Also, the reason the not a lot of progress has been made in the last few months is because of the seemingly ever-changing shaders in each version of racer. It's hard to test the model when I have to redo the shaders every time. If we have news that they'll be staying a certain way for an extended period, I'll push towards finishing the car and possibly releasing it for that period.
It seems that in general, the ambient lighting in racer is a little too light and a little too blue. And the reflections in dark inner areas of the car are too strong for sure. What would be really useful is if someone could show me how to adjust the reflection map's alpha through a texture. That could easily solve the reflections in dark areas.
The solution isn't that Racers reflections are wrong. Also, there is no need to tweak the reflection maps alpha control.
The problem is your tracks lighting conditions and the environment it is reflecting.
Also, base fresnel values may not be ideal.
Try
fresnel
{
bias=0.07
scale=0.98
power=2
}
It looks really good by the way. Just don't go break it by tweaking it's shaders, when it's not the shaders that are broken, but the tracks that are being reflected in it, and lighting it up, are not ideal (or in your examples case, not equal between one shot and the next, hence looking different)
Personally I think most of the shots you have posted look fine. Just the odd one where it's clear the track isn't so well setup wrt lighting curves, that makes the car look odd.
Cheers
Dave
There I fixed it for you.
Yeah, GT5 is a lot sunnier than the recent versions of Racer. Somewhat on account of the way track lighting's set up, I think. I haven't looked at tuning all the curves yet.
Recent versions of Racer are also a lot more flat compared to GT5's HDR-ish colourmapping. You can tweak that fairly easily too, if you want the look of the 3rd/4th GT5 pics.
WRT the reflection map as alpha - if you're using dyn_standard_reflect_f.cg, that should just work (darker alpha = less reflective, afaik).
I don't like the reflections in Racer.. it bothers me seeing the same thing reflected no matter where I go or what way I face..
The reflections are wrong, because on the real car, areas that are facing the inside of the car reflect the other parts of the car, not the sky. Since we have to use Cubemaps in racer, and not ray-traced reflection, it's impossible to have those inner areas reflect. It's unfixable, really, but i'll try the fresnel stuff you suggested. I was messing with it at one point and it didn't seem to do a whole lot.
I do agree though that you might want to tweak the alpha map in your shader to turn down the power of the reflection in appropriate places. That does however mean that you will need a properly unwrapped body texture.
Body is already unwrapped with a diffuse for AO, but I don't know how to get that to work on the reflections