Cars – Brake Disc FX

New shader for brake discs, with anisotropic lighting, dynamic wear and new heating.

Never mind holes glowing too early, that is fixed now.

Patch would go and find all meshes using ksBrakeDisc shader, and switch it to ksBrakeDiscFX, adding a few parameters for the whole thing to work. If you’re using ksBrakeDisc for something else, you can disable the whole thing with settings:

Basic settings (recommended to change if needed)

[BRAKEDISC_FX]
ACTIVE = 1             ; set to 0 to disable the whole thing if car uses ksBrakeDisc shader for something else
CERAMIC = 0            ; use ceramic look
CARVED = 0             ; add a bit of carving, radial lines (fast for shader to compute)
CARVED_FREQUENCY = 20  ; increase to make more lines
GLOW_OFFSET = 0.8      ; increase to offset heated and worn center more to the center, decrease to offset it more to the outside area; with 0.5, it would be in the middle

; Patch guesses holes from alpha-channel of txDiffuse. Holes don’t glow or reflect stuff and look dark:
ALPHA_MASK = 0.1, 0.2  ; hole is everything with alpha below 0.1, everything with alpha above 0.2 is not a hole, in-between is a transition

; Patch can also estimate deepenings based on luminance and normal texture. Deepenings glow with a delay (but fully heated, glow more) and are a bit occluded:
LUMINOCITY_MASK = 0.01, 0.02  ; everything darker than 0.01 is a deepening
NORMAL_MASK = 0.5, 0.3        ; everything looking away more than 50% is a deepening

; Patch would try and guess size of brake disc and its inside area from its mesh, but if it fails:
DISC_RADIUS = 0.25           ; radius of a brake disc
DISC_INTERNAL_RADIUS = 0.15  ; radius of an inside part of a brake disc

; Another feature is that patch would mask reflections with rim, stopping brake disc from reflecting sky if looked at a angle. By default it would use rim radius and 60% of wheel width (for the distance between brake disc and exterior part) from “tyres.ini”, could be changed if needed:
RIM_RADIUS = 0.35  ; inside radius of a rim
RIM_HEIGHT = 0.2   ; distance between surface of brake disc and vertical surface of a wheel rim

To customize front or rear discs separately, use [BRAKEDISC_FX_FRONT] or [BRAKEDISC_FX_REAR]. Settings given as an example are default values in most cases.

Debug settings

[BRAKEDISC_FX]
DEBUG = 0  ; set to 1 to highlight shape:
    ; • cyan is for the actual disc;
    ; • yellow is for the deepenings;
    ; • dark blue is for the inside part;
    ; • pink is for the outside part;
    ; • red is for the borders;
    ; • black is for holes.
WEAR_FORCE = 0.5  ; force certain wear level
GLOW_FORCE = 0.5  ; force certain glow level

Other settings (not that recommended to change)

OVERRIDE_NORMAL_MAP = 1   ; set to 0 to use original normal map
OVERRIDE_DIFFUSE_MAP = 1  ; set to 0 to use original diffuse map
WEAR_MULT = 1.0           ; please do not change this one unless you want to set it to 0 or something; general multiplier might change in the future
GLOW_MULT = 1.0           ; adjust glowing intensity
ROUGHNESS = 0.2, 0.9      ; X and Y material roughness, giving that radial anisotropic specular

; Following material settings are in pairs: first number for new disc, second for worn. Default values depend on if it’s a ceramic or non-ceramic disc:
REFLECTION_F0 = 0.08, 0.44      ; base reflection intensity; ceramic: 0.16, 0.44
REFLECTION_SHARPNESS = 10, 200  ; aka ksSpecularEXP for reflection blurriness; ceramic: 10, 10
SPECULAR = 0.5, 1               ; specular intensity

Please avoid editing those, especially material settings, unless you need to recreate some unusual material. If it’s a regular metal or ceramic disc and default settings are not good, let’s discuss it instead. I would really want to see AC content becoming more standardised.

Guessing

By default, patch would assign ceramic brakes to racing cars and open wheelers no earlier than 1990, and some sporty cars made after 2004–2010. See also

Features to add later

• Adjust wear intensity.