Logitech 25 wheel texture. I'm not an artist, so take it for what it is.
I couldn't really duplicate the shape the hub and stuff because the texture gets wrapped onto an existing 3D model. It's not perfect, but it's as close as I'm coming tonight. Enjoy.
This file (131KB) contains Cromowheel2.dds and Cromowheel_grip.dds. Unrar them to your lfs\data\dds directory and you're good to go.
That bottom lighting in the source photo is just because that is studio photography with multiple lights on the subject (and a white flooring which is probably creating that under-highlight). If you just look at the G25 in the daytime, it will just have a highlight on the top of the button and that is it. Just like anything under the sun
What I meant about the contrast and saturation is that the 2nd version you made looks crisper, but it it too dark (the black areas). They almost look PURE black, and that makes it stand out far too much against everything else imo.
Which is why it looks like that center hub piece looks like the contrast is raised because the black areas are much darker and the silver 'cap' is affected by it with a strange red sheem. Looking at my G25 under different lighting, the 'cap' isn't even that glossy or silvery against the metal spokes. The cap is actually darker and more of a gunmetal color. And hardly glossy looking at all. The same goes for the black bits, they aren't so dark, and that is why I think you should work on the saturation and levels of the center hub to make them look accurate. And maybe a small silver ring around the black logitech circle, because there is a bit of shiny metal in between the black part and the cap.
Boris' suggestion of taking off the drop shadow is ok, but now the center cap looks like it is floating without it. The drop shadow you had on previously was ok, though it was too big and too dark. Make the drop shadow/glow a lot thinner and not so dark. At least give the center piece a sense that it is 'on top', but not too exaggerated. The reference picture will not always be a good thing to look at because of the lighting from all different angles. With one light source, it looks a lot different.
Yeah, I do bluescreen work at home. I've got lights everywhere.
Yeah, the source photo doesn't show that ring at all.
It's kinda shitty either way, unfortunately. The problem is that the hub is not really circular, it's clearly a 12 sided polygon. If the drop shadow is too small, it only pokes between the corners. There's no way to make it tightly hug the sides of the hub (like the wheel appears in real life). Just having it there at all makes the blockiness of the hug more obvious. I think Boris' wheel works better without a shadow because the MOMO hub 'pops' a lot more (due to shape and lighting) and because the MOMO hub and spokes are both relatively dark.
I'll play around with the drop shadow settings and see how subtle I can get it.
Well, I do have the wheel sitting on my desk. I can definitely see the gun metal grey and the silver ring (they aren't in the photo I used for the texture, at all), and that the color/contrast is off in my texture. Maybe I'll bust out my camera later at take my own source photo and mess around some more (if I can bring myself to burn any more time on this)
BTW: Is there a quicker way than changing tracks to get LFS to reload the wheel texture?
How about put some dark shading on the bottom of the cap instead of on the metal bit of the wheel? That would solve the issue of not making it seem to float, but also give the cap better depth. Most of the dark shading is ON the cap, and not on the outside it seems.
Like in my example pic here (right one):
Also note that the G25's cap there is kind of flat. What you have looks more like a ball. Fine, since on the actual model it does protrude a whole lot more, but using smaller shadows on the edge make the inner area appear to have less of a huge round profile... and flat in the middle. Good work so far :up:
All of the above is much easier said than done. The hub and spokes are separate geometry, but they use the same texture file. It's hard to get anything that goes just to the edge of that hub.
I made a grid, with colored lines at 5/10/50/100 pixel boundaries:
I then put it on the wheel. LFS uses the same texture file for both the central hub and the spokes, but it aplies different scaling and lighting to each!
Ugh. Anyway, that let me get accurate enough to put a small shadow on the edge of the hub. Using just a flat grey... it looks... flat gray.
So I took a new source photo to clone from and create patterns from, hoping that would automagically fix the look of it, but it didn't. It looked worse.
I darkened and desaturated it a bit, which helped, but it still doesn't look right:
A big part of the problem is that metal.. is just grey. What makes it look like metal is not it's base color, but it's reflective properties, the way it creates highlights. Without support for reflections in LFS, the only way to get those metallic highlights is build them into the texture, but I lack the art skill to do that by hand. I tried using a photograph, but since the shape of the G25 hub is not a decohedron, it's impossible to map directly to the LFS hub, and doing approximate mappings just makes the hub look bulbous.
Anyway, I'm done mucking with it for the moment. If somebody else wants to take a stab at it, you're welcome to my Photoshop file.
And yeah, the wheel has limitations for both texturing and the detail of the polygons, it's a shame. It's too bad the wheel itself has a wierd design to begin with. The spokes are one big solid slab, weird. This looks the closest to the G25 now so far . I don't know whats so bad about it But the weird shading at the top cannot be removed somehow? It's odd it even showed up in your line test version.
Eric, how did you loose the shine from the first version?
It would be perfect if you could do the shine like in first version, and everything else like in last..
Maybe he could make 2 versions. That middle piece isn't shiny at all, it is almost a flat metallic. If he was going for almost an exact remake of the G25, that last one looks great. But if he wanted something else that looked a bit different, the shiny one is a different kind
I have used Eric Tetz wheel texture, the only thing I changed is the centre of the wheel and the buttons - Eric Tetz... you have done an AWESOME job but I just wanted to make the centre more like the G25
But the weird shading at the top cannot be removed somehow? It's odd it even showed up in your line test version.
