Radiosity is a very effective way to add vertex colour-based ambient occlusion to your terrain objects, and is a fairly easy step to perform near the end of the track creation process, when all key elements are in place. Applying some kind of ambient occlusion to the terrain will result in a much better sense of depth of the environment, both in cockpit and replay cameras. Please read the “3ds Max - Radiosity” section on the excellent Polycount Wiki here: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Ambient_occlusion_vertex_color Notes: When you assign the vertex colours, they will overwrite any existing values, so manual vertex colour painting should be done after the Radiosity pass, in a new VertexPaint layer on top of it (Multiply). Works best if all terrain pieces are attached and edge vertices are welded. Before attaching all terrain objects, assign a unique smoothing group to each of them, so you can quickly select and detach them again when you’re happy with the results. Walls (concrete, armco, …), structures (buildings, bridges, …), tree walls, … should be left visible; crowds, vehicles and other small TSOs should be hidden. Any triangles using a RealRoad material should be detached from the terrain objects (they don’t belong in the terrain objects in the first place!) to prevent assigning vertex colours to them. A higher ‘Initial Quality’ value will take (much) longer to process, but will result in a cleaner result. Typically, ISI tracks use 98.5 - 99.
