AMS2 - User Livery Overrides

Did that, but it doesn't work

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<USER_OVERRIDES>
<LIVERY_OVERRIDE LIVERY="53" NAME="France #1" BASELIVERY="Chrome">
<PREVIEWIMAGE PATH="France\France.dds" />
<TEXTURE NAME="BODY" PATH="France\France.dds" />
</LIVERY_OVERRIDE>

</USER_OVERRIDES>

 

No stopping now. You can do it.

 

Any news about the livery override for the GT3 Lambo?
I still can´t get it to work...my N24h skins are waiting

 

These liveries are a work of art!

 

Thank you so much! We did our best and it's amazing seeing a lot of people enjoying them!

 

Thanks to Wolf at the TAMS2SP Discord, I have finally figured out, why my custom livery for the Lambo was not working:

I had to use BASELIVERY="Matte" in the .xml file. With "Default" it doesnt seem to work.
So if anybody else had this problem, maybe it can be fixed in 1.6.8

The 2024 Konrad Motorsport N24h Lambo will soon be finished!

 

are the second and third images, the #130 merc, the same livery? One looks white and the other quite silverish - is it just the lighting?

I did download the 24h livery pack - I'm seeing spec and fresnel dds files... how does one create that silverish finish?

 

With the BASELIVERY in the xml file as SilverMetallic. The white paint shouldn't be like that, but it might be because of lighting. Anyways, I will probably update it again once @mikesch250 has finished the Lambos

 

Early work in progress...sadly, some things are different between the N24 and the ingame model, so I have to adapt some stuff. The uv mapping on the black air vents on the front hood are quite challenging. Its almost impossible to place the decals of the N24 car there.

 

Ooh, well, it looks extremely cool when in the shadow like that. Very nice effect, imo

I've been playing around with it, trying to get a handle on how to spec and fresnel passes work. I've been exporting the .dds files with DXT5 per the instructions, but I'm confused 'cuz I see no difference in the way it looks. Are they supposed to have alpha channels to work properly?

I'm trying to recreate this look.

https://preview.redd.it/is-the-clk-lm-worth-it-v0-tnu9rguhmcpc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=f7276a100254722d6ce07518d32e302383a193cc

The way GranTurismo handles that mercedes silver is so evocative. The default liveries on the Reiza cars also have a certain quality to them that a simple default gray color doesn't quite capture....

 

Silver metallic (along with Matte and Red/Blue/Green Metallic) doesn’t use Spec or Fresnel files, if you want to apply the effect you need to use the alpha channel of the main file (black is full matte/metallic, white is regular specular.)

 

Thank you! okay so if you select Silver Metallic, you use the alpha channel on the "body" file. When are the spec or fresnel files used?

Does default baselivery use either the alpha channels or the spec or fresnels?

 

Right, okay, so I think what I'm looking to do is really, really bright highlights, with a sharp falloff. But not particularly reflective. I presume you'd use the spec. Do you apply that to a default baseline livery?

 

Matte + Metallic only use Alpha channels for their effects, No need to use Fresnel or Spec (haven’t noticed any change with them, anyway.) Chrome also uses alpha channel to determine where the reflective effects will be but you can use “Fresnel” to fine tune it a bit.

despite making dozens of skins for AMS2 at this point I’m not the expert at all of this and am currently doing some experiments so I’ll post on this thread with my findings. The explanation in the XMLs can be kind of unclear.

 

Same car, it was probably just the lighting glitching out.

 

Anyone having problems with Overtake.gg? Can't download anything. Just get all ads.

 

Ok, I've done a series of test skins with the Porsche 991 3.8 GT3 Cup Car. Here's what I've found.

For this test I've used a series of plain color DDS images. Each car's primary color will be red, and each one will use BODY, SPEC, and FRESNEL pointing to different colors for each. I had one red file with Alpha completely white and one with alpha completely black. I decided to use Green as a utility since it'll be pretty obvious to see against a Red base.



TEST 1
Default
BODY: Red w/ White Alpha / SPEC: White / FRESNEL: White
Pretty normal looking car. Might even look familiar if you've glitched out the XML while loading skins. Not much to say about this one.


TEST 2
Default
BODY: Red w/ White Alpha / SPEC: Green / FRESNEL: White
Now this one turned out pretty interesting, and this is the first time I've found out that you can manipulate not only the value of the reflections, but the color too. (I've previously used SPEC to make certain parts of the car less shiny.) Obviously for this effect to work best you want a highlight that's a somewhat lighter color. The darker the color, the better you'll be able to create a bit of a matte effect that looks like the surface is absorbing more light. (Too dark and the surface will look a bit weird and uncanny, just to warn you.)




TEST 3
Default
BODY: Red w/ White Alpha / SPEC: White / FRESNEL: Black
This result was the most alarming to me as I thought you needed to set the skin mode to "Chrome" to achieve a chrome effect, but, well, see for yourself.



It seems the Fresnel has eaten up the color on Body and there's no way to tell that this car was actually red. For some clarity, I tried this same combination using CHROME mode and produced a very similar result.



I will say this version seems a little bit brighter, but that's purely subjective since the overhead light in the AMS2 Showroom is slowly changing as you keep the program open. (Not to mention the FOV and camera angle are different.)

On to the next one.


TEST 4
Default
BODY: Red w/ White Alpha / SPEC: Green / FRESNEL: Black
The car is black again but with the green SPEC the car just looks like it's actually green.



Again, I'll try this same combination with "Chrome" mode. Very similar (again, too hard to say The Same.)




TEST 5:
Default
BODY: Red w/ White Alpha / SPEC: Green / FRESNEL: Grey
With as much as the black Fresnel seemed to eat up the primary paint color, I decided to plug a Grey in there and it's a lot more moderate. Not much to say about this one.



Once again with Chrome to see what difference there is if any. (Nothing drastic in my opinion.)




TEST 6:
Default
BODY: Red w/ White Alpha / SPEC: White / FRESNEL: Green
With the results we've had so far I wanted to go a step further and see if including color in the Fresnel had any effect, and well.... not at all. At least not on the Hue front.



However the car is a bit more reflective than in Test 1. My guess is that the game pulls the color's value instead of its hue, and since green is closer in value to black than the pure white is, we get the result we see above.

OK, that's enough of the DEFAULT skin type for now. I wanted to experiment a bit with MATTE and SILVERMETALLIC.

TEST 7:
Matte
BODY: Red w/ Black Alpha / SPEC: White / FRESNEL: White
Given what I already knew, zeroing out the Alpha in a MATTE skin will give you a dull but still quite satin-y finish. We're all pretty familiar with this one and I do enjoy mixing the matte look with the regular speculars.


TEST 8
Matte
BODY: Red w/ Black Alpha / SPEC: Green / Fresnel: White
With my previous results experimenting with SPEC I was wondering if you could do the specular trickery thing with Matte skins, and... nothing doing, apparently. The reflections and (dull) speculars are all plain white.


(I promise these aren't the same pictures, overlay them in Photoshop if you have to!)

On to Fresnel...

TEST 8
Matte
BODY: Red w/ Black Alpha / SPEC: White / Fresnel: Black
Another suspiciously similar image. Again, I promise I'm not just posting screenshots of the same car 3 times over.



At this point I'm content to settle for what I thought I'd already known, which is that MATTE is a one-trick pony and all the effects are contained in the Alpha channel of the BODY file. Let's check on what SILVERMETALLIC (the best kept secret that the XML override files don't tell you about) is like.

TEST 8
SilverMetallic
BODY: Red w/ Black Alpha / SPEC: White / Fresnel: White
I'm already familiar with this effect so this result isn't very surprising. It looks a little annoying against the Red, but if it's what you're going for, I can't stand in your way.



TEST 9
SilverMetallic
BODY: Red w/ Black Alpha / SPEC: Green / Fresnel: White
For this test, I was hoping that by making SPEC green, we'd get a result similar to what we'd get if we went for GREENMETALLIC, but this is the confirmation: Metallic works much like Matte where SPEC is useless.



(Sorry to post seemingly identical car pictures over and over. I'm just trying to be scientific. On that note, here's me being thorough.)

TEST 10
SilverMetallic
BODY: Red w/ Black Alpha / SPEC: White / Fresnel: Black
With the drastic results we got back in test 3, I decided to give one last chance for METALLIC to work in a unique way, and once again you get another identical Porsche and I feel like I wasted your time.


At this point you should get that with Matte and *Metallic, all you need to worry about is the alpha channel on the BODY file. And just to be fully informative, here's what the 3 other versions of Metallic look like, in case you're curious (GreenMetallic, BlueMetallic, and RedMetallic, respectively - these tend to look best when used as contrast to produce a holographic effect.)






CONCLUSIONS

Here's the TL;DR for this whole post, or rather a way to describe how livery overrides work in a way that I feel the .XMLs packaged with AMS2 could explain more effectively:

DEFAULT and CHROME can produce regular specular reflections as well as highly reflective options. You change the colors reflected by modifying a SPEC file (even producing a pseudo-matte look), and can increase the total reflectivity by modifying FRESNEL (in monochrome - white is regular, black is full Chrome)

MATTE can produce a satin-like finish that is less reflective than DEFAULT and CHROME, but not completely dull. You can increase matte effects by modifying the alpha channel in a BODY file (Black is most matte, white is default specular). You cannot change the colors of speculars using SPEC or FRESNEL.

SILVERMETALLIC, REDMETALLIC, BLUEMETALLIC and GREENMETALLIC produce a shinier finish than Matte that is still less fully specular than DEFAULT. Like MATTE you can increase the metallic effect by modifying the alpha channel in a BODY file (black is most metallic, white is default specular). Again SPEC or FRESNEL do not provide any options but there are 3 different reflective colors to choose from depending on the result you're going for.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: This may not be the case for every car in the game at the moment and some cars do not have every option available. This is a rudimentary test with a single car mostly for my own edification but I hope it helps some people out. I know you can't pin a post in a thread but at the very least I want to have something I can personally come back to spelling this out in plain language when I inevitably forget about it again.

 

thank you so much for all these tests. I'm playing around with the GT1 mercedes. I haven't had any success with any of the metallics doing anything. Does that mean that car doesn't have this option enabled? Does anyone know for sure?

 

IIRC it says in the xml file

 

unfortuntaly many xmls are just copy&pastes. Not everything is supported.
And sometimes there is a bug deeper inside, where a normal user has no access