An other possibility would be abload.de Anyhow even without pictures this sounds amazing and unbelievable! I'm curious if my 2D alter ego will still stand all around the Nordschleife!?
Does anyone have any solution to make the AI better on this track? They are for the most part god awfull. I don't care if I **** the AI over for any other track as I use rfactor 2 only for nordschleife.
Good Morning guys! Finally!!!! 1.6 is online here: https://mega.co.nz/#!dFAXEZyC!slddi-jr8TNnXpvnIq5wc9Zi9UTFDRA7oFMUCoR9WWQ It isn't exactly what I would have liked to release, but as I wrapped up the lap yesterday doing my trees, I thought that I would upload what I have, so you guys can enjoy this for the weekend. I believe the issues present aren't really a showstopper. So, the trees are mostly done now. It is, as I call it, Real Forest (tm) j/k. It just seems the Real prefix get used a lot these days There is a few LODs problems, some grass mats I newly made, and forgot to add to tdf (so no reaction from those piece of grass, but the track is on the tarmac right? no worries, it will get fixed). Also, at the paddock, there is a flying fence post. Near kallenhard, I fixed the road side and forgot to match up the road as well. I've also noticed a crack around a paddock island yesterday. All this stuff happens because I'm currently having a really hard time working on Nord these days. The track is heavy and I've reached the 32bit limit a while ago already, and I must work with parts of the track. The 64bit version of the exporter would be highly needed. So when I was working on the trees, I had a few forests active, along with a few terrain pieces, and all else in another max file, cause otherwise Max would always crash, and most often than not, while saving or autosaving. So yeah, I lost countless time crashing for 1.6... it wasn't nearly as much fun as it was. Please ISI, work on that 64 bit plugin... I will never start Nord from scratch using the 32 bit version... if there was a 64bit, I'd be tempted. I've also redone the whole mountain range from Kallenhard to around bergwerk. Since I let go of the ugly tree line and covered the mountains with trees, this whole mountain range was sort of off, and not nearly high enough, since these were built with mostly only tree lines. What I did was take the terrain (from the terrain plugin) mesh I did a while ago, and cut part of that mesh and fitted it under the mesh we have as good as I could and conformed my mesh to the accurate one. It isn't a perfect fit, but it should be a whole lot closer to what it should be, than what it was before. So for all these reasons, I will not update the first post once again. I don't want to make this official yet, next release will. Another thing, in the process of making new forests, all the more particular trees that wasn't part of forests but parts of tree rows are gone now. I'll import them in my current forest scene and modify my forest to include them. I'm talking about the high and slim evergreen trees, etc... I've read the comments about image hosters suggestions, and I'll pass. I will not certainly pay to host any images. So I'll leave this part up to you guys, making screenshots and videos. The surprise effect is just better when you get to try it out without knowing first what you will see Regarding the AI, I know it isn't as good as it could be, but I've tried once, and it's not easy to run 20km at 30km/h or so... and when I tried the resulting aiw, the game crashed on loading the track. So I won't be digging into this for the moment now. When things will be more final, and I have less things to do, if no one did it, I'll look more into it, but it's 30-40 mins minimum every try at the speed you must go... so it's not an easy things to do... it would be nice if we could visually do the path... using splines or something like this. Oh, and the bushes haven't been done all around track.. I started the forest work at the dottinger hohe start, as I always do, and was making forest+bushes, but I stopped around antoniusbusche and concentrated only on trees. It was way too much to handle at once with 32bit... 64bit had no problems handling the scene, but working with everything in white (the mats don't work) isn't exactly helpful. I would need to convert the gmats to standard to work in 64 bit and back to gmats once I'm ready to export... unthinkable if you ask me. ** Please ISI, make a 64bit version of the exporter, pretty please... that would help tremendously. Thank you! **
Wow... you've been very very busy, there are trees everywhere ^^ Thank you so much for all the time and effort you've been putting into this track. It is truly wonderful.
Oh yeah I was I haven't made the count, but it would be safe to assume that my smallest forest now (not counting those few small patches) have more trees than the largest before. And the largest forest now probably have a lot more trees than all of what we had before. I tried to follow what I was seeing from the satellite image as good as I could, where I could, cause there are parts that must be done otherwise, like on the dottinger hohe, where on the left side there is what seems to be a large parking lot or something like this, and we don't have that... so in those case, I looked up what we had before and replaced the tree line that was blocking view with a wide row of trees instead. I know, it might not be the optimal way to do it, I must have used a couple more trees than I should have, but I tried to only fully cover mountains when it was really needed. Most of the time, in cases where I knew we might not see the bottom of a mountain, I skipped putting trees there, and tried to only cover what we would see in cockpit or replay view and with playing with the camera a little. And I think I managed that pretty neatly. You hardly notice any places where the trees cut, except if you really start to move the camera around and look for it. The experience resulting is one of a kind I think... I never raced any track in any game where the forest was like this, and I'm really excited to have managed to pull this off. The Forest Pack plugin was really a good purchase, and I don't regret it one instant. The beauty of this is, my forests are all moddable at will. I wasn't forced to collapse the custom objects to edit poly or mesh to export, I used an edit mesh mod to export the custom forest objects. So I will likely play some more, and define more regions according to the forest type I see on the satellite image. For now, I had 3 types of forest I made that gave me highest possible density without flickering and colliding. One was made of most bushy trees, with very few evergreens (like on the dottinger hohe), another was made from this preset but increased the EG possibility to a bit lower than the bushy trees, like maybe 60 bushy, 40 eg.. and I have another with mostly EG and few bushy. Like in Adenauer forest... There is also a few spots that I spent a bit more time and made zones with more EG incased in a zone mostly bushy. There are quite a few spots like this on the satellite image where it seems a large patch of EGs is incased in a larger patch of bushy tree, and vice versa. So I will likely play and fiddle some more with these... I highly recommend Forest Pack to anyone needing to place a medium to large amount of trees... it is nothing short of awesome. EDIT: Sorry, my bad, you can use Forest pack to scatter anything.. not just trees and nature. I will use it to scatter the billboard crowds later, the cars, and other flying stuff! You should really have a look at it. Search Forest Pack on goggle.
Later on, I will redo the trees normal maps and I will lessen the normal sphere around it... the shading is a tad too much and I think it should be more subtle. I believe the normal sphere was set at 80% opacity, will try 60%...
Just had a quick lap and it looks funtastic! Great work, but you are right on the trees. The difference between direct lighting and ambient lighting is to big. Maybe you can adjust the normal maps to receive more light from the top (have more white areas in the normal map).
Thanks! Nord is so huge, that any purchase that I can make that will save me any substantial amount of time is highly benefical. If I had used the free ultimate painter I used to scatter my bushes previously, I would have probably got burned out and abandon. When you work with tools that saves you large amount of time, doing tasks like these suddenly is no more burden. Hmmm I hope that it makes sense in english The more I dig into this, the more I'm loving this. Oh, another thing I forgot to mention, the two bridges are now brand new. I have managed to fit in the two bridges that was sent to me a while ago by Richard on the forum. I wasn't able to fit them at the time, and I had put them on the side, but I gave them a try again, and it was piece of cake now. I had to retexture them a bit, as they weren't up to the quality of texture we have now, but the model is 100x better than what we had. I also have a much better green hell cafe, that I also managed to fit in place of the old one. It is not used yet, cause it's not textured at all. I tried to texture it with what textures I have, but I cannot do a job worthy of using it. I cannot really use the old textures either, as they were photos of the side of the building... and this cafe have a lot more geometry and I must textures every parts... I don't have all the resources to do this, and not good enough texturing yet to make them up myself. If anyone is willing to do the job tho, I could send you the model and you could texture it, it is already fitted in game, just hidden for now. If ISI would release a 64 bit version of the plugin, I might be tempted to start a kickstarter project (or another crowd sourcing website, I'm not too familiar with these, so I would likely need help settings this up etc), to make an accurate version of Nord from scratch. I'm not at a level I would feel confident doing so now, but I now know I will get there. If you asked me this a few months ago, I would have likely said otherwise, but I'm getting better and feel that in a year or so, I might just be there. So I will continue working on the com8 version for now and push it as far as I can... learn and gain skills in the process. who knows what will happen! I would be probably up to moving temporarily to germany to be able to go there on a more regular basis to have live references for the track... that's how dedicated I am
Thanks Tosch, and good to see you again! I was wondering if you were still around or not! I believe it's the first time I see you post since I made 1.5 update.. but again, I might have skipped a page or two... I'm sorry, it's not that I don't care, my time is just missing. Another thing I will also do when the trees will be finalized, I'll play with vertex coloring on the ground, as I did to darken the forest floor in adenauer forest, so it don't look like the grass underneath receives too much light for the density of trees around. This should really help realism. Regarding the normal maps, as it is a sphere I used (you showed me this trick), it is already receiving more light from the top, but the opacity of the sphere is too high, I will lessen it a bit and see what it does. Or are you talking about adding a top gradient to the top of the trees in addition to the sphere? or just highlighting the top with the top color (like a bevel?) For this matter, I will be able to do much better normal maps now that I have nDo2... I started with crazybumps (didnt buy tho, couldnt afford at the time, so I used the trial) and found shadermap soon after that was better and cheaper. So I bought shadermap.. but now have nDo2 (actually the suite, got the educational one tho)... I'm not yet a master of it, far from it, have only done one normal map from scratch now, the road drain seens in kallenhard and other places.. but I'll check out tutorials and play a lot more with it when I get there. But it should enable me to do better normal maps... cant wait to learn about dDo2 as well...
Myself I've got no clue at all on how to replace treelines with brand new trees when porting french tracks to rf2... Going to test this new baby as it just finishes downloading !!!
If you've got 3dsimed, check out the track with it, you'll see from bird's eye view what they look like. The way I did with Forest pack was set up my reference trees (with the size I wanted them to be, so I resized all trees and they should be proportional now) and import them into the Forest Library of the Forest plugin. Then from there, I made presets which made sure the density was as high as possible without collisions, and with the forest plugin, it is really easy to scatter, and you have a lot of options. When I started using it, I had no idea really how it should be done, so I started by defining regions with splines, and using those regions to fill forests with the plugin, with the preset I wanted. That was much faster than anything I had tried, but was still a lot of work. Then I discovered the paint region of the forest pack plugin, and from then on, I used those to paint the trees with the presets I wanted, where I wanted. All those regions are moddable, I can erase and add to them, substract other forests from them, or other objects, and you can also convert paint to spline and spline to paint. Useful when you wanna use the same painting region for another forests in the same area, like trees+grass. So, to replace a tree line, I set my brush size to something like 20-40m can'T remember exactly, but large enough to have a couple of trees wide, cause otherwise it looks too scarce and you easily see thru if too thin. And painted where the tree line should have been. If I didnt had Forest, I would probably have used Ultimate Painter (free) or ScatterFX (which I bought before Forest, thinking I could save money, but it wasn't up to the task over Nord.. but I got reimbursed and bought Forest)... but for smaller 3-5km tracks, it could be a nice alternative... not nearly as good as Forest, but it is a pretty solid scatter script (not plugin, therefore more limited and less powerful and speedy) but it has some really nice options to scatter, and you could probably create similar things with it, only would take a lot more time and more troubles, with no options to modify your objects after, except redo from scratch. Let me know if you need more help.
Make sure you race the track at all time of day.. its worth it Start your laps early at 5-6am with 45-60x time accel and enjoy Over at Breidscheid, early in the morning, when the sun is just over in the trees up the mountain... its a really nice view check it out! EDIT: Forgot to mention it again, but if you remember a few posts ago, I was talking about the tdf modifications I did. Don't forget to abuse the darker patches of tarmac now... overall the grip is improved all around track.. Most of the track was set to 0.95, its now at 0.96... not much, but I believe this is accurate, given race track made from isi's range from 0.97-1.01 or so for normal tarmac... nord should be less grippy than a gp circuit imo. But the main changes happen in the other sections, mainly the new tarmac patches... those parts happened to be defined in a section of the tdf called dusty or dirty roads. So when I originally set this up, in the beginning, I didn't knew the mat names, and went with what I was reading in the sections comments. So I had set the dirty roads at the same set by ISI, which was 0.9. So the darker patches were in fact .05 lower than the lighter one... there goes the grip issues most were experiencing. I also raised the cracked and bumpy sections grip from high 0.8x to 0.9 to 0.94 and 0.95. So a little lower than the average 0.96. I thought I had gotten all dusts down as well, and I think I missed a mat or two. Will see to this.
[RELEASE] Nordschleife Tourist v0.97n beta Ok thank you for all these infos! I've got both simed and max. I will have a look to trees with your advises. The only thing I notice is that some trees are going through some barreers and that looks a bit strange.
[RELEASE] Nordschleife Tourist v0.97n beta I noticed some grip variations on patches and this felt really good man. i agree for the grip, less than a GP track is better!!!
Really nice update. Great work pleclair!! Quite a lot graphic glitches and stuff atm, but I can definitely see great potential Maybe too much leaf trees but some places are simply stunning
The trees look great but the automated hdr is to agressive (bright parts are to bright, dark parts are to dark). Here is a hdr profile with more ambient light that should brighten up the dark areas. To install extract the zip into the settings folder. "currentProfile.hdp" is included, so there should be no need to switch the hdr profile ingame. View attachment Ring_Tourist_HDR_Build660.zip
