Here is a tree in foreground: View attachment 9726 I had no trees with mount thingy on the side, but I chose a nice well kept rounded tree for the paddock. Here is how it looks when standing right beside. Pretty neat eh ? EDIT: Don't mind the low res grass, it will eventually be changed , and dont mind the rest either, just focus on the tree and camaro
The forest around Nords is not really that varied, though. Different sizes and shapes, but basically the same type of tree all around.
To add new trees is a excellent idea. Was a real pain to recolor the old trees to make them look good and you are right, Nordschleife is all about trees. When you map the trees on the billboards, is it possible to add a specular map and a normal map for each tree? You can see it in the ISI tracks. For example TREESC.DDS has a specular map named TREESC_SPEC.DDS and a normal map TREESC_NORMAL.DDS. You don't have to create the final maps now, just some quick and dirty place holders. The fine tuning comes later.
Umm as far as i remember between hohe Acht and Pflanzgarten you have some broad-leaved forest and also conifer forest. So there is some variation...
That's weird Racefreak. I'm running Firefox 23.0.1 and have no problems. I watch the download bar go across the screen and then I get the box asking "do you want to save this file", I tell it where and it's done.
I know that those changes doesnt reflect the real Nords. But, it does look a ton better tho (compared to what it looked like) Sometimes later on, I'll sit down with some videos of Nords, and try to match the tree line as best as I can. EDIT: I looked around the net a few days for trees actually. Tried to find Nordschleife specific trees, and unsurprisingly, there was no result. I found a pack of european trees, but there was 30-50 or so trees in that packages... and very little coniferous, mostly small trees too. There was some other interesting collection, but this was the most interesting package atm. With so many trees, I went thru both pdf before buying, and noticed there was already quite a few trees with similar shapes and sizes as those we have. I have also set my eyes on some really nice low poly 3d trees. They are 80$ and will get them later on, if money allows it. Regarding the grass, I have found one package that have interesting grasses too (and also some nice high res grass shrubs to replace those ugly low res one we have now). Sure thing, that was already planned Unfortunately, this set didnt come with normal and spec maps, but this is something I can do. I followed a tut online to do this earlier with the fences and stuff. Just to make sure it is right, I use the normal map filter by nvidia on the regular map, then I duplicate the resulting layer, set it to overlay, add 0.5px blur, duplicate that again (to make the bumps more pronounced), and run the filter again, in normalize mode only. Then to make the spec map, I run the find edges filter, desaturate the result, and play with the levels (bringing white and black closer in, and the middle closer to the white point).. Is that correct?
Well, now that I'm doing extra tedious work with the track itself (moving vertices and edges one at a time), doing this was almost a break actually! I remember the first time I did the bb trees and was raising them to ground, I found that tedious, but it wasnt that bad actually, now that I'm doing something much worse (in the sense that I cannot see progress going fast, and see the changes right away) I'd like to thank you again for your hardware suggestion, really satisfied! I've been using AMD cpus ever since the first Athlon arrived and kicked the pentium's butt (since then Intel got back on top), but still this is more than enough for me. Really stable so far, 1 max crash, but it wasnt a crash like before, I had too many things opened, 3dsmax, photoshop, bridge, 3dsimed, chrome with like 10-15 tabs, and rFactor 2 When I exited rF2, and got back to 3dsmax, I had a Directx problem, 3dsmax needed to restart. Trying to close it resulted in it crashing... But other than that, it is real nice. Thanks!
I believe there are several ways to create the maps. What counts is the end result. I would pick some reference maps, maybe the mills trees (look good to me), as a starting point. There are so many things that effects the lightning, you can spend weeks on this and when you have everything looking good there is a new build and you start from scratch. To do something different than always work on the mesh, is welcome change. Have fun!!!
Thanks! Really hard to say... I'd rather not say anything now to be honest. I'd think I have a little more than a month left on the mesh itself, but its hard to judge at this point. Some parts will go faster, and some will be more troublesome. At least, I got over the start area, and gp connections, that part had a lot of work done to it, took a few days alone. What I thought of doing tho, is release something like 0.96a when I'll have the first sector done, 0.96b when I have the second, etc... 0.97 will be the final smoothed version with hopefully all cracks fixed (and the new trees, I'll try to do the normal and spec maps for this release). That should also help with seeing if I missed any cracks. 1.0 will hopefully bring reflections, more shadow optimizations and such. The shrubs, grass, treelines, 3d trees will happen either before or after 1.0, not sure. I have found nice packages for this, but cannot afford them at the moment. I would need help for the alpha channel of the road textures. I've looked at the stock isi textures, and tried something on my own on the road textures we currently have, and the result wasn't as expected. Under wet conditions, the tarmac was a dull mat gray (but I have no reflections planes yet, so is it a normal behavior when in this condition? So I reverted and removed the alpha channel for 0.95-6, but I tried. Anyone is familiar with this, and could either give me tips on how to make them, or make one for me so I have something to refer to. .the road maps of isi's track are different then those in Nords, for instance, there is a road line in the texture, how should it be in the alpha channel, black, white, or anything in between?
Perhaps you allready know it, if not here's rf2 Track Technology document, also something about bringing animations to rf2: http://dlc.orcl.de/RF2/beta/tut/rF2_Track_Technology_v2.pdf You can also try to look at isi tracks where helicopters or other aircrafts are included how they solved it. btw, your new trees look brillaint, I'm sure they'll bring new amasing atmosphere in the environment of the nords.
Additional to the grass, you should look for some nice bushes too. The area between the guardrails and the forest mostly is very crowded with high bushes. Here are some impressions of my last visit, where you can see some fauna right after Pflanzgarten 2: View attachment 9739 Just before the crest at Pflanzgarten 2: View attachment 9740 Runup to the Karussel: View attachment 9741 The corner at the foot of the Steilstrecke (corner before Karussel): View attachment 9742 Döttinger Höhe: View attachment 9743 As you can see, there is quite a lot of variation in the trees. And i think the mess of all the bushes contributes a lot to the atmosphere of the Nordschleife...it feels "wild"
Thanks! I've already read that pdf a couple of times, but I've always skipped animations, since I didn't think that anything was animated in Nords. Well, now that you speak of it, I remember seeing a balloon flying when I first converted the track with 3dsimed, but it was flying really fast. Something wasn't set correctly I guess, but I've stopped seeing that thing a while ago. I can understand animating flying objects, as they loop around in the sky, but how would you animate the cars? Once they reach the end of the highway, where they go? Respawn at start and go over again? Looks to me it would look even worse than if they are sitting still? So long as you won't see them disappear or respawn, it would be fine, but again, at the speed we go, when we see them in the cockpit view, they almost looks like moving, unless you really focus on them. Also, another thing, looping around cars would look weird, since you would always see the same car going the same direction over and over again. A copter will loop around track in real life, so looping them in game doesnt look odd, I think that seeing cars loop would feel different. But I wanted to dig into this later down the road, to get the balloon back, and flying at a normal speed.
Wow, wonderful pics Johnny, this one did make me laugh though - reminds me of John McEnroe's pithy comment at Wimbledon when he was an angry young man disagreeing with a crap line-call: ..you canNOT BE SERIOUS.. YOU SIT THERE LIKE TWO BUMPS ON A LOG"
