Okay that sounds good, I've heard about the racesurface before, later on I'll see if I can chop up stuff. As for collision, guess I'll just take roughly the same chunks Right now I'm planting all the posts for the guardrails and giving them their end pieces... Tiresome work but it needs to be done one time... even the poles will be optimized in the lod's... After this, those all walls will get the same treatment, finish working on those meshes once and for all and never touch them again hopefully!
In rF1 perhaps. So far, our tests have pointed out that there is little to no impact at all between dozens smaller files and fewer larger files. LochD and Silverstone have several large collision objects rather than hundreds of smaller ones. In fact, in the case of rendered objects (RaceSurfaces and everything else that's visible) you're more likely to be better off with fewer files anyway. More triangles to render, with less instructions. But don't forget to keep an eye on the total amount of rendered tris. Multiple smaller files have better culling and offer better performance on the tricount side with more instructions (slower, more stutters). Fewer files offer increased tricounts (slower FPS), but generally faster (less stutters).
As always then it will be a balancing thing, thanks for the addition Luc It'll have to wait till the content is more complete as I'm still tinkering with the track surface from time to time..
Finally some progress, all guardrails and posts are in place! Now I need to combine them all and build LOD meshes for them, another tedious job but I have to do it. Damage and AO will need to wait, other items on my to-do list have higher priority such as the pitwall and other walls on the track. The pitwall however I am probably going to build like it is a building so the walls throughout the track will be done first
Looking good! The general shading looks great and having these different types of guardrails in certain areas (two rows, red/white, that double sided for a small part then single middle row) really make a lot of difference to me.
Thanks ^^ Yeah I like the contrast myself as well, I wish they would use the red/white in more placed than just the pitlane! On places where there is just the generic grey guardrail I have some replaced sections of a different color in there to break up the look. I might even lighten up my diffuse texture a bit so I can do like a 90% vertex color on most grey sections and than as I wish can introduce sections which are slightly lighter or darker than the general tone (something for later as well though..) I should start hiring interns to do the lod-ing!
Normalmap seems inverted on brick wall. I'm pointing it out just in case I fear for my virtual car already!
Hmm I happened to notice that on multiple occasions, most of them at low sun angles. I will investigate, thanks for bringing it up, it will go on my to-do list
I'm working on this stuff and realized this might be a fun little informative thing to share Sometimes it's a bit annoying to uv something which has a kind of generic (tiling) texture as you are guessing at much times you have to tile your uv's in order to map the texture on there properly with the least amount of distortion etc. Now a checker map only takes you so far and this is such a a flippin obvious thing it wouldn't surprise me if it can help people who are like, oh boy I'd never figure that such a simple thing could be so useful So simple!
I'm doing something similar when I'm unsure if I need to adjust the tiling, usually I only use the circle. Such a simple symbol so easily distorted. I do prefer calculating the tiling I need from the spline I loft from, the cross section I use and the aspect ratio of the texture mapped to the final mesh, but there are cases when that isn't an option anymore. Hadn't considered it some trick of the trade but thinking about it, it's been a while until I discovered to use. So thanks for sharing wgeuze, I'm sure someone will be glad to have read about it.
That was my point exactly! I read the post tuttle wrote about not teaching modders how to do basic 3d work, and rightly so, but these kinds of things are handy little tricks to make life easier which I don't think are much written down either, it's just something you do as a means to do what you need to do A question I have myself though, about placing billboard trees. After you set your base tree up, there's only moving them into place left to do, and no rotating of meshes, right? I'm used to placing x-trees so that rotation of meshes is kind of a habit... It does make a lot of sense not to rotate since the billboarding takes care of that obviously, but just wanted to make sure this is the case and my way of thinking with billboards is correct. Will have to check documentation again to set up the first one though cause right now it's floating somewhere on it's side (probably a combination of vertex order and mesh orientation?)
Vertex order, probably. Sometimes you need to rotate the object in vertex sub-mode and flip the mapping back so they appear correctly in 3ds Max. Billboarding takes care of orientation, so no need to rotate them like you would with an x-tree.
Thanks for the clarification It would be nice if there was a way to show the vertex id numbers in 3dsmax by the way
Yeah, that would be useful in cases like this. Selecting a vertex in Editable Poly mode does reveal its number in the side panel though, but it does take a few extra clicks, yes ...
Indeed, I was more thinking in the likes of knots on a spline type of display ^^ I'll tinker with it this evening probably, how hard can it be.. As usual I'm all over the place, I need to hold back installing Zbrush to sculpt a concrete rumble strip because, well.. it's fun, ahh the freedom and silliness of working at home knows no bounds! First need to finish texturing the walls now they have their uv's sorted out. For the guys who remember the previous version of these wall textures, I removed almost all of the scuffmarks from them and will do those in a seperate damage texture which I'll blend in, but at a later time. I'm also starting to think about doing tirestacks, very interesting to do it as good looking as I can with minimal footprint edit: Having way too much fun This is a piece of the texture showing some details ^^ I think I'll do a test with the damaged versions tomorrow edit2: Thanks again Tosch for giving me the tree textures, they do work pretty well in adding life to the scene! (and yes I see the alpha edge on top of the trees ) Think I'm going to relax tomorrow and plant a bunch of these. It would be nice if they can be combined in batches though, I believe that's going to be the stamp option when exporting if understood the documentation (rF2_Track_Technologyv3.pdf) on that part.
Thanks guys ^^ After my post I realized I forgot the orange one Ah okay then I clearly misread the documentation on that part, would be nice to group these trees so I'll give that a go
