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Two versions of the same corner:



In first version, turn is long and flat (I zoomed out to fit it into screen, so it may seem like it's much more than 90 degrees but it's not).
In second version it's shorter, but note the elevation - there's clearily a bulge and when driving it takes away all the grip.


Neither one of these verions had this particular turn anywhere near the real one.

Track makers often do that kind of errors, changing the character of a turn completely. When racing on Sachsenring in our league last year, our cars were thrown in the air at one corner. Our next race is at Road America and I had to remodel start/finish straight uphill, because it was impossible to drive safely there. It's still far from perfect but at least we can race.


Look at this image:



There's like 20 feet down between "The Ninety" and "The Esses", while rFactor version we used in our league has only 2 feet of difference there.

On the other hand, we never raced on Eastern Creek in our leagues, becaue it has some horrible holes/bumps that upset the car way too much I believe these were modelling errors, not acurrate representation of real track.

Laser scanned or not - track needs to be modelled properly. We need correct layout, elevations and banking.
And when I say banking I also meand transitions to and from banked corner. For example - on real Daytona drivers are capable of doing entire lap near the wall, while in different rFactor versions transitions could be so sudden, that you were literally driving over a crest, unable to hold your line.


Laser scanning isn't essential to getting track right. What is essential is the will to do it right If you can get corner radius, banking and elevation data, then you will be able to create good representation of the track with some reference photos. You just need to be smart about it.

 

I would like to add my 2 cents to the laser scan tracks and non laser scanned. I'm a surveyor I work on roads. I build roads in acad civil 3D and I also lay them out in the real world. I've used scanners and conventional survey methods to as built surfaces (roads). Now with that said when you scan a surface with a scanner device the amount of data generated is eminence. You can scan a mile long road and have about 70gigs of data depending on the density you have chosen, with that you pick up every square inch of that surface. To me a scanned surface will always be a better representation of that surface as opposed to conventional way of building one. Yes you can build a track in a cad program but you will never be 100% accurate EVER sure you can get the geometry for the turns and pitches but to get the dips and bumps that happen over time do to sub grade or just the weight of the cars riding the same line over and over the scanning surface will be best suited for those details.... I would like to try and make a track one day but I really don't know where to start as far as software goes can CAD be used? how does one get the geometry right? ISI you guys need a guy to travel and survey tracks for you LOL

 

If I'm not wrong, laser scanning of track costs -HUGE- amount of money which in my opinion is better spent on anything else.

It would be great to have - with unlimited funds - but...

 

The problem is the 70 gigs per mile thing. After it is all said and done, even laser scanned tracks aren't perfect representations because they can't use all the data that you've collected, the track needs to fit in more like 100-300 MB at the very maximum (and that's including everything, not just the geometry of the track surface), so you need to drop the accuracy to around 0.1% level anyway (talking orders of magnitude, not specific numbers). You won't have all of the bumps, but admittedly the ones you have will be in the correct places.

Yes, laser scanning of tracks is the only way to get them to be as accurate as they can be. The end quality once in the game though isn't anywhere even close to the level of the original data though.

@osella: It doesn't have to be that expensive, since two tracks have been laser scanned by modders already. It's expensive, but depending on the case it doesn't have to be incessantly expensive. I do agree with you though that the money can be spent in better ways, especially when taking into account how much of the data is really usable once the track is in-game anyway.

 

Yes exactly. There is a way to compress the data though, Trimble uses its own surface files called .ttm's which is a compressed surface file. Scanners are the next best thing in my industry the problem is the amount of data they generate...well thats not the problem its how to efficiently use the data.