacement mapping?

Quote from XCNuse :

its the angle: that is if your using a bumpmap

keep in mind, bumpmaps dont do anything but change the lighting a little bit; unlick displacement texturing which actually changes the shape of a poly

Cool, I'll have to work on that some more.

Quote :

scene is a bit dark though imo, and maybe to orangish.. i dontk now, somethings weird looking about it

It's supposed to be approaching sunset, low light angle, slight yellow tint to the light and a sunsetish environment map. It's not entirely successful I know.

Quote from MorroW :

I like the lightning, but not textures - wall texture is to big and road
texture don't have any depth at all...just a plane without bump etc.

Thanks for the input.

Both are 3ds supplied textures, I was wondering if the flat appearance of the road is a limitiation of the texture or a result of the angle that I am using it at.

Quote from Davo :

Impresssive result for not using brazil! Its the only thing holding me back from using max9

One thing i noticed is the reflection ont he frontbumper looks liek matt paint and not high gloss like the relections.

Thanks.

Yeah, I need to work on the textures more , I just copied the specular parameters from the brazil texture.

One nice thing is that mental ray renders are quite a bit faster than brazil.

Here is my first attempt at a render (besides the standard car on a plane renders of course).

I'm just starting to learn 3ds, it's a fun tool.

I converted one of the brazil scenes over to mental ray so that I could use 3ds9 (actually that was the hardest part).

Geeky? Who cares, are you getting laid? Then it's all good.

If you give up sex to race, then we'll talk.

Heh, I figured it out.

I had a left over rule from when I was playing with the dedi server, I removed it and now I have no problem connecting to servers.

That leaves me with another question though, why do the rules put in place to run a server interfere with client operation?

Thanks for the input everyone.

I get to your server without any trouble, one server that I can't get to for instance is the Core Racing server called www.Core-Racing.com.

I'll try opening up those ports, although when I opened up ports for the server in the past it also interfered with my ability to query servers (i.e. getting the list from the master server).

Strange stuff.

I'm still looking for a solution. Fortunately I spend most of my time at either my team server or ConeDodgers, but occasionally I see a friend on another server and would like to join him, but it hardly ever works.

I use a linux box(w/ iptables) as my router and nat provider, so I have to explicitly specify forwarded ports like I did to run a dedi server. But lfs client shouldn't require any of that as far as I know.

I suppose I could forward everything to my lfs system, but considering it is windows I'm not all that interested in doing that.

yeah, like I said, I can connect to many servers, but there seem like an abnormal number (with good pings) that I can't connect to.

I have been having some strange connection problems.

I am unable to connect to certain servers, they show a low ping on the master list, but when I attempt to connect I don't receiver guest info.

Other servers I have no problem with, my team servers for instance. It seems more prevalent in S2, but does occur in demo as well.

I know the servers are available (not having a problem) , because my teammates are able to connect.

If I turn on network debug I get the following messages:

UDP : Send
UDP : Send Again
UDP : Send Again
...

And then I get the "Did not receive guest info (Lost connection to host)"

I've poked around a bit for other people with network problems, but haven't found anything applicable.

One other thing, I did have some firewall rules setup so I could run a dedi server, this seemed to interfere with master list access, but I have since removed those rules.

Any help would be appreciated.

A guy in my autocross club told me about it.

It's much cheaper than autocross.

I won't argue whether he should have done this, or if he should have presented it differently to the developers, but I would argue that he should stop using the hack.

I've seen it being used as recently as yesterday under a variety of screen names.

Quote from frokki :

I agree with you, XFG is the worst, theres no way a hot hatch would rev 10 000 rpm illepall
The shift light also lights up @8000 rpm, i think thats also too late..

edit: english......

The rev limiter on my Matrix XRS is 8200rpm and because of lift the power is there right to redline. I know people have pushed the limiter up to 9000rpm.