This one slipped under the radar for me, will be coming to RF2 later on it seems. http://www.virtualr.net/bryce-canyon-for-rfactor-lots-of-previews
Looks pretty sweet. Although tbh when I first saw the name I was hoping for something a bit more Monster Trucks Madness 2
Looks more like few meshes repeated plenty of time, so I don't think any terrain modelling software or plugins were used. Look at any closer shots on virtualr page linked in first post and you will see. Sky is a photo - these are apparently rF1 screenshots. You can't modify sky in rF2 since it's provided by engine.
Woo guys! This is indeed rF1 yet. I've used "Terrain" plugin by West Brothers. But it doesnt provide the hoodies, so I've made them separately (and remade them few times - lowered the polycount). In real life the hoodies are also repeating. There are like 4-5 types of rocks which do repeat, it's caused by the erosion, water and winds, so on a different levels there are different types of hoodies. Look here for example: http://www.anirama.com/Motorhome2003/images/BryceCanyon.jpg That's also what I admire about that canyon - some of the hoodies are exactly repeating eachother, and it blows your mind. And also that's why I've decided to take that challenge - because if they are repeating in real life, how hard can it be to make them in rFactor?. The rF2 version will come someday. I still have less than 40 materials in the entire scene, and driveable surface already smoothed. The main question is shadows - in rF1 I've pre-rendered all the shadows and put some of them via multiply maps or vertex colors. I've done this because of FPS reasons - you really have to see all the shadows from the above view to make the track look sunny, but if the shadows were real-time they would kill the framerate to death. Probably I'll leave the shadows the same way for the first rF2 release. Who knows - maybe in few years we'll have machines which will be capable of rendering millions of shadows - then I'll make them real-time.
Shadows engine is completely different in rF2 - it will work much better with this kind of terrain. rF2 simply had separate shadows for all objects and then blended them all on top of other surfaces. rF2 has one shadow buffer for entire scene (this shadow buffer has multiple levels, but from our point of view it's like one buffer). You should go for built-in rF2 shadows from the start.
Well, I won't for now. Its quite easy to re-do then, just erase vertex colors and delete the vray layer in multiply map's psd file. I'm (and my pc) still not very happy with rF2 shadows when it comes to big numbers. Anyway, for rF2 I'll do a different track first. Which will use all the new rF2 features, for the experiment.
For performance I can only advise to decrease number of objects. Put portions of your map into single GMT files, rather than having multiple small objects amassed in one area. Especially if you're reusing small number of materials over many similar objects.
Done that already! The hoodoos still a bit heavy, altho I had to multires them, and some of them lost 70-80 percent of polycount, especially the far ones.
