Welcome...

Slimjim said:
Scott or Luc
once you have say a basic track from rF1 converted,
what are the most important extras that will be needed to add to the track.?
wet surface, and other damage to TSO's ?
have the material names changed and or are there any new material names that may add different effects.?
is the rubber build up added by the game like the race grove in rF1.?
same question about the drying line on a wet track.

and will the in game tools open a rF1 track to convert.?
and will 3Dsimed be something of the passed, or will it be useful with rF2.?

Thanks for all the hard work.
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nice questions, one more.
The "Alpha channel bug" is fix? Can now use transparent textures with no problems?
 
Some work has been done on alpha channel sorting, but fundamentally it is a DX9 issue, as far as I know, so there isn't much that can be done about it. Although I have to say, chroma is now a much better alternative for most transparent materials than it used to be in rF1.
 
I know this is track related thread, but I have a few general questions:

1. what kind of shaders will be released with rF2? Will there still simplified shaders like diffuse only, bump-diffuse, spec-diffuse, bump-spec-disffuse etc, or there will be rather most complex ones ? Looking on screenshots and movies I can see rather old approach (like in rF1) where most of materials have rather plain diffuse shader. What about Fresnel, IOR, etc. Could you give some clues?

2. What about Z-fighting/Z-sorting? Is there any method developed to minimize this effect? On the last video I saw rear window drawn behind wind-shield (Megane). Does it mean we will have to face the same problems as in rF1 in this area? What about special materials (like glass); will be still some predefined behaviours or some more 'natural' approach has been chosen?

3. What about rendering light on materials with blended textures? It was p.i.a in rF1. Is it improved in any way?

4. What lighting method has been chosen (comparing to rF1)? In relation to this thread you can answer only for track lights but I would be glad to hear something about other lights, like headlights. Will all light sources be rendered using the same method, or some specific 'tricks' will be used. Does shader can control lighting effect?

best regards
 
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has anything changed in the gmt's if so, what.?
and what is a typical size or max size for a gmt.
i just don't want to be adding too many things to overload the gmt so it renders smoothly.
i will be more on the car side of modding, but i do need to know a bit about tracks,
as i have quite a few Kart tracks for rF..

also on rF1 for adding track lights, there was a limit of how many could be used.
does this limit carry over to rF2 if not is there a limit on rF2 for adding the lights.?
rF1 limit was 130... Singapore...lol lots of lights.
 
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MaXyM said:
I know this is track related thread, but I have a few general questions:

1. what kind of shaders will be released with rF2? Will there still simplified shaders like diffuse only, bump-diffuse, spec-diffuse, bump-spec-disffuse etc, or there will be rather most complex ones ? Looking on screenshots and movies I can see rather old approach (like in rF1) where most of materials have rather plain diffuse shader. What about Fresnel, IOR, etc. Could you give some clues?

2. What about Z-fighting/Z-sorting? Is there any method developed to minimize this effect? On the last video I saw rear window drawn behind wind-shield (Megane). Does it mean we will have to face the same problems as in rF1 in this area? What about special materials (like glass); will be still some predefined behaviours or some more 'natural' approach has been chosen?

3. What about rendering light on materials with blended textures? It was p.i.a in rF1. Is it improved in any way?

4. What lighting method has been chosen (comparing to rF1)? In relation to this thread you can answer only for track lights but I would be glad to hear something about other lights, like headlights. Will all light sources be rendered using the same method, or some specific 'tricks' will be used. Does shader can control lighting effect?

best regards
Click to expand...

I quote all the things you report.
I'm very interested in Scott reply.


As addition I want to express my disagree about "not priority" of the compatibility of the ISI plugins for 3dsmax 2012 and overall about the 64bit version.
I'm quite sure that with the 64bit version of the softwares, the 3d artist was set free from any memory limit and related crashes.
So I'm sure that the 64bit version of your tools are really welcome from any 3d content maker.

I hope you could change this priority.
 
As we all know, the most used software to create tracks is BTB (Bob Track Builder)... as we all know about the author's life, my question is really easy: is there any chance to use the current version of BTB (or current beta) to export the track to rF2 and in which way?
i.e., exporting the track like a rF1 track and folder structure to be manaully changed into the new rF2 folder structure and/or using a specific tool released by ISI?
Many thanks in advance.
 
since we discuss versions of Max here: does someone know, if it's a problem to have 2 different versions of Max on my PC? I've got the 2012 64bit Product Design Suite (wich contains MAX) from my Employee, but am also member of the Autodesk Student Community and could get the 2011 32bit version for free...would try to install that one too!?
 
They should work on same PC without problem. I have both (2011 and 2012, 32 bit though...) on my PC aswell.
 
Hey Luc & Scott, hope you're enjoying your time off!

I know the beta is expected to be just around the corner, however, I just had a question pop into my head that I'd like to discuss... Any chance we'll see better integration of the shaders in the 3dsmax viewport--particularly with textures that use chroma transparency? Since 3dsmax can use DirectX in the viewport, what exactly might be preventing you/us from seeing them displayed properly?
 
If I may throw wild guess on this...

I believe problem is 3ds max not-so-good overall performance. When we are working quite big track mesh, typically square mile or so (which requires tons of ram), more accurate viewports would make too big performance hit to max.

We are kinda "trouble" already with it, because more than 30-40 sub/multi materials will bog max down and most cases even 100 sub materials is not enough... There are couple of tricks to get around those problems, but even so best solution is to look modelling results in viewer, not in max. You can't see track mesh in correct lightning enviroment in max viewport, which can lead you in wrong direction when trying to reach wanted result. It's not so time consuming anyway to export model to sim and check it out in viewer. ;)
 
isn't this one more big reason to have the 2012 64bit max plugin!? Autodesk claims to have made big improvements in permonance in max 2012, and 64 bit would give you more ram to play with anyways! i don't get why they won't do the plugin ^^
 
Well... During these years I've learn Autodesk marketing department promises haven't always come true...

It's true that 64-bit version would help with memory problems, but I can foresee some amount of work (for ISI) to make 64-bit converter especially, if they are using 32-bit version of max.

We probably see in some point 64-bit version of converter as well, but I can imagine that it's not so high on their must-to-do-list.
 
JJStrack said:
Autodesk claims to have made big improvements in permonance in max 2012, and 64 bit would give you more ram to play with anyways!
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They always claim that. When I started doing tracks for rF I was either still using 4/5 or even 3. Man it has been a while. :)
In any case, I haven't seen much of a performance increase from going to more current versions since then, only added features.

I'm not so sure the problem is that your RAM (or more precisely, the amount allocated to the process) is already filled up to the brim when max slows down. Might just be that you're displaying a ton of materials and meshes in a software that isn't optimized for real-time rendering like games are. When RAM slows you down, it's because your OS has to swap files in and out of the RAM and temporarily write them to your HDD.
Next time it happens, watch your HDD light if there's activity, and check how much RAM the 3dsmax.exe process is using at that point.
 
ethone said:
They always claim that. When I started doing tracks for rF I was either still using 4/5 or even 3. Man it has been a while. :)
In any case, I haven't seen much of a performance increase from going to more current versions since then, only added features.
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Yeah this may be, but I saw a review of some guy who's NOT Autodesk staff or contributor. He directly compared loading a complex model into 2011 and 2012 and layed his focus specifically on the viewport. The comparison was quite impressive. 2012 was way faster! It took less time till he could start working on the model and also the viewing while rotating was much smoother. I notice that also in other 2012 Autodesk products: When you have big amounts of data to be loaded, it's much faster...i think i once read about them having remenaged their system of loading data into memory...gotta ask the CAD Admin of my Employee about that again.
It's a shame I can't find that video I mentioned...the model was some kind of complex high poly robot thingy. If i find it again i'll post it here
 
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I'm already setup to use 2012 64bit for creating, and then dropping it into 32bit 2011 for exporting. Easiest way to do it for now, it's really not that hard to setup to do it this way, and i agree that the tools if working in other versions should not be a priority to ISI as they need to work on the beta itself and not our modding tools.
 
I'm already setup to use 2012 64bit for creating, and then dropping it into 32bit 2011 for exporting.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Somehow I never managed to make this kind of enviroment work. Afaik 2012 and 2011 file format differs each other making them incompatible. With traditional 3dsmax import/export process I have typically lose too much data. Am I missing something..?
 
Hi guys, i'm just courious if something different is available for track cameras. Sometimes i found the cylindrical activators too hard to trim in some circumstances (closer lanes, like Adria, Varano or Mugello for example).
Plus, in those days, i'm developing some particular layouts for Varano, seven are like a classical point to point stage, one is like the ROC, 1vs1. Will be a real event called Rally Circuit Series in program for the 4-5 of February weekend. Every apex got moveable tires with mass, it's good but if i touch the tire, i had to restart the event to put them in place again. Not a big deal, but i hope in rF2, moveable barriers got some sort of timer/reset feature, just like LFS for example. Cheers. :)
 
Good point about having an option to reset movables.

What would be an alternative to the point+radius camera activators?
Activate on AIW waypoints with the radius of the width centerline to wall and only switch to another on passing through another such AIW waypoint+radius?
Using wall-based detection like for the sectors through the xfiles?
 
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