Re: [WIP] Nordschleife Tourist Very interesting Mario. However I have heard about gps receivers for biking specially with an odometer and altimeter incorporated (I would add a low frequency accelerometer which I think could add very relevant info to the ones above) which greatly improves altitude reading. Software can do a great job of interpolation to minimize overall epsilon square error Enviado desde mi GT-I9505 usando Tapatalk 2
Hello Pleclair! I rarely post here but read the forums on a daily basis. Thank you for all the hard work you put into this project! Simply fantastic! I can only imagine how hard it must be to tackle all those problems while trying to bring the Ring to life in RF2! I'm really enjoying your work, so i thought i try to lift your spirits by posting this very nice Video of the 24H Nürburgring 2013 (if you don't know it already)! Thanks man! Greetings from Berlin!
Hello guys! Really sorry about the delay. There has been a lot of ups and downs in the past few days. First, the darn trees... they are nearly perfect, there is 1 spot to my knowledge at FOV30 that is flickering, but its not in the near track side trees, so you may not notice it. I tried a couple of time to make it disappear, but I dunno, I'll have to check it out later. But I was too fed up with those trees to give it further tries.. My computer was acting up worse and worse too. Today, I was supposed to finish a few things and send it online. However, when I woke up my computer was on a blue stop screen. I rebooted, it scanned the disk once more, and I'm now up to 55mb or so bad sectors on it. 3dsmax with all the swapping really put the final nail on its coffin! So I was able to make the final tweaks, and tried to export, but it wouldnt, it just blue screened, and at some point, windows wouldnt boot no more. The good thing is, when I woke up and saw that blue screen, it sort of woke me up and I told myself I should put that win7 64 bit (a legit technet that was given to me by a forum user here, thank you Scott!) to my usb key, since my dvd drive is now long out. So I did, and when I got to the point it wouldnt boot no more, I tried to install win7 on another drive that was part linux, part ntfs. Except that drive was partitioned under linux and for some reason was gpt partitions style. So win7 wouldnt install on it. Great! Hopes were getting slimmer! My other drive (had 3, now remains 2) was full and couldnt hold it on any partitions and I couldnt delete one either. I tried to boot my linux again, and it sure booted faithfully! Except my home drive resided on the failing drive which was disconnected. So using linux I made a little room on the drive that could hold windows, and tried to install. The windows iso was downloaded to my failing drive, and even tho the iso extracted, the files were corrupted somehow. So had to reboot again to linux, download the iso again, redo the usb key, and install windows! So roughly 12 hours later and lots of sweat, I managed to get back on track. Just a pain to know I'll re-install everything when I receive the mobo/cpu/ram combo. Failed a few days too quickly! I'll post the stuff that has changed in the following post, I don't want to mix it up with this post!
So for v0.95, everything has been reimported from scratch and done completely from 3dsmax. WARNING: First, let me warn you. Performance might be worse for you than in previous versions. Remember that this is a 20km track, and as the track will have more and more eye candy its performance will go down... probably to a level worse than silverstone in the future. At least, I hope so, that would mean the goal is reached! I wanted to make shadow groups and vis groups, but it will be done for the v1.0. It will require quite a bit of time to do properly. So, there was a little performance increase coming from the better mesh (a whole lot of vert welded) but the curbs have a higher resolution now, and there are quite a bit more shadows, and the shadow out is greatly increased so there is little shadow pop in. This is basically the setting that max users will enjoy. It is the same for high as well. Everything has been set to high and max. So if too slow, reduce to low or med. The track mesh is now in a much better state. Drives a bit smoother, but it is still a bumpy ride. Don't ever expect this track to lose much of its current bumps, as it wont happens. I love how the track feels, it feels alive, and I think it represent well a segment in time of the Nords. The track may be smoother today, but its seen very rough days from what I can hear, and this track is clearly modelled around those time. If you are losing controls because of bumps... drive differently.. I'm having fun with bumps actually, flying sideways in some corners Most of the materials have changed. After seeing a video of the automatic bmw earlier, I noticed how green the inside grass (between fence and track) really is. So it is now a bit brighter. The rest is basically the same. I used the patch texture from limerock to replace the mowed texture from silverstone. The curbs have been tessellated a second time, and now feels much better. I went over many textures, and created norm and spec maps (after seeing a tutorial on youtube) for most fences, they now stand out a bit more. All trees have been levelled to the ground, and re-arranged to prevent flickering. The night lighting is now in, and on top of the moon light, there are a light coming from the gpk sign that is lit at night, and from the few lights on the side of the track. The track now looks very good, to my taste at least. I tried to have a quick shot at reflections but werent successful. I would need help creating the alpha channel for my road texture. If somehow could explain to me what I must do to make a proper one, it would certainly help me. I tried to look at the one from other isi track and make one for the many textures there are, but I dunno if it was my global plane that wasnt right, or the alpha channel, but the track wasnt looking right. Was mostly dull gray, with no reflection. Well, I'll stop now, cause my memory is failing me, at its nearing 3am, and I'll let you download it and try instead! I'll update the first post when the upload is finished!
Btw, I now have the full scene in Max, with all materials converted to rf2, and can export it all from Max! I use 3dsimed to quickly view my track and to get the mat properties that went wrong in the import in Max from the rf1 version. Had to fix so many mats because they didnt import right. All alpha transparency mats werent set right, and lots of others because of the shaders used. Once I'm done, other that will want to improve further should have a very nice Max file to work with! All arranged in layers.
I am very thankful for all the hard work and time that you have put into this beast of a track, but I have a question. Are the bumps you are talking about caused from the low resolution of the old track surface; (the black line in my drawing)? Or is the track now genuinely smooth but with lots of dips, bumps and undulation; (the red line in my drawing)?
Regarding the mesh, I've fixed all glitch in the road and curbs prior tessellating. So this result is a smooth mesh now. The AI doesnt show problematic behavior sometimes as seen in previous versions. Here is an example of the old one: View attachment 9545 And the new one: View attachment 9546 You shoud notice the difference right away
If it's the latter, I really can't understand why people like this.. It's like with the historic Zolder, it has some terrible low poly bits, even visually, messing with the cars physics and people actually claim to like this, totally beyond me, how modders can take some of those comments seriously after that... The worst part, it makes people not fix it! I sent an entire pm of constructive feedback including pictures and examples and explanations of how and why but I don't think they have been taken seriously ever because the people liked it anyway... Peclair, seeing your choice of words and seeing you are a new max user: - By smoothing the road, did you mean using autosmooth in the editable poly menu? This doesn't smooth the actual road, it just smoothes the normals, you're not changing geometry - by tesselating. do you mean the tesselate modifier? This only adds resolution, but doesn't change the shape of the geometry. These two things could explain the bumps you are referring to. Driving differently shouldn't be needed if the bumps are caused by ancient low poly meshes, no matter what people claim, that is definitely not how it is supposed to be. If you want to check a mesh for smoothness, take a look at your mesh from a low angle in an orthographic view If you just cleaned up the mesh a bit and tesselated, there's a big chance you just kept all the low poly bumps that were in there. See my previous bit. There is a big difference in max between mesh smooth and tesselate. edit: Here is a quick example, it looks great from the top, but the actual surface contains some really low poly induced bumps, notice the sharp jagged shapes! Now although the physics engine seems to contains some smoothing/damping of its own it's still not a bad idea to smooth these out using some free spline smooth tools or meshsmooth to have the undulations make sense and be smooth. Unless you are talking big industrial concrete slabs that can be found on airports or factory terrain, no matter how bumpy a road is, it will always be a smooth surface. Drag the image into your browser address bar for a bigger view. Just taking the peaks off of this can already make a difference but hopefully you can understand when you have a high or low jagged edge like in here in the apex of a corner. Although the orthographic view emphasises this effect a bit cause you don't see distance very well, you can surely feel the difference in the car between a smooth road and a low poly bumpy road. Drive my Zolder version for example, that is a track with a too smooth surface (for now), but especially in the second chicane it does have two biggish dips in the apexes but still provides a smooth ride, as it is in real life at that location on the track. edit2: Here is an image to explain what I meant earlier to make it clearer, I hope:
@wgeuze Good explanation. @pleclair . You use my importGMT2v2? My script set alpha transparency and others properties.
Thank you for the explanations! Now I understand why the mesh was still low res even tho it wasnt. As I was gonna update the 1st post with the 0.95 link and go to bed, I came up to your comment and decided to try to mesh smooth the road mesh. I have saved my progress under many increments and stages, so I was able to get the road mesh detached, quadrified and not tessellated, and used mesh smooth on it. Instead of 2x tessel, I did 2x mesh smooth, and now I think the mesh is too smooth. I had a few issues with the mats having changed in some areas of the track (like for grass), and I changed them all back while looking at what was supposed to be right in 3dsimed... (it is still very useful nonetheless!) I'm currently sending the 0.96 version with ultra smooth road mesh. I'll try tomorrow to mesh smooth 1 time, and then tessel instead of a second mesh smooth. I think the mesh smooth will give better results being applied first then after tessel. Am I right to think that? I'll try to stay awake to update the post with the 0.96 version, I'd like to read what you guys think when I wake up But its already 6:44am... damn..
No, unfortunately, I did the importing before donating to you, so I used the other version to import 0.96 is 25% online... think I'll be able to wait it out So you will be able to start your day right, with a few laps on smooth nords But dont get too used, it will likely end up 1 mesh smooth - 1 tessel instead.... will see tomorrow! EDIT: well, later I mean
View attachment 9559 Someone posted this on the screenies thread, from rf1?! The curbs look amazing, are you aiming at recreating that level of texture? Would be awesome if so Amazing work, greatly appreciative pleclair
I just finished the 1x mesh smooth and 1x tessel road mesh, and this is just perfect! It is roughly the same smoothness regarding low res bumps, but the tarmac doesnt feel like its concrete no more. Currently uploading, will have breakfast, send the link online and go to bed, at long last!
