With the return of Aston Martin and British Racing Green, I couldn't resist taking on the AMR21. The AMR21 has a number of changes to the monocoque, the sidepod inlet and side protection is much more like the 2020 Mercedes, as well as the Mercedes rear suspension and rear crash structure, so it will take some time to shape that.
But before I do that, I couldn't help but throw a quick livery onto the RP20, but what green? Green is one of those colours that's difficult to get right, I don't know why, I remember it was the case with the Jaguar cars back in the day. The problem is really in the range of shading, and how it looks when rendered in game with the lighting engine.
The team have not gone for a matte livery, but quite a shiny one, so I've had to adapt the alpha channel for the right level of reflection. Plus in GP4, there's a range of things that affect reflections;
i) whether you run static environment maps or dynamic (real time reflections) which make the cars more shiny,
ii) which track you are running, as they all have slightly different light settings,
iii) whether the track you are running has a sky dome, which combined with dynamic environment maps is very powerful, and then finally,
iv) the level of grey in your alpha channel (the whiter the shinier).
So for my experiment, I've chosen to run with the shiniest track, with dynamic environment maps, and a fairly middle grey.
So here's the team logo with the Aston Martin Green underneath taken from their website.
And if I place that colour straight onto the car (with no shadings etc) this is what the car looks like.
As you can see, it's quite bright. If you compare that with a shot from the Silverstone filming day (considering it was a rainy grey and dark day) it just doesn't look right.
So I've experimented with a couple of darker greens, which makes it a bit more blue. GP4's reflections seem to work best when the base colour on your texture is darker, allowing for the ingame lights to do their job. I deliberately left the logos with the original green just so I could compare the difference.
And this is what it looks like in-game. As you can see, the green in the texture is not what you see in the game. I think it's a lot closer, though more tweaking is required to make it a little less blue. I also need to consider the dark swooshes that need to be visible, so I can't make the main green too dark either.
Let me know what you think.
