Having finished my shader, I went back and updated the first car I did and it's looking really good, so good it's making the second car I did look bad. Guess I'll have to update the second one as well.

In the meantime, I added a four door police car, typical of what I'd see around town.

The nice thing about using the pixel shader is that it not only makes the cars look better, they use far fewer polygons. The hatchback originally used 154 polygons, now it's using just 104, while the police car is only using 108.

I made a couple of minor mods to the shader today, one to better handle the mixing of the cars colour with the texture colour, and secondly, I added a third texture channel for a second normal map, which will be the "damage map" used to make the cars look beaten up after an accident. The new map is added on top of the normal bump map and can be dialed in so the car can show minor scratches all the way up to looking like the bodywork is made of crumpled tinfoil.