Suggestions on how you can improve the ACC graphics

[Simon Kaminski]

Playing ACC is fun and I really enjoy it so far but the graphics could be much better imo.

Compared to the first AC the graphics are top notch, but the Unreal Engine 4 is capable of so much more. I think there is a lot of lost potential. People who don't care about graphics and want to say it doesn't matter can go elsewhere. This thread is for graphic suggestions. And if you guys have some ideas as well please feel free to share them. I am sure the final version of ACC will look much better.

Things I noticed on the Nürburgring GP course so far:

• The grass looks like a low res texture. And it is really hard to see the actual foliage. I first thought u are only using a texture for grass. You could easily add better foliage using the UE4 editor. You just need to import and setup the foliage meshes (material) and then you can paint them using the foliage tool or using masks where the grass should appear with a blueprint or material. As you can see there are tons of possibilities. You could use Quixel Megascans for this kind of stuff which might be the fastest and cheapest way to do it. Look at this for example on how good it could look: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/megascans-meadow-pack It might be hitting on the performace but you could add options to enable or disable high res foliage.
• Temporal AA. Everything looks washed out. I didn't dive deep into that topic so far but maybe have a look if it's fixable?
• I don't know if you are already doing it but you can add much more details to the world (tarmac, walls or guard rails for example) using decals and vertex painting where you can paint more details where needed. Look at this:
• Many trees are (sorry for the word) plain ugly. Maybe look if you can replace them with more beautiful ones? And the lods could need some work. The trees are changing their look/color while passing them.
• You could add some nice particle effects when you drive over grass or sand other than the default dust.
• Many props need some better textures and you could add so much more material details using proper roughness maps for your models. Looks like you are just using a gray uniform roughness texture for many props and when you are "walking" around a object it's really obvious. One example prop where it's just a color and missing dirt and details:
  
  
• I am feeling like there is a lack of ambient occlusion which might reduce the overall washed out look of ACC. The road and the side stones are not really fitting together. Imagine you would use vertex painting to add some details like dirt and on top of that ambient occlusion. I added some poor fake AO to the wall in 2 minutes (far from perfect) in Photoshop in the second picture that u have a better idea of what I am talking about