REFLECTEDENV (global plane) is used when no local reflector is set for object. When track scale is big (huge in this case), you need to think carefully where put local reflector planes. Every single local reflection plane will eat up video memory. When you already have used 1GB+ for track textures, careful planning and testing is essential to keep this track useful as many players as possible. If I may suggest, put local planes only on those areas which are relatively flat. In real life, mirror-like reflection from tarmac rarely happens on down- or uphill sections of track. Remember that REFMAP0 (car reflections) and STATIC (static cubic reflections, used places like tso building windows etc.) will eat up resources too. And we need to save some resources for cars also! Cheers!
Thanks for the tips Jka! So if I understood you correctly, in this case, I shouldn't use a global plane, and use as few local planes as possible. Is size of the plane a factor too? For example, my first plane covers the full paddock area, plus the dotthinger hohe behind and the highway beside it. I thought I would add the highway as well, since there are a few parts we see it, so I was going to add it. However, after reading your comment, I think I'll trim there! For the moment, I believe that most windows doesnt have cubic reflections. I believe they are part of the whole wall texture for building. They aren't a separate object. There is actually one cube mapper that I'm aware of, and it's the blue glass at the paddock area. I've seen it work in a few different angles, but it doesnt always work, or so it seems. I haven't looked much into cube mapping yet. The biggest tip in your comment was the fact that reflections rarely appears in slopes. The thing is, I never did 3d before, so I never really took time to observe those kind of behaviors in real life. Plus, I go out so little these days.. One last question remains unanswered tho, the plane itself, how should it be placed? Perfectly aligned to the road, above, below, or right on it?
@pecliar, maybe this vid helps: http://www.virtualr.net/le-mans-1991-1996-for-rfactor-2-–-rain-preview-video
lol Two of BES mods tested (Porsche adn i forgot the other one now) are crashing to desktop when loading track is finished. The Ford GT didn´t. But did not tested in another tracks yet this specific cars. Just warning. I´ll come back here if is in my side the problem. Awesome work. This track deserve to slowest car i have in my mod list just to appreciate the scenery (and my dad be able to drive)
Ok, I have few more questions regarding reflections. This is going to be harder than I thought, I believe. My first question is, is the plane acceptable for the road? I also read in the guide, to position planes under the object to be reflected. I thought the plane needed to cover the racesurface. But the guide wasn't mentioning if the object was nearby, or hovering over the road, like the start finish gate, shown in an example somewhere. So, in my case, would I need to break up that plane in more parts, so it perfectly align with the road? Next question, the bush surrounded in the red circle. If I assign the local reflection to the plane we see, it will reflect on the road, but how do I get it to also reflect on the runaway of the paddock area? The building in yellow, I believe they should reflect both on the road and paddock area? Since they are large enough? How is it done? The stuff that is a bit in the far scenery, like circled in blue, does it need to be reflected? And do I need to enlarge the plane to include them in, or I assign it to the plane above road, and if there should be a reflection on the road, it will show? Another question arise, at the edge of the reflection plane we see, in the length direction, there are trees. I guess that I will need to break up the tree objects to fit the reflection planes, since they can cover quite some large areas. But those on the very edges of the plane, I will assign to the plane we see, and the one past it, to the following plane I will create. But when switching camera, and seeing it from the other way around, the trees would need to reflection on the other reflection plane? This is all not very clear atm! With my initial try, which isnt this plane we see, it was larger, and covering all the paddock, the race surface in front, and the highway further back. And longer. But the plane was mostly aligned with the paddock, which resulted in what seemed correct reflections. However, when I drove on the racesurface, the reflections didnt appeared right, and seemed to be missing elsewhere, even tho I was pretty sure I was still in the plane boundary. I also had a look at the video linked, and what I understood mainly, is that I will have a very hard time trying to get the guardrails to reflect, if even possible in this case. But this video is made a while ago, are there any other technique used recently to overcome this limitation?
Actually, the BES mod is known to have many problems. I remember when I tried it, before I started nord, on silverstone, croft and limerock, they all acted weird, bounced here and there, and what not. They also are much heavier than ISI's or t5 and egt series. I remember, I couldn't run more than 4-6 BES cars on silverstone with my previous setup. On the other hand, the egt and t5 series are very well done, and you can run a nice grid with them, even on nord. I doubt the problem is with your computer, it is more likely the BES mod itself being too heavy. You may want to try running without any AI, and see if it helps. But give a try to the free demo of the t5 series. I recently got hold of them, and I'm very pleased with them. Beside a few things, mainly sounds, they could be released with ISI in their name, and few people would notice it isnt really ISI. The quality is high, and they seem to be well made as well, in the sense of resources they take, didnt seemed much higher than the best from isis, but I didnt went deep, just looking at fps...
Thank you PLeclair for your continued efforts on the funnest circuit in the world! The track looks great without HDR or with it, Thanks Tosch your part in this effort and all others that helped!
Speaking of HDR--which profile should we consider the "default" one (standard issue, no fancy or extreme settings)?
Actually, none of them can be considered extreme. It is a matter of personal taste. I myself find the 342v2gamma the best for me at the moment. Althought I also liked contrast too. @o0thx11380o I already thought about doing something like this. There is actually quite a bit more tatoos on the real track than the virtual one, so adding some could only make it more interesting. And adding some that is related directly to the track, rfactor, and stuff like that only further tailor our version. If I could find a way of listing all the people who participated in this thread, I could add those name in. Adding the donators only would be a tougher feat, since I have the real names of the donators, and I dunno who they are in the forums. I'm not sure if people would like their real names in. I use my real name, but not everyone is. But now that I made my first tatoo and know how to make more, I will likely be adding some too. If anyone have good pictures of the real tatoos of nord, that I could use and trace with the pen tool to make a tatoo of, let me know, I could also add few real tatoos to the track. I also thought of increasing the current tatoo resolution this way. By tracing them with the pen tool and turning them into vectors. But this is a time consuming process. Will do this later.
Oh, and I have worked yesterday at improving the guardrails textures! I was waiting for an answer for reflections, so I decided I'd improve the guardrails. There was much to do, but I thought I could add more variety to them. So I took some rust, scratch, etc textures, and modified all guardrails with different scratch, and damage to them. So all the guardrails are now unique. Well, they are repeating themselves countless of times, but the 14 different guardrails textures there was, which only had different band coloring, now have different damage to them. It looks so good, that I decided to package what I have now and send it for you. Unfortunately, since I had to modify the mats and generate new gmts, an update wasn't really possible. Plus I dunno how good it would have been. Having two updates for the same version. But there isnt only the guardrails, the new background order is in effect, and the landscape is looking quite a bit better this way. So, here is the download link for 0.97k: https://mega.co.nz/#!oIYwgQQS!HC0ne0uy4vG-UR6CQJ8o2AacGnBozDaBhccQm12Ngqo I could not hold on these guardrails for longer, I believe you will enjoy them much! EDIT: It may or may not be worth mirroring this version, since the changes are little, compared to last few releases, but nevertheless, the visual impact is major. So I thought it would be a good idea to share, and let you decide if you wish to update or wait.
Donation sent to you, peclair. Great job on the greatest track of them all. Your dedication (and everybody helping, like Tosch) to that project is nothing short of amazing. Well Done!
Hello Pleclair Just wanted to say thank you to you and Tosh for bringing this track up to such a high quality,i know its been said over and over throughout this thread its almost unbelievable that this is the same track you started off with simply amazing.Great work guys and very much appreciated
Thanks guys! I know I say it often too, but I never tire hearing such comments! It gives me motivation and a reason to put in as much into it. I'm currently working on something that was bugging me, and some people for a while now. I'm spotting all the trees that are too thin, and scale them wider so they look natural. There was a pretty large variations on the width of trees, to create variety and make the same tree not look all the same. Plus, I believe I have swapped 2-3 trees that were made to be half width than height, and used square 2048x2048 trees instead. Plus, I have spotted a few floating tree, with one really up in the air. And some trees still too deep into the ground. I had fixed this a while ago, but since then, I moved a few trees so they do not touch each other, and sometimes the ground varies alot, so moving a tree 5-10m can result sometimes in the tree being in the air or into the ground. So I'll go over them one last time. And make sure they are all flush to the ground (well a little in to be exact). After this will be done, I'll be working on the bushes, converting the remaining x shape bushes to billboards, and convert the x trees that are left in the bushes to billboard trees. Then should come the x shape grass. This should be quite interesting, can't wait to see the side hills where we see those x shape grass, completely covered with billboards Should look pretty good, specially at night I'll probably release a version in between each. So when I'll be done with the trees, I'll share with you, and so on.
Well K seems to crash my rFactor. I haven't lowered any settings but I shouldn't have to with 3gb of vRam. Will do more testing later.
Thank you Pleclair for latest version of Tourist Nordschleife. When I tried the k-version for the first time, I recognised hudge moire-pattern with the new guidrails, which makes driving not really a pleasure. for those who don't know this effect, read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiré_pattern The effect occurs when horizontal structures with high contrast like guidrails must be rendered in an small angle from viewer. Our Monitor mask has a limited resolution, so this is let me call it the sampling pattern. When the spatial frequency (linepairs/mm) of a texture is higher then the half (nyquist theoreme) of the spatial frequency of the sampling pattern (monitor resolution) then the moire effect occurs. As the spatial frequency of the structures rises with the distance from the viewer, the moire effect must occure in a certain distance, you can only avoid this using infinite monitor resolution (which is technically not possible). As you can see in the K-version picture the horizontal stuctures of the guidrails show much bigger moire-pattern than in j version, even if the top edge shows ugly stair pattern, j version looks better while driving. It's not that visible when looking at a picture, but while driving this effect is not an eye candy. Only 8xEQ, SSAA is able to reduce the moire-pattern, but with that setting I have very poor performance. You will not be able to surpress the moire-pattern with textures, as this is a sampling problem of vertical monitor resolution and the vertical spatial frequency of the texture which is rendered. What you can do is reduce the contrast of the texture, thus the moire-effect will not obtrude that much. Furthermore, if you have transparent parts in the guidrails, and the textures behind the rendered guidrail is very dark, you will automatically get high contrast wihc will result in hudge moir effect. Both pictures are taken using: 4xAA EQ, MSAA, to see the effect you must view pictures with full resolution (1920x1080) This picture shows this effect with j-version View attachment 10777 Here Is same picture with k-version: View attachment 10778 I hope I could explain the problem, so everybody can understand what I mean. Sorry for my bad english.
I haven't noticed this, but again, I'm running with 16x AA, so that might explain why. But I know how to make it a bit less of a problem. I have bumped the minus bias on the guardrails to -3.0, from -2.0 I had originally. At 16xx AA, it worked nice, and the guardrails are looking great, but it might be the source of the problem without a strong AA. Thanks for letting me know, I'll look into improving this. EDIT: Regarding the guardrails, they aren't transparent, and do not have any alpha channels. I'm pretty sure the visual impact by alpha masking the parts in between the bands, and the bottom, versus the performance hit from using alpha trans on so many more objects would be worth it. Doubt it... That makes me think... I was looking at guardrails (3d) from silverstone and mores yesterday, and I noticed they even have a thickness. I didnt noticed this when I first looked at them a while back. That means the number of polys for such objects is quite high. I doubt we will be able to have guardrails such as these in Nord. That would probably more than double than actual poly count. But all in due time. We'll see once we get there. EDIT2: Just thinking, meanwhile, try settings allow negative bias to clamp instead of allow. It should solve your moire pattern problem for now.
