Hey guys!
I figured I'd drop by and update you on what's happening! It's been a while and I've made good progress since.
But there is something I need to tell you first, I have come to conclusion that I cannot do the 24h layout as I have planned. I will keep working on that mesh and use it for the tourist instead. The reason is, the gp circuit is in really bad shape. I haven't had a good look at it before I made the announcement, but it almost looks like that part was made differently from the whole rest of the track. For instance, there is no track edges. Right after the road polygons, there are large grass polys, and no edges.
I cleaned up a whole lot in this area, removed all overlapping faces, and there was many. I started work on it, and added edges for the stretch going in the circuit, but when I got to an hairpin, I was a bit in the blue as how to handle the wires and everything. The road connections are horribly done, and there is no way I can smooth them without redoing them all, and I have no clue how to rewire those section properly to have a good density for rf2.
A few days ago, I was really curious to see how things were in game, and at that point, I hadn't seen any of my changes live in game. So I took a day, and split the track and export it to see how it looks in game. I had applied a one time mesh smooth on all roads, including gp, and it wasn't enough. The gp is still very rough with one mesh smooth, and the tourist is far better, but seems it really need that tessellation to make it perfect.
So I was a bit bummed out with the fact that the gp section is horrible... but if I were to continue in that direction, it might took me too much time at the moment... or we would have the tourist looking good, and the gp circuit looking sub-par.. and I don't want such a huge contrast between both.
So here is how the mesh is looking right now:
As you can see, everything that I went over is completely redone. One would look at that mesh and could never guess where it comes from. It's all brand new! I've hunted all overlapping faces, edges, vertices, isolated vertices, multiple edges, and t-vertices... and very few remains. I had to let go a few in the bridges sections... but everything is now connected together.
Since I never done terrain blending, I tried to think ahead and add vertices and geometry in areas where I wanna blend some textures in. I'd like to use a forest floor textures for areas where there is heavy trees... there shouldn't be heavy grass in those areas...
As you can see from the number of polys and verts in the screenshots, the clean up I did accounted for a lot, with all that extra geometry added, I'm still below what I started with when I imported everything. And I'm only a couple 2-3k more polys and verts than I had on my last update here.
So, now you must be thinking, wait, you tried this in dev mode, so where are the screenshots? Here they are
Don't expect to be blown away tho, all mats are still not redefined, and I'm using all default textures for now, since the mapping needs to be redone for a few textures, and I don't want to make it heavier in Max either yet.
But if you are familiar enough with the track and how it looks now, you can extrapolate and imagine what these smooth hills will look like when properly textured and with all trees, fences, etc added!
(screenshots need to be taken into a new post.... too many images again)
I'm still trying hard to come up with something for christmas, but it might be tight. I'm currently past the adeneau bridge. I already went over it already, since I smoothed stuff initially until the village... but after seeing comments about the mesh, and how mesh smooth messed it up, I decided to do it manually, and rewire everything.
I've taken care of all those funky parts like the bilstein bridge, where those parts were an object sloppily added over the terrain... Now those parts are part of the terrain and all connected together.
Really sorry to have gotten your hopes up too fast on the 24h circuit. It will likely still happen, just need to improve further in order to rewire it properly, and add the needed geometry.
But the tourist should be looking reallllllllllly good.
I have also went ahead and bought GTR Evolution so I could have the best reference I can have on PC. I'm not using any parts from it, but I'm using it as a reference on how hills should be etc... again, don't expect it to be exactly like it, it won't be, but it should be closer to reality than what we had before.
Unfortunately, I cannot fix the layout itself. I had already overlapped the 2.2a over google earth's data, and the layout is similar, all the curves are looking about the same etc... but everything is a bit different, and if I overlay the stretches so they mostly fit together, then the rest of the circuit is not matching... and it's not a matter of redoing a corner or two... or three, or four... its the whole thing.
When driving on it, it might not seems all that different, but it is.
I have overlayed evo's version on google earth data, and it is 99% accurate, and the 1% probably comes from my tracing... since there is an area that is screwed on google earth, and I had to extrapolate.
But after driving evo's, I can safely say that the 2.2a version is more interesting anyway, in the sense of driving pleasure. The elevation changes are more pronounced, and some corners tighter... the evo version felt a bit faster.. it is particularly evident in the first corners after the main stretch... the U corner is quite a bit more opened up.
So what I'm trying to do is combine best of both world. I'm using evo as reference on how hills and scenery should be, and I'll keep the 2.2a layout to keep driving pleasure at a maximum! One area that will be quickly noticeable is when you exit the double s turns after the gp overlap, the hills right around the last s turn should be a lot bigger than we have, and I made it look like evo's. Another part that will be striking, it the adeneau bridge. The hills before the U corner should be much smaller, and also runs toward the bridge, and become higher for the bridge section. The hills we had were stopping after the corner, and then a lone hill was supporting the bridge (on the right side)...
Hmm, why not a screenshot to better show what I mean...
Having evo's will also be useful to determine how a few really bad textures should look like, since some were so bad I could hardly figure what is was... and what to replace it with...
@Denstjiro, Funny that you mention it, cause it was something I thought a while ago! And if I wasn't so busy at the moment with what I'm doing, I would probably have done something like add a christmas tree and some decorations in the paddock area, and maybe some tatoos, etc... but I'm already sleeping short nights trying to pull this off for xmas...
@J.Persson regarding the road bumps, I wish to make it more bumpy as well, cause I also think it is too flat. But like it's been said, the original mesh was way too low to have any bumps defined. It was bumpy because the polys were so huge.. But I would feel confident in creating some bumps now, only need to know where they go, and how much bump to apply, and the kind... is it all across the road, or over a defined part, like a pothole or something... althought I doubt there are many of those on the circuit We aren't in Montreal after all! (We have such ugly roads... 
)
So having someone with actual knowledge of the track would help... someone who's ran it many times in real life... cause looking at videos and pictures... unless they are taken for this purpose, to show the bumps and stuff... it will only be guess works... and I can already do that by randomly putting bumps in sections I see the camera shake in videos...
I figured I'd drop by and update you on what's happening! It's been a while and I've made good progress since.
But there is something I need to tell you first, I have come to conclusion that I cannot do the 24h layout as I have planned. I will keep working on that mesh and use it for the tourist instead. The reason is, the gp circuit is in really bad shape. I haven't had a good look at it before I made the announcement, but it almost looks like that part was made differently from the whole rest of the track. For instance, there is no track edges. Right after the road polygons, there are large grass polys, and no edges.
I cleaned up a whole lot in this area, removed all overlapping faces, and there was many. I started work on it, and added edges for the stretch going in the circuit, but when I got to an hairpin, I was a bit in the blue as how to handle the wires and everything. The road connections are horribly done, and there is no way I can smooth them without redoing them all, and I have no clue how to rewire those section properly to have a good density for rf2.
A few days ago, I was really curious to see how things were in game, and at that point, I hadn't seen any of my changes live in game. So I took a day, and split the track and export it to see how it looks in game. I had applied a one time mesh smooth on all roads, including gp, and it wasn't enough. The gp is still very rough with one mesh smooth, and the tourist is far better, but seems it really need that tessellation to make it perfect.
So I was a bit bummed out with the fact that the gp section is horrible... but if I were to continue in that direction, it might took me too much time at the moment... or we would have the tourist looking good, and the gp circuit looking sub-par.. and I don't want such a huge contrast between both.
So here is how the mesh is looking right now:
As you can see, everything that I went over is completely redone. One would look at that mesh and could never guess where it comes from. It's all brand new! I've hunted all overlapping faces, edges, vertices, isolated vertices, multiple edges, and t-vertices... and very few remains. I had to let go a few in the bridges sections... but everything is now connected together.
Since I never done terrain blending, I tried to think ahead and add vertices and geometry in areas where I wanna blend some textures in. I'd like to use a forest floor textures for areas where there is heavy trees... there shouldn't be heavy grass in those areas...
As you can see from the number of polys and verts in the screenshots, the clean up I did accounted for a lot, with all that extra geometry added, I'm still below what I started with when I imported everything. And I'm only a couple 2-3k more polys and verts than I had on my last update here.
So, now you must be thinking, wait, you tried this in dev mode, so where are the screenshots? Here they are
Don't expect to be blown away tho, all mats are still not redefined, and I'm using all default textures for now, since the mapping needs to be redone for a few textures, and I don't want to make it heavier in Max either yet.But if you are familiar enough with the track and how it looks now, you can extrapolate and imagine what these smooth hills will look like when properly textured and with all trees, fences, etc added!
(screenshots need to be taken into a new post.... too many images again)
I'm still trying hard to come up with something for christmas, but it might be tight. I'm currently past the adeneau bridge. I already went over it already, since I smoothed stuff initially until the village... but after seeing comments about the mesh, and how mesh smooth messed it up, I decided to do it manually, and rewire everything.
I've taken care of all those funky parts like the bilstein bridge, where those parts were an object sloppily added over the terrain... Now those parts are part of the terrain and all connected together.
Really sorry to have gotten your hopes up too fast on the 24h circuit. It will likely still happen, just need to improve further in order to rewire it properly, and add the needed geometry.
But the tourist should be looking reallllllllllly good.
I have also went ahead and bought GTR Evolution so I could have the best reference I can have on PC. I'm not using any parts from it, but I'm using it as a reference on how hills should be etc... again, don't expect it to be exactly like it, it won't be, but it should be closer to reality than what we had before.
Unfortunately, I cannot fix the layout itself. I had already overlapped the 2.2a over google earth's data, and the layout is similar, all the curves are looking about the same etc... but everything is a bit different, and if I overlay the stretches so they mostly fit together, then the rest of the circuit is not matching... and it's not a matter of redoing a corner or two... or three, or four... its the whole thing.
When driving on it, it might not seems all that different, but it is.
I have overlayed evo's version on google earth data, and it is 99% accurate, and the 1% probably comes from my tracing... since there is an area that is screwed on google earth, and I had to extrapolate.
But after driving evo's, I can safely say that the 2.2a version is more interesting anyway, in the sense of driving pleasure. The elevation changes are more pronounced, and some corners tighter... the evo version felt a bit faster.. it is particularly evident in the first corners after the main stretch... the U corner is quite a bit more opened up.
So what I'm trying to do is combine best of both world. I'm using evo as reference on how hills and scenery should be, and I'll keep the 2.2a layout to keep driving pleasure at a maximum! One area that will be quickly noticeable is when you exit the double s turns after the gp overlap, the hills right around the last s turn should be a lot bigger than we have, and I made it look like evo's. Another part that will be striking, it the adeneau bridge. The hills before the U corner should be much smaller, and also runs toward the bridge, and become higher for the bridge section. The hills we had were stopping after the corner, and then a lone hill was supporting the bridge (on the right side)...
Hmm, why not a screenshot to better show what I mean...
Having evo's will also be useful to determine how a few really bad textures should look like, since some were so bad I could hardly figure what is was... and what to replace it with...
@Denstjiro, Funny that you mention it, cause it was something I thought a while ago! And if I wasn't so busy at the moment with what I'm doing, I would probably have done something like add a christmas tree and some decorations in the paddock area, and maybe some tatoos, etc... but I'm already sleeping short nights trying to pull this off for xmas...
@J.Persson regarding the road bumps, I wish to make it more bumpy as well, cause I also think it is too flat. But like it's been said, the original mesh was way too low to have any bumps defined. It was bumpy because the polys were so huge..
But I would feel confident in creating some bumps now, only need to know where they go, and how much bump to apply, and the kind... is it all across the road, or over a defined part, like a pothole or something... althought I doubt there are many of those on the circuit We aren't in Montreal after all! (We have such ugly roads... )So having someone with actual knowledge of the track would help... someone who's ran it many times in real life... cause looking at videos and pictures... unless they are taken for this purpose, to show the bumps and stuff... it will only be guess works... and I can already do that by randomly putting bumps in sections I see the camera shake in videos...
