Development news

I wanted to keep the geometry at a minimum while I was working on the bulk of the work, quadryfing the mesh and re-organizing the edges so it flows better and allow me to add loops easily.

After testing with the road patch yesterday, I was getting nervous to think of connecting everything together, with reducing so I don't have tiny polys everywhere.

It's a real challenge actually.  When I did my rF2 version, I didn't quite matched the road resolution on the sides, so it wasn't quite as good as this one.

I wanted to have every vertices to be connected to another, so when I detach things, everything fits perfectly, and shows no cracks.

I have started to do this on the dottinger hohe, and here is what it will look like.  The edges are around 1m in length now.  Once I'm done, I will be able to add a mesh smooth over it all since the mesh is built better, the mesh smooth won't mess up anything, I've already tested it on a small patch.

And here is how the hills starting in nordkhere and the castle's mountain looks like in the editor.  Don't mind the messed up shadows, the editor have problems calculating the shadows right with such a huge mesh.  The game however does better, and I think there is actually nodifference.. tho I haven't carefully examined, they don't appear as in the editor.

As you can see, the smoothing on the hills did a great job at bringing the track up to new standards.

Oh and I plan to swap the fake catch fence as you see in the last image with the one I had in my rf2 version, with 3d posts.  It will look much better than these.

Development news

Well, if you are using 3dsmax or similar software, never bind the quadrify function to a common and easy to access hotkey, such as the letter Q.

The quadrify tool can indeed mess up your triangulated mesh quite badly.  It often cannot guess which edges to remove, and doesn't remove the right one.  So when quadrifying a mesh such as Nord, it's best to work on small area, and inspect the quadrify result carefully before moving forward.

If you aren't aware, you can select a bunch of polys to be quadrified, hit the quadrify selection tool, undo, and switch to edges sub mode, and you will see the edges being removed.  It's then easy to inspect the red edges and see if it is indeed removing the good ones.

I noticed early yesterday that I have accidentally used the quadrify tool on all my mesh, and it screwed up a lot of things.  I was fixing up some bad quadrify when I had the impression I didn't quadrified the area yet.. so I looked ahead and it was all quadrified.  What an horror!

The worse was, it happened  quite a few Max files ago, so I had to detach what I had done, find the max file where it wasn't quadrified, and turns out it was one of the first few, and merge the changes in this one.

I've now fully recovered and done quite a bit of progress today.  My girlfriend and son are gone for the weekend at her mother's, so I can work full time on it.

I'm past the overlap now, working on hatzenbach, almost up to quiddelbacher hohe.  So it's going great.

The increased details on the curbs, like drains and the concrete extensions that are different kinds and different shapes are a bugger to fit in the increased mesh...  and in the planned road edges for rF2.

Also, guess what?  The AC engine is awesome.  Not only I'm able to preview my track in the editor while it's all merged together, but I can also drive on it in the game as well, with no noticeable performance hit.  I haven't run an fps counter, so there might be one, but its minimal if there is.

I had hard time believing it could load a huge map such as this, without lod'ing anything, since its all stuck together as one mesh (well the terrain), and let me drive it normally.

The more I dig into AC, the more I love that thing.  I really like the workflow of it.

I also done some testing on increasing road mesh density on a patch, from the paddock to tiergarten, to test in one of the steepest hill in the track, and the one that had the most oscillation in v0.18 when you took it at high speed, and I managed to make the track even smoother than it was.  So you can expect pristine quality for the track in the next update :)  Not sure there will be bumps yet, as I will most certainly release in between, so you can have a feel at it before I spend more time on the matter.

The mesh density that I'm aiming for is around 0.5m for the length of an edge, on the length side of the road.  It doesn't need any in the width direction.  My test patch had none.. however, I will likely add some to define bumps, otherwise it wont be possible.

Things are looking very good.  The side hills have most of their roughness gone, I'm doubling the resolution on these hills by flow connecting them, so it smooths the larger 5-6m panel a bit.  I have also worked a good bit on the mountain the castle sits on.  It was way too jaggy, specially looking back from hohenrain.  So I smoothed it a little bit so we dont see any sharp edge on it.

If I can manage to swap the worst textures we have in game, we will have a very very decent nord :)

Development news

Making slow and steady progress!

I'm still finishing up the area between the dottinger hohe and the gp overlap.  I remember last time, it was one of the toughest and most time consuming part of the track.  The karussel area ain't piece of cake either.

Here is how the mesh looks at the moment for the area I have worked on:

There is an awlful number of verts floating and not connected to the terrain.  Such as in the curbs (curbs floating in the air not connected to the grass behind it, often the grass goes under it.  Stuff like that.  Might have been a way to save polys or simply lazy work, I dunno, but I'm fixing these :)  You can see this near the gp overlap before t13, and in hohenrain, the curb that goes toward the old pit.  Not sure how it will be for the remaining of the track... 

Good news tho, I can now preview my work with AC, while I'm working on a merged terrain.  This wasn't possible in rF2, as I tried to load the terrain merged all together, and the game crashed upon reaching 100%.

So I was able to have an idea of how the new drains would look like in game... and they are looking pretty good actually!

I'm also raising the curbs as I go.  I have two videos ready to play in my browser (the michael S onboard bumpercam, and another, plus my reference pictures), so they should be a lot closer to what you would find normally on the track.

Last night, as a way of taking a break, I started to experience with the tree textures and see if I could improve the look by improving the alpha channel, and they indeed look better, a bit less fuzzy and blurry. Those that suffered the problem, some don't.  Mostly the 3d branch trees that suffers.

I have also found a way to use my own trees with the Y shape mesh, and get them to lit up with a sphere normal.

It turns out there is a little tool that comes with the plugin and I can break up the forest objects into separate trees.  So importing them into the AC editor generates the proper normal.  Now...  I'm not sure what I'll do with these trees.  The 3d trees certainly adds a whole damn lot... we need them.  I have a few model of branches I got from gametextures, not sure if I'll find some suitable one, but if I ever subscribe for another month to their website, I'll be requesting some high quality tree branches.  This is gonna be worth it.

As you can see in the mesh screenshot, the hills will be a bit better as well since I'm turning them to quads (those close to track, not the scenery, not worth it).  The hill next to the bilstein bridge looks better now.

New drains in curbs

While I'm cleaming up geometry, I quadrified some curbs, and when I removed the support edges around the drains found in the curb, the curb mapping went a bit skewed.

I found a way to fix this, and since I had to detach the drain from the mesh temporarily to do this, I thought I would add a bit of details to these drains.

Since they are quite a bit nicer than those found in com8's, I thought I should bevel them in a bit, since I guess they must be a bit carved in in real life, tho I'm not sure.  Nevertheless, it will certainly add both visually and physically when running over then, you will feel them slightly, they are in 1cm.

Also, regarding the controversial kerbstone matter, I wasn't sure when the discussion rose up at the rf2 forums, but I had the impression I did this after buying and seeing gtr evo's version.  At first, I thought it was some sort of imagery trick, and thought the kerbstones found in evo were in reality flat to ground, and only made to look like one with normal map trick.

When I was defining mats in this conversion, I saw the texture used for these kerbstones, and there is a light half, and dark half, so I further thought it was a trick.

Now, I'm at the first of these kerbstone and guess what?  They aren't trickery, they are indeed very real.  And higher than mine as well.  Well, the edge is 13cm, but it is angled, so it may be a bit lower or higher than mine, but certainly, I wasn't so far away with my 10cm straight up.

You can bet I won't flatten these :)  But the way they are added, there is a little run off between the road and these, so they might not be as bad for some than mine.

Just thought I should let you guys know :)

And here is the kerbstone in question:

Making good progress

There is a lot to do!

When I started over last time, took a few months break and came back to it, I was amazed at exactly what I had done to the mesh.  So it gave me motivation to finish, or at least move on.

But I was thinking, man, I will never go thru that again... and yet... here I am.  :)

It's worth it tho.  This track alone is the mother of them all, and SimBin did such an astonishing job at recreating it with mind boggling accuracy, I must pay tribute to both the track and SimBin's work.

So, at the moment, I'm redoing the topology a bit, so that I can easily add loops later on, so that the loops go thru the road edges and curbs as well, and reducing in the grass behind.

This is the original untouched mesh for the dottinger hohe area:

And this is what I'm working on at the moment:

And here is something I found on youtube, a very nicely made comparison between GTR Evo and real life Nord.

Don't focus much on the scenery, but keep it on the roads...  it's pretty darn good :)