03-12-2018, 10:27 PM
The 'cartoony' look in rF2 skins (or in any sim really) is caused by using oversaturated and overbright (and overdark) colous in the texture. You need to give the graphics lighting/shading engine room to breathe. In rF2's current engine in particular where skins are Albedo maps, they recommend white, for example, to be about 85% white, which is about 216,216,216, though in their example they actually use 200,200,200 for white. Same goes for colours and blacks -- stay well clear of values 0 or 255 in any channel (other than alpha of course). In their example they desaturate colours by 10% from what you would expect to see. I usually go 20% (and even with that, my purple-and-yellow McLaren appears still a bit brighter than I had hoped, but it's tolerable).
Alpha is still important, and even though it seems I can't make something completely matte with it in rF2, it still does affect the amount of reflection -- particularly at acute angles. So if you want something less shiny you still can make that portion black in the Alpha channel, and similarly something particularly reflective can be made white. Most rF2 skins have the Alpha portions nearly white to begin with (or no Alpha at all which is treated as white), so dropping that down considerably can help make things look more like operational racing cars and not polished museum pieces.
As for photographs, well, they can't always be trusted. Look at the Marlboro McLaren for example. In photographs it looks red, but in reality -- as in game -- it was bright orange. The same is true for the Marlboro Team Penske in IndyCars, and STP colours in IndyCar and NASCAR. They were all day-glo orange, though in photographs and on television they looked red. I think it was mainly for the sake of television video, as proper red would "bleed" while the orange would appear red without the bleeding. I have a photo I shot in 1988 of a Granatelli STP IndyCar being loaded onto a truck with a red-and-white striped tent in the background. The car and tent look to have the same shade of red, but in reality the car was orange.
Alpha is still important, and even though it seems I can't make something completely matte with it in rF2, it still does affect the amount of reflection -- particularly at acute angles. So if you want something less shiny you still can make that portion black in the Alpha channel, and similarly something particularly reflective can be made white. Most rF2 skins have the Alpha portions nearly white to begin with (or no Alpha at all which is treated as white), so dropping that down considerably can help make things look more like operational racing cars and not polished museum pieces.
As for photographs, well, they can't always be trusted. Look at the Marlboro McLaren for example. In photographs it looks red, but in reality -- as in game -- it was bright orange. The same is true for the Marlboro Team Penske in IndyCars, and STP colours in IndyCar and NASCAR. They were all day-glo orange, though in photographs and on television they looked red. I think it was mainly for the sake of television video, as proper red would "bleed" while the orange would appear red without the bleeding. I have a photo I shot in 1988 of a Granatelli STP IndyCar being loaded onto a truck with a red-and-white striped tent in the background. The car and tent look to have the same shade of red, but in reality the car was orange.