Yes, thank goodness trees were paid close attention (with awesome results) for a track with thousands of trees. If the standard ugly ones were used, it would distract from all the hard work put into the realism of all of the man-made elements.
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DJC had the ingenious idea to create a gmt file that includes all tree materials and place it at the beginning of the scn file (later loaded gmt's don't overwrite the material settings). We have no max files and 3dSimEd can't export billboards (messed up rotation axis), which makes working on the trees almost impossible. With that solution we were able to put all season textures (trees, bushes, etc) in one central folder instead of having a set of textures in each layout folder (smaller filesize). As a nice side effect I could improve the material settings (specular reflection) of the trees without destroying the forests. It's a bit tricky, because you need good bump maps and some time to create suitable spec maps, but when it all comes together it can look very good.
Yep! That's the reason why it took so long to "fix" (remove) the kerb stones (.... a million mouse clicks later... ).
It's crazy! What does 3ds max cost really for non comercial stuff? Free student software Download a free 3-year license of this software. Hmmm.
Like it says in the description, I'm getting big performance drops in the autumn layouts, especially when racing the VLN. I get 50 percent fps drops even when just racing alone on the track. But this only helps me with my decision: I will definitely be upgrading my GPU as soon as possible. I need to able to enjoy these layouts in all their glory.
Really cool. Love it. By the way, some funny car shadows on VLN. Looks like the car shadow is from a car which is 1 m above the surface ;-)
Bloody hell Djc & Tosch, a single red Rose and a cheap bottle of perfume would have done, but this is off the chart (; happy valintines day, all my love (;
I suspect it's not just about having Max or not, but having source files in Max or only GMTs. Of course there's always a way, but for each specific problem one method may be better than another. He said, having done very limited track work
The track at max settings, full hd resolution, 4xAA and a single car should exactly "fit" into a 2GB graphics card with a safety margin of 100MB. When you see big performance drops, can you check the VRAM display (2x Ctrl +F)? You should see a bit more than half of the green bar. From what I have seen while working on this track is that whenever I noticed performance drops or stuttering it happened because the gfx card was running out of memory and had to load textures from system ram. Try to set texture detail to high and test if that helps.
I have a student version of max, but it is the most complicated software on the planet and I take my hat off to everybody who can do something useful with that. There is a difference between creating a track and modding a track. Maybe I find some time in the future to learn how to use it effectively, but I believe this takes longer than two weeks.
Most complicated? Try working with max for year and building automatisms (instinctively knowing how to do things) and then switching to to another modelling software, say Blender. You'll consider max straight forward and wonder why every single thing must be done in a completely different way in the other software.
