Hello, everyone During my recent work on a track (I'm a complete beginner to RFactor 2 track modding, but not to working with 3D models) I realized that the mesh topology of the Joesville examples seems to be very clean, compared to what I'm able to achieve in some places, albeit the Joesville example is a very simple circuit. Thus I thought that for the sake of future track artists, and for my own sake as well, we could have a little thread about track topology. I have tried to search the forum for similar threads, in order to avoid redundancy, but I have failed to find any threads addressing this. If we get a good discussion going, I will make sure to update this post with suggestions and examples from members, so future artists can look it up. Case 1: Horizontal-Vertical merging (Non-driven surface merging) In this case, I have a horizontal road that is merging with a vertical road. Now both of these roads are not actually driven, so it is more a question of making a nice transition between the two roads. I have removed the decals from this image, but there are decals at the edge of both roads in order to transition from road texture to grass texture. What I am most worried about is z-fighting and graphical glitches between the two roads if I simply add a decal on top and make a transition. Any thoughts? (Driven surface merging, green is racesurface and blue is pitlane) Now this example is similar (This is for the pitlane entry) however in this case the road is driven, which means that I have to be careful about overlapping meshes (From what I've read, please correct me if I'm wrong). You can see in the top right corner of the entry I have fewer vertices than the road, which means I have a slight overlap - will this be a problem? I tried to solve the merging by adding a triangle in the middle, is there any better suggestions? Case 2: Road surface mesh (Green is road surface, increase vertices in corners) I don't think there is too much to be said about this, I think I have achieved a pretty good mesh topology with my road surface, but I wanted to leave it here in case someone had some suggestions. Case 3: Decal topology (Transition decals in white, gravel trap in yellow. Terrain not yet done) In the case of decals, what I usually do is I make a bunch of planes that follow the outline of the object I'm trying to transition (In this case it is a gravel trap) and then I edit these planes so that the edges are crisp (That seems to be the way they are done in the Joesville example). How does the uniformity of my quads affect the transition between the two textures? Will I get artifacts if the quads aren't all the same size? I think that is all the examples I have for now. Now I usually work in Blender, but I think that this is (and should be) equally applicable in 3ds since it is just a question of topology. If anyone has some more examples or suggestions feel free to write them, and I will add them to the original post if they are relevant to the topic.
Always snap and weld surface joins. Reduce polygons as you go away from the main racing surface The decals, there is no real need for those extra edges, In Max it is very easy to create the decals from a spline created from the terrain boundary shapes.
Thank you for your insight and the great link you sent, I will try to include that in the main thread. Regarding the decals; What I'm doing right now is that I use the outside spline as a guide for an array modifier that produces the quads along the line, then I tighten up the corners afterward. Maybe you could visualize which edge you say there is no real need for? From the link you sent I can see that there is no decal, is that because they are simply using the first quads along the racing surface as the edge transition?
your decal is of a higher poly density than the edge of the terrain. It would be more optimal to use something like a sweep or loft (in max), which creates geo from the spline and UVW automatically.
Ah yes, I know what you mean now. The decal should still be overlapping at the seam between the two meshes, right? I saw that in some online youtube tutorial for GJED, but I'm not sure if it applies anymore. Please correct me if I'm wrong!
It's just a matter of optimization. If your surface terrain only has a poly 1 every meter, then there is no need for the decal to have a higher density usually.
