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.

3D guardrails goodness!

Yesterday, after writing my 4096+ comment, I decided I would take a break from the curbs and model the guardrails.

Here is what I came up with:

These textures were made by Gametextures.com and were made to look similar to those with the com8 layout, which featured some rusty versions.  

These guardrails should be looking pretty neat in game!  I can't wait to see what the lighting engine will do to these guardrails at dusk/dawn settings! :)

EDIT:  I have shaped the guardrails entirely with my Quad Chamfers plugin.  Really neat plugin!  I'm using it a whole lot now.  Only the tip have been curved with an FFD box with a 2x48x2 box.  I added 4 edges near the end of both sides.  The straight section have no edges on the width side to keep poly as low as possible.  I wanted to model the holes and bolts, but it would have skyrocketed the poly count... I'll use the normal map that was made with the texture along with the alpha channel for the hole instead :)

Development news

Things are going great.  Progress is certainly slow, but it should be looking pretty darn good.

Here is the curb in hohenrain, along with the concrete part next to it.

One of the road drains...

The start and end of the curbs.  Managed to do them in 3d, and learned about the FFD box modifier and wow... wish I would have known about it earlier!

The dreaded kerbstones!  

And the X bricks near hohenrain.

We should be able to tell what we are riding on with our eyes closed now :)

Anyone got a working iPad 1-2?

Hey guys,

I'll cut the story short, but my girlfriend's iPad 2 is dying out.  The screen has lost touch on nearly half the screen, and it acts by itself more often than not.  The keyboard shows up and disappear, trying to type on it, and you need to rotate the iPad every few letters so you can get a spot that works.

The problem is, since she bought it like 3 or 4 years ago, well the year it came out, she has started to do stuff on it, with art studio, page, numbers etc for her work.  The place where she work is having a hard time as well, and her boss won't be able to buy her one.

I'm not asking for a new iPad either, but if any of you, or someone you know have changed his iPad 1-2 or whatever recently, and still have it, we would be very grateful for it.

As you can guess, my girlfriend is an exceptional person.  I don't know many women who doesn't share passion with computers/racing/gaming who would tolerate me putting that much into what I love doing.

The only way we could buy one ourselves is waiting for tax return next year, and this is a rather long wait... so if anyone is able to help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Reach me out via the contact form if you are in a position you can help.

Curbs looking spiffy in the editor!

I was curious to see how the curbs would look in the editor, so I exported a small segment of road, along with the curb and the part before the curb, and see how it looks.  Pretty stunning I must say!  The different time of day really shows a difference now.

I didn't thought about that before, but since the curbs have their own geometry, which differs of the road, and the beginning and end parts, it adds a bit of trouble, and will likely take me a lot longer than if I would have done them as they were before, but I believe the efforts will be worth it, don't you think?

Since there was no way I could connect the curbs to the road cleanly, I put the pivot point of the curb a little back, just a tiny bit, so it will sit a little over the road, as you can see, it doesnt really show up, and will save a lot of poly doing so.

I guess that's why the original was made like this!  With the curbs and stuff not connected and overlapped a bit.  I'm just too perfectionist and it bugs me... but I have no other choice now to do the same.  In the end, in game, it doesnt matter, but it's just that I like when things are clean and nicely made.. .stuff all connected.. but seems modelling for games requires some trickery!  Not that I modeled before for different purpose, but I suppose you don't have to resort to that kind of stuff when you are no really limited by poly count.