Hi: Make the lines of the track as separate objects, it allows you to edit the grip independently of the rest of the track but, have some other function? I think that if don't have any other function, not I will do them in the case of a conversion, because they are drawn in the texture of the track.
I'm kind of on the fence about modelling the lines instead of having them on the base texture as well. I havent really checked it out yet, but what happens when the fastline goes over a line. Does the the groove just disappear because theres a line over it? Same question about marbles. How about rain reflections.
rain reflections work they are a different channel than lets say the racegroove the marbles and the racegroove use the same channel i think
You can make RealRoad work on lines quite easily by using a RealRoad material as a texture. It's not necessary to model them separately if you have them built into the base texture but there are some scenarios where it can be helpful to have the lines in a separate layer of polys: - when the lines don't follow the direction of the road (think street course like modern Monaco) - when you would have to create so many variations of the base texture that you could save an awful lot of video memory through one simple 128x128 pixels white line texture instead of 8 1024x1024 (or even bigger) base textures - when you absolutely want to model the bump or the grip variations of the lines.
This is what I would do, It's a bit unorthodox but most of my methods are. After I have mapped the road and mapped the raceline etc. I would duplicate the road mesh, then edge loop select all the edges covering the line, Use connect with 2 segments and adjust them to line up with the line. Then once again edge loop select the new edges inside the line, ctrl + select poly submode (which will select all the poly's connected to those edges. then invert selection and delete (of course this means doing both sides before deleting the remaining mesh). Then lift it up about 1mm, duplicate the road material and change the t1 tex to the lines (you should have a plain road tex and an extra tex, the extra tex will have all your lines and markers on it) What your left with is a line mesh that is mapped exactly to the road. *make sure to remove unused verts from the uv's and also double check channel info to make sure you don't have any dead verts.
