Test track for anyone to use

I was just looking over your track tonight just to see how you have things setup, now to be clear blending seams like you did with the edge and 2nd surface track that HAS to be done right at the end right, when there is nothing else to do except that. According to that new rF2 track guide I guess.

Any tips on how you did the alpha vertex or is there youtube videos on this..lol, is this sort of a painting on the track texture itself or do you make something about the thickness of the white line on the side of the road and then paint or drag a line in there. I'm very confused on this part but I want to do things right with Zolder which will have to re-texture the roads just for that alone and for the other tracks I am building myself.

The last thing I wanted to mention was I came under the impression that all textures needed to be set to shader T1, maybe I miss read that some where's because when I looked at your material editor you had 5 textures which will be 7 for the real road and marbles but I see you didn't add them but what I got most confused about that these textures seemed to have all different shaders and there seems to be 50 different ones in there but you have T1 and then MANY T1 mul T2 or whatever there called plus many multiple versions of other ones. Is there some where's that tells you which shader you should use for what? I get some of them but others make no sense.

All this is very, very confusing if your a noob and haven't designed tracks for years with the other game. That's what kind of sucks about the tutorials, there geared towards people who have used this stuff before and a noob can barely understand it..lol

Also while I'm here and sorry for another question but I keep thinking of things to say when typing out another, when you add your objects and are about to export your track, do you need to click on each object and put a reference to it in the .scn file or does the exporter do this for you?

If others can chime in that would be great to, should really start a new thread with tips for noobs and have the questions answered there and if you want I can copy these questions to that instead of here. It's possible some of these answers can be on other rF sites but there's just to damn many of them to look through out all those forums for info and some of that info might not even be useful with this newer game especially with some shaders or having to now put your lines ABOVE the road texture, wow that probably won't be fun..lol
 
Firstly and most importantly, you do not want to use any vertex alpha or vertex colour on the track, the race line blend and marbles are controlled by vertex alpha and colour. So no manual blending on the track or real road wont work.

Secondly and as equally important, you do have to leave this till last, once you start editing a mesh that has vert alpha values, it will get jumbled up and loose the correct information causing all kinds of funny looking things. If you do have to edit the mesh you will need to go into tools > channel info and clear the vert alpha channel on all objects you edit, then go back and redo the blending.

For terrain blending you can use the vertex paint modifier and set it to paint vertex alpha, right click the object and select object properties, then turn on vertex channel display and in the drop down menu select vertex alpha. In the vertex paint modifier set it to alpha and start painting away. You will only see a shade of black if you are doing it on gmotor materials. But before you do that, have a look at Bink's post here where he mentions using a dx shader so he can see the blend, then change it to a gmat when he is finished. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...-Tech-pdf...-(-)?p=37082&viewfull=1#post37082

You need to use a lerp vertex alpha shader, any shader in the list that has [t1 lerp t2 etc etc vertex alpha] can be used to blend. *Note, don't be confused by vertex alpha mask, that's a different way of blending and not important for you just now.

t1 will be your base texture, t2 will be the texture you blend in.
*A tip, you want to be careful with what you blend with what, some shader-texture combinations don't blend well, ie, you cant blend the grass with the road, because the road shader (using spec, multa and bump) will come out completely different to what the grass shader comes out like and when it meets the road it will look like a solid line, because the blend will be using the spec bump etc from the grass shader.
What you do there is create a separate blend mesh which uses alpha transparency and the decal tag (look at the 'edge' mesh in my test track, it goes between the gravel and the road)

Using what shader you want is user prefrence, most of these new shaders have their purpose in their name, ie, infield grass, road, water, etc. But the other most commonly used shader is Bump Specular map t1, which is used on things like concrete walls and buildings, etc.


In the scene rollout of the exporter is a pair of radio buttons, 'all' or 'selected'. 'All' will export everything you see in the viewport to the scn file, (it wont export hidden objects) and the 'selected' option is self explanatory.
I prefer to use selected for 2 main reasons,
1, I can use the select objects window, switch everything into alphabetical order, then select all and ths will cause the scn to write everything in alphabetical order, otherwise it will write the scn in order of when the object was created.
2, When I only want to export a few items to test them quickly the viewer will load a lot faster. Otherwise you will have to wait forever for the viewer to load the whole track. (we don't have a viewer yet but when we do :))

I hope I haven't confused you, if you are confused, just get your hands into it and start playing, see what you can come up with.
 
mianiak said:
Firstly and most importantly, you do not want to use any vertex alpha or vertex colour on the track, the race line blend and marbles are controlled by vertex alpha and colour. So no manual blending on the track or real road wont work.
Click to expand...

Yep freew67 has a great video tutorial on how to put down the race line (real road texture) and align it so I'm good there.

For terrain blending you can use the vertex paint modifier and set it to paint vertex alpha, right click the object and select object properties, then turn on vertex channel display and in the drop down menu select vertex alpha. In the vertex paint modifier set it to alpha and start painting away. You will only see a shade of black if you are doing it on gmotor materials. But before you do that, have a look at Bink's post here where he mentions using a dx shader so he can see the blend, then change it to a gmat when he is finished. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...-Tech-pdf...-(-)?p=37082&viewfull=1#post37082
Click to expand...

Ok so now I am clear that I cannot put that white line nor any other line on the track or track blends till the very end, I maybe was thinking that I would have had to put some kind of plane or box that followed the edge of the track where I want the white/yellow lines to go and then Material Editor and place a texture 1mm on top of it. Ok so it IS blending with the vertex paint in the modifier/mesh editing tab which I just found..lol

I also noticed that your edge texture is just a blend with alpha around it so how do you exactly paint this because wouldn't it just sit on the surface or does using a paint brush thingy in the vertex paint just keep placing that texture down where ever you want it? I also seen that you had a ring around the track where this edge texture gets paint blended in, did you make this first just like the surface track blend (separate mesh like you talk about below) I know I can probably see this by looking at some videos on vertex painting now in Max but hey I thought I would bother you some more..lol

t1 will be your base texture, t2 will be the texture you blend in.
*A tip, you want to be careful with what you blend with what, some shader-texture combinations don't blend well, ie, you cant blend the grass with the road, because the road shader (using spec, multa and bump) will come out completely different to what the grass shader comes out like and when it meets the road it will look like a solid line, because the blend will be using the spec bump etc from the grass shader.
What you do there is create a separate blend mesh which uses alpha transparency and the decal tag (look at the 'edge' mesh in my test track, it goes between the gravel and the road)
Click to expand...

So is this why you have two blends between the gravel and track texture?

Using what shader you want is user preference, most of these new shaders have their purpose in their name, ie, infield grass, road, water, etc. But the other most commonly used shader is Bump Specular map t1, which is used on things like concrete walls and buildings, etc.
Click to expand...

While it would be great to have a max file track to look at since yours only had a few textures so I could check the material editor and find out what is using what I think my main concern was for the road and grass and walls since that is what you see the most, I know track side objects are more critical then grandstands, people, cars and such..lol

I hope I haven't confused you, if you are confused, just get your hands into it and start playing, see what you can come up with.
Click to expand...

I'll play around a bit, I'll see if I can use that vertex paint tool because that is the one that I will need to learn good besides adding mesh but there are good video tutorials on this.

Thank you very much for answering my questions, I'm sure I'll have more at some point. :D
 
Ok so now I am clear that I cannot put that white line nor any other line on the track or track blends till the very end
Click to expand...
Nope you cant blend anything in with the track using lerp, because as I said, real road uses vertex alpha, lerp blending also uses vertex alpha, if you lerp blend things in with the track it will cause confusion when real road goes to adjust the vert alpha.

What you do here is use a decal layer much like the edge blend for lines such as pit box lines, s/f line etc (small lines)
As for the lines on the side that go all way around the track, you can cut them into the track mesh itself and use the same road shader on them. In the joesville sample piece, look at the roadlines mesh.

re the edge blend, have a look at the texture in photoshop, check what I did with the alpha layer. Basically I took the gravel texture, cropped it to a thin long strip and painted a rough line on each side in the alpha layer.

Thank you very much for answering my questions, I'm sure I'll have more at some point.
Click to expand...
Your Welcome.
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So you make somthing for rf2 but it does not install and run BS
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I think you missed the entire point of this exercise. It's not supposed to work, its simply just a heap of experiments I have been doing in 3dmax that I have shared with others so they can get some idea on what to do. If people can get it working, then that's just a bonus for them :P
 
What you do here is use a decal layer much like the edge blend for lines such as pit box lines, s/f line etc (small lines)
As for the lines on the side that go all way around the track, you can cut them into the track mesh itself and use the same road shader on them. In the joesville sample piece, look at the roadlines mesh.

re the edge blend, have a look at the texture in photoshop, check what I did with the alpha layer. Basically I took the gravel texture, cropped it to a thin long strip and painted a rough line on each side in the alpha layer.
Click to expand...

Yeah I read about that stuff being decal when exporting out but still figured they were talking about it still being a blend so it couldn't have been done till the last minute, yeah this would be great if you could add the decal before putting objects down on the race track. First things first though, I need to follow that video and get this track texture on, seems I am doing everything possible to avoid doing it..hehe

Can you import Lidar Data into Max because I have access to Lidar data for the track itself, I know in this video I am about to watch and follow this guy uses a height map on a plane but I don't have no height map and using a Dem is so off usually you can do a better job just eyeballing the elevations especially at these 2 tracks that barely have any elevations at all.

I did look at that Joesville track mesh and it was pretty impressive and so perfectly aligned. I believe the part you wanted me to look at was the racing painted line between the flatter part of the track and the banked one. Yeah that is a work of art and once I get to that part I hope to find some videos on how to do that, I'm sure it's not that hard but being a some what n00b at Max it's not easy to figure out, I knew how to do some things before and can make some simple objects but actually working and adjusting mesh I never have done and is over my head right now..lol
 
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Cant get my head around what materials i need to make a road, the quick n dirty pdf doesn't help much...!...ho hum!
 
I was hoping to use a sample track in gJED Editor to see the the settings, my old version of 3DS Max wont load the Dev plugins...! :(
 
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