Hello all, I want to start building tracks and have a real life track lined up and researched. However, I'm totally new to all of this, including Max. After three weeks of reading the rF and rF2 track forums and doing tutorials and googling ideas, I've attempted something that I've written out below and included some screen shots. I bet most of it is a mess, so i really welcome any comments and help and suggestions. I've reached the point where I have to start attempting things and then learn from mistakes or bad ideas as I'm going. I start by making a polygon square mesh, because for the real track, that's what I have for the topography of the area. 1. Created a 1000mx1000x plane with 100 segments in each direction, thus a 10m terrain grid (planning a tighter mesh for the real track). 2. Applied a noise modifier to make it more terrain like. 3. Drew a line in top view to create the circuit shape, and a 10m wide straight line to the side of my mesh. 4. Raised the circuit line above the map and selected it. 5. Then lofted the cross section onto the circuit and adjusted the tick boxes as I'd read in the Track Building Tutorial 2.6.pdf. 6. I intend to be mathematical when I come to build my track but for now I increased the shape and path steps until it looked like my track ploys were approximately 2x2m. 7. Selected the loft, then conformed it down onto the terrain, then deleted my original spline and cross-section. 8. Converted the loft to a mesh, choose edges, select open edges, Create shape from open edges. 9. Hid my track mesh leaving the two new outer edges, and raised them in the air, applied a extrude modifier and made the track deeper than the terrain, and lowered it so it cut through the terrain. 10. Chose the mesh, Compound objects - Boolean, Cut - Split under Operation, Then Pick Operand B and choose the extruded road shape. 11. Immediately pick Edit Mesh from the Modifier list. Select Face, then detach. 12. Delete the road, and unhide my lofted road. At this point the lofted road is slightly higher than the mesh, so I guess the mesh moves slightly when making the Bollean cut? I repeated the above process and the same happened again. I'm not worried at this point because I might well be advised to not be doing this method anyway….. And that's where I'm at so far. When I look at other WIP examples I see they look very different to this - and possibly for good reason. At this point I think I could repeat the above technique to add other roads and the pit lanes, and then manually tidy up where roads meet. Anyway, that's enough for now. I'd really welcome any comments. Many thanks. View attachment 2261 View attachment 2260 View attachment 2259 View attachment 2258
Everyone has their own way of working. I would avoid this method, myself for a number of reasons. 1. The terrain and track are "random"--I prefer to 'design' everything. Even though the track follows the terrain, you will probably never see this in the real world--not even on standard roads. The cambers will be constantly changing to match the terrain. The road is typically flat, and often banks into the turns (not out of the turns). Just from driving on the roads, you can see how it has been cut into and build up from the terrain. Plus, on just about every road, there's some sort of concession built in for drainage from the rain. 2. The terrain mesh is inefficient--the edge flow should fit the contours of the terrain. The reason that many games use a grid for their terrain is because they use height maps. Basically, terrain in most games is a special beast of their own, and it's faster for them to use grids than an 'arbitrary' mesh. rFactor just uses static meshes, so the most efficient polygon flow is preferred. 3. All of the "driveable"/"interactible" surfaces (i.e. runoff areas, shoulders, gravel traps, etc.) should follow the flow of the road. They should look more or less like an extrusion off the sides of the track. 4. Probably most importantly: 3dsmax's booleans suck. One of the artists that I work with was trying to do something particular with booleans in 3DSMax, but was struggling horribly. I KNEW there was an easy way to do exactly what he was doing. So, when I got home, I tried it in Max and was getting the same terrible results that he was. I then went into another software package (Softimage), and it worked perfectly in about 5 seconds. I, personally, like to work with the lofting method. It provides the most non-destructive workflow possible with the most control, IMO. It's really easy to adjust cambers, road profile, elevations, etc. I believe freew67 (sp?) has some videos on this method. I'd recommend having a look.
Many thanks for the reply, you’ve given me some good info to think about. So if you had a good terrain map in the grid format above, would you manually lower your loft road spline to closely match the surface, and then draw your own terrain over the top of the grid, deleting the grid as you go? I’d really like to make use of this type of information when I build my track. Ideally, I’d like to start off by drawing my inside and outside road lines because I have a good overhead plan, and have reasonably accurate elevation data for both lines. And then tie it into the surrounding terrain map. Thanks for the boolean warning. It would be nice if there was something like autocad’s ‘trim’ feature.
Honestly, I don't know. I suppose that if I had a terrain come in in that format, I'd probably be a bit more lenient about using the grid format. I'd probably at least look into some of the various retopology solutions that are out there. It all depends on how much work it would be to get the mesh to follow the terrain. Plus, it'd depend on how heavy the scene was overall. If I could get away with the grid format and still get good framerates, I'd probably just go ahead with it. However, that'd only apply to the non-driveable terrain. I'd still try to get the driveable terrain to follow the flow of the track as much as possible. Maybe someone else would be so kind to chime in about best practices when using an existing terrain. I've only worked with fantasy tracks so far (mostly).
I haven't worked with grid terrain yet but I believe you could make it work like the two of you "outlined" (or danced around without making it explicit? ). Here's how a section of track usually looks like (low poly road surface from rF1): View attachment 2277 For the "outside" terrain that I artistically and professionally marked in red you could easily use some sort of grid terrain, given that it's grid is of sufficiently high fidelity. You however have to make it "add up" with the track to avoid visible gaps (rF2 is far more sensitive to this than rF1 was) or draw the terrain all the way under the more highly detailed terrain right next to the track (which still might give you bad gaps from the trackside cams). So yeah, you can make it work and if the outside terrain is sufficiently important for your track and you have sufficiently good grid terrain. For anything from the road to the guardrails and one or two more rows of detail I would always go with the increased control I get from lofting.
Thanks blakboks and ethone for your help. It's much appreciated. After reading so much I needed to start attempting things to see how it goes, and your advice is invaluable. One of my top priorities is to ensure the finished track is very neat - no overlapping or gaps - and no wasted ploys. So I will take care with whatever I end up doing. I think I can maybe use the grid in some areas around the track, but as I get further away I think it would make sense to change to bigger polygons as in the top left of the screenshot above. ethone, I have a super beginner question based on your professional drawing, do you know of a tutorial or video that demonstrates the technique used in that picture. Where you have 4 vertices from the track joining up to one point and then several of those point meeting in the less detailed area - and so on. It's the most common approach I've seen to making a track but I can't find any info on how it's created or built up. I'd be really interested. Thanks again.
Depends on how you created the objects. Generally you'll loft an object with a higher step rate (like the road in the screenshot) and loft another one with the same step rate next to it (like the broader yellowish object in the screenshot). For the "next to it" object you can then select several vertices on the edge away from the road and weld them together. Or if you lofted the wall from a separate spline first, snap them to the same vertex from the base of the wall and weld them after you've laid out the object in full, giving you a bit more leeway to go back on your choices to connect which edges going from the road to the wall where. You'll be doing that since the road is generally the object that has the highest "longitudinal resolution" on your terrain, with the terrain further from the track generally requiring less and less polys the further away it is.
Thanks ethone, that's really helpful. The result looks like an almost automated process, but I can see it's actually a lot of work. I have two brief questions and then I will go away and spend most of the weekend trying out these methods. 1) is there an offset style command in Max? I've attached an example from autocad, i drew the red line, selected it, chose offset, typed in a distance - and you get the perfectly offset green line. This would be really useful. 2) ethone, I've reattached your picture, but I've coloured 3 lines blue, green and light blue. Would you aim to get the elevation of these lines correct (as well as the track) before you start welding the vertices to the track itself? Thanks again for sharing your experience. View attachment 2299 View attachment 2300
1) Google gave me this: http://forums.cgarchitect.com/15415-offset-max.html I never used it before, but I can see its usefulness. I usually loft from a single spline with the width defined through a cross-section. That isn't the only viable way to build the road, curbs or guardrails/walls though, so just because you'd do it differently discount your technique. 2) I would definitely loft the blue line and pay good attention to the green line. Now that I think about it, the criterion would probably be which "position in line" we're talking about. The blue line is the first in line from the track. Getting that right is important. (Case in point, the screenshot is of a corner where the position of the guardrail was slightly modified, before it was where I manually cut through the grass for mapping purposes. As you can see with the two heavily welded vertices I "inherited" an area of not-quite good geometry.) The red line would connect to the blue line, so you can't weld the vertices of the row of polys between them until they're done anyway. Feel free to ask some more when anything arises.
ethone, many thanks for the link, the Outline tool under spline edit is exactly what I was looking for and will be really useful to me. I still haven't started the track, I'm stuck between lofting and a more spline based method for the road, as per feels3 Interlagos previews. More to follow I'm sure....
I haven't played with a spline based method like feels3 has but I think in essence it's not too different - you lay out the splines you need. With lofting you use a pre-defined cross-section across separate splines, with feels3 example you build the cross section into the spline construction. Just go with what seems more easy to do for you.
I didn't want to ask another question so soon... but here I am. I have a road and a terrain. I have imported it into the Joesville track section and copied the materials over, and matched the GMT settings so they look the same - just for the road, and the outer track. I've since spent about 6 hours over the last two nights trying to get it into Developer mode - but I can't even get the track to show up in the menu. I am frustrated! I was wondering what the very bare minimum files are that are required for the Developer mode? I have a SCN and GDB (which I have edited) file and then two GMTs and all the MAPS that I copied over for now. I've methodically checked the GDB file and I'm sure I've exported the track and terrain GMTs as per ISIs example. I also copied over the JoesvilleIcon.dds and renamed it and it's reference the GDB file. Any help, or pointers to a good guide would be fantastic. All I want to do at this stage is check out the road camber and banking etc... See if it seems true to the real circuit. Thanks.
One thing I stumbled across was that there is a character limit to the length of the filename of the .gdb file/the track designator in the very first line of the .gdb file. If that is long (HeartlandParkTopeka_Intermediate was too long) the track won't show up in DevMode. For the track to load you'll also need the xsector1/xsector2/xfinish/xpitin/xpitout files but I don't think that prevents the track from showing up. As a temporary measure copying the Joesville ones should at least allow you to load the track once you get it to show up in DevMode.
Thanks ethone. Another few hours tonight and I still can't get it to work. I now have it showing up in the menu, the loading bar gets close to the end - and then it just crashes out back to the desktop. I copied over the 5 xsector files and copied the line for them in the Joesville scn file, into my scn file. The only other GMT I have is my road surface, part of which is set over 0,0,0 in max. I've tried it to keep it all as simple and neat as possible but I still can't get it to work. Any other help would be much appreciated. I've spent 3 nights trying to do this instead of building the track. Thanks.
Yes! I basically copied over the entire Joesville folder and renamed everything. Deleted all the GMTs except the xsectors. Opened the GDB and renamed the contents to suit. I then opened the Joesville section in Max. Made a simple road shape, copied the road name and materials from the Joesville section of road. Exported the GMT for just the new road and the SCN. Opened the SCN and copied in reference to the xsector files. Because there's only one partial document it all feels like wild guess work, directed with a lot help in this thread and all the others I've read. I thought what I've done above would be enough to get it working. Thanks again ethone, it's much appreciated.
Are the .gmt files you exported "big", i.e. 800kb or more? At times I've seen such big .gmt files get corrupted while exporting while receiving no error message from the GMT Plugins. After a re-export my tracks loaded fine again in that case. With the new RealRoad I have found large RaceSurface (road shape) .gmts can give tremendous performance issues, perhaps if they're too large they can even prevent a track from loading? I hope that might be it, tracking down such basic but significant hurdles can be quite a pain.
ethone, I finally have it working! I changed the file path in the SCN file to match the other examples. The ISI scn generator had used a full path c:/...... I think that's what did it. I then found myself off track - I guessed the AIW file changed the start position - so I removed the file - and I started on track. Many thanks for all the help. I can now apply this to my actual circuit.... And then start asking other questions!
