Specular Maps in F1-2005

I’m trying to make a custom skin for one of your teams in your Mod. I get a weird problem. The original skin seems to “shine through” the custom paintjob. I already tried to alter the alpha channel or completely get rid of it, but the problem stays the same. When light falls on the cars nose and wings, the old skin seems to shine through the new texture.

Ok, I’ll explain this. It’s about the Specular-map. Basically the materials are combine of 3 textures: The Diffusemap (RGB), the Reflectionmap, which is the alpha and the Specular-map, which is either Greyshade or RGB. The Spec-Map is a seperate file usually in the team.mas.

For more details about the different Texture maps read here.

Now, you want to replace this map. I argued several times about it, but unfortunately rFactor skinning feature, doesn’t support skinning the Spec-map which doesn’t make any sense, but is a technical limitation. Therefore, we have to overwrite the original Spec from the mod, replacing it with a more generic Spec-map.
You do this by taking the templates, creating the alpha, as described someplace else. I suggest to scale the texture down, in our 2006 mod we only use a texturesize of 256×256.
This Alpha is saved as an own texture by the name-scheme <teamname>S.dds
The DDS-file should be of Type DXT1, since we don’t need any alpha. This file is placed in the team’s folder alongside the team.mas. This will replace the car’s specular map, so the appearance of our original car may change slightly, but not signficant if done correctly.
I suggest to use a simple grey spec-map, with the shadings and details from the template. This way it fits any car skin.

Unfortunately, since this handling with Spec-Maps is highly impractical, it’s hard to use the Spec-Map for Funstuff, that is actually possible. (different colored cars depending on the lightangle for example)

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