Development news

It feels like forever since I last updated my blog!

Last week, one of the main water pipe in our apartment broke down, and we had water under our floors over half the apartment.

Luckily, the apartment above us got free last July, so we were able to temporarily move a couple of things up while the repairs are done.

The floors are ripped, the bottom of the walls are opened, and it's drying out.  They should be coming over in a few days to redo the floors and finish up the repairs.

Sigh...  At least, we were lucky to not lose anything to the water.  But having two apartments, one with no locks on any doors or drawers, a staircase and a 3 years old little boy.. and you've got a nice headache!

As for the track, I haven't stopped, I can't anyway... otherwise I would lose the momentum...

I finished up the curbs all around track a few days ago, and I have went a little overboard with the polys... not that much tho, I had 3.8M poly, and I know I can load a 3.6M poly scene.  But I had no scenery, trees, etc... and this stuff takes roughly 800k-1M poly.  So I had to trim 1.2M or so from my curbs...

At first, it seemed like I would have to abandon the 3d curbs all around track, but then I looked into baking normal maps and this is what I have done.

I have highly reduced the poly count by removing the single or dual chamfers to round up things, and I have baked normal maps out of the higher poly curbs and use the normal map on a lower poly model.

I have redone all the extra curb models, except the main red/white one.  This one, I can pro-optimize to around 65-70% without losing any noticeable details... so I want to keep those looking as good as possible without needing some normal trickery.

The rest of the curbs objects are still 3d, and will still be able to remove the fake bump added on those, however, they won't look as good from all angles... but from most, it should look pretty similar, if not better in some case, since I improved the high poly model a bit for most models, and edited the normal maps with nDo, added a high resolution concrete grain from another gametextures.com texture I have, and masked it to the tiles only.

I have started to redo the curbs with the lower poly objects and I'm up to mutkurve now.  I had 3.8M poly on the full track, with all reference objects removed, and now I got 2.3M poly with all reference objects removed but I still have the gtr evo track and curb mesh... doesn't take that much, but still...

So it's looking good.  I think it will end up being a reality after all!

I have calculated about 500k poly for my guardrails, a little more with the tips I'll need to weld on the guardrail's ends.

So I might even be able to have some kind of 3d grass on the infield... still early to really tell, but we have a lot more chances now.