Sorry for posting so many questions lately. I do search and experiment first. I plan to use mario tools and spline road lines. I also want to feel them on the surface so drive and collision plus tdf will be accounted for. What does Decal do? How does it change anything when exporting?
Decal just means you don't get any "z fighting" when the object is placed just above the road surface I believe.
Should lines be given real road shader? If they are placed 2 mm above road surface they should be ok as just a race surface?
No, because you need the alpha channel for transparency. I guess if you don't need that then you can do it.
No, but you could have a white line texture with rubber on it already that you could use in certain places.
Matsusaka and Le Grand Circuit have real-road painted lines. As mentioned they don't have transparency, so the meshes are cut to size. They also get the wet reflections, as well as the rubber/marbles. I wish real-road paint was standard on all tracks, but there might be good reasons why it's not. Longford does have rr paint decals for the lines that aren't baked into the main textures (way old-style!) Interested to know how/why z-fighting shouldn't happen anymore. Sounds delightful!
Could be that in the cases that the lines have real road, the lines aren't decals? IIRC, what we did in some ocasions was to cut the asphalt below the lines and put the lines at the same hight than the ground. And put the Realroad Shader and material to the lines, with a different grip in dry and wet, than the asphalt. Then, the rubber is shown on the lines
Matsusaka and Le Grand Circuit are real-road decals, rather than cut road mesh. It works as expected, but without transparency ability. Matching tarmac tones in the paint texture does a good enough job to be able to do without transparency. Good enough for me if the upshot is rubber and wet effects. No info on performance difference. Some tracks have that thick paint that you might see on a highway, and some use spray which is a much thinner coat. So yeah, some lines you would feel, others not so much. Perhaps a negative tdf height offset could be used to simulate a thin spray line. Presumably the offset would be -0.002 if the decal's height from the surface was 0.002. Or an offset of -0.0015 or -0.001 etc if it's more satisfying to have the slight bump.
WHAT IS THE BEST WORKFLOW ORDER? Track and racesurface mapping is done Lines then bumps? I know I can group lines when making bumps so the somewhat move with the track Not sure I can conform the lines to the bumps after????
Just an off-topic note for the attentive reader: the wet= tdf parameter is no longer used. Surface roughness determines wet grip (in theory).
Fantastic, thanks for responding. Figured out conforming lines last night with mmtools. I was stuck on that for a little while.