Messages

More liberties taken with the start lights.   



In the real world it's a dude with a flag that starts the race...
...but sod it - I want lights. 

Figured I'd point out the deviation to save anyone else having to.
Exporting V0.2 now.  Should be up later.

Oh yeah - turned on smoothing for the grass as well.
Of the however many hours of tinkering that's been done in the last week that's probably the most noticable 20 seconds worth.   

130k of clutter added.



That's half a paddocks worth of cars/caravans/ambulances, some tents and stuff, placeholder marshalls and I'm round to just after Memorial with the camera crew.

Taking a few liberties with the cameramen but probably just doing what the real camera teams would like to do - in reality the whole lap isn't covered.
...but with a truckload of scaffold it could be and that's what I'm doing.

Have also gone through the marshall positions again.  A tweak, tweak here and a tweak, tweak there...
...adjusting the model to the marshalls as much as the other way around.

Cheers.   
Tons still to do though.  I can see the work in another 9 versions pretty easily.   

In reality I just release stuff when I get sick of the sight of it and decide to have a break but in some fantasy land whre I was serious about the project the roadmap would be something like...

V0.1 - Everything working well enough to race.
V0.2 - Enough TSOs that it's starting to look the part.
V0.3 - Vegetation filling out nicely.
V0.4 - Track work - missing white lines and start positions, drains, still a couple of bumps that could do with a tweak, tidy up the link section at Farm.
X0.5 - More TSOs and Vegetation.  Get the hedges looking good.
V0.6 - Landscape - distant buildings, trees, hedges, etc.
V0.7 - Reskin.  Split the grass into areas for different skins(forest floor, long grass, short grass, etc).  Maybe double map some areas if it doesn't trash the FPS too much.  Replace any shaders that aren't doing their part.
V0.8 - 3D grass(for all the different areas)
V0.9 - Puddles
Final release - Assorted tweaks.

Used MAX for making the main road and I do the final exports from it but on the whole I work in Lightwave 2018.
Tracks are pretty simple so it doesn't really matter what modeller is used.  If I save out from lightwave as an OBJ, MAX will load it right up and it'll be ready for export straight away.

Other folk do the same - you can model in Blender and I think it's fbx that h uses to get stuff to MAX.  Hawk uses Maya which is another Autodesk program and talks perfect MAX no matter what format you use.....

So if you're asking from a 'what program should I learn?' point of view - the answer is "whichever one you fancy".   
MAX does a lot of things better than other programs but has a steeper learning curve, Lightwave is about as simple as a modeling program can be but you can end up slogging through jobs manually that MAX could have automated.
....and in-between there are probably 20 or 30 other programs that'll get you to the same result.

90-odd-k of hedges planted.



...which once would have seemed like a lot but since upgrading my computer the targets have shifted.     Breezed past the old 500k target ages ago.  It's at just over 900k just now and my new thinking is to try to keep it under two million polys or thereabouts.

Really I should be getting back to the trees and bushes now but I think the track's about ready for some third-party junk. 

Looks like they've changed the way the lidar data is distributed on data.gov.uk
All the individual tiles are gone, as is the old coverage map.  You now have to link the dataset urls straight into GIS software.

I tried it out with ArcGIS and yeah - it all works ok.

...but unfortunately Three Sisters falls in a gap in the coverage.  I've got all the lidar layers on here, both 25cm ones, the 50cm, 1m and 2m.



So you're out of luck with the free lidar. 

Looking at the bluesky site you posted(go to the purchase options and check the previews) their lidar sets have the same gap(probably the same data) - The only one of their sets that covers it is the Photogrammetric DSM 2m, whatever that is.

There is a version of 3 sisters for rfactor.  I can't find a link that works  but it's name was...

Three Sisters 2010 1.00 by Madcowie

A video....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIOH2BG_ebk

Looks like LauZzZn was going to do a conversion for KRP.  You could maybe PM him and ask if he still has a copy on his hard drive.
http://forum.kartracing-pro.com/index.php?topic=2464.msg25410#msg25410

P.S. Autodesk Infraworks 2015 for converting DEMs and LIDAR to a usable format.  Other programs will do it too but Infraworks is the best I've tried.  It's handled every format I've thrown at it.   

[OK]

OK is about how I'd rate them.
Livable with for the moment. 

I'd like to end up with a recently cut look, more branch than leaf, able to see the silhouette of fences through them and an impression of real depth.
...but all that's a lot of work, requires a bunch of skins that I don't have yet and sounds more like a v0.7 job than a v0.2 one. 

Got about halfway round the football fields last night with the hedges - another session might see them all planted.

That's great news.   
...about racing starting again - not the bit about the track nearing a release - that bit sounds optimistic. 

Less so today than yesterday though.  Yesterday's step 1 was selecting all the hedges I'd done the night before and punching delete.
Between some poor UVing and having a bit of a funny shape - was going for the 'flattop' look that they cut them to at OM 70-odd percent of the time.
...but it wasn't really doing it for me - hence delete-all.   

Last nights efforts are looking better.  Only done memorial and mountside so far and they still have that obviously-an-extrusion look but as base geometry goes - yeah, looking kinda hedgy.





...and should look even hedgier with the shaders applied.

Pit area lowered/adjusted to fit lidar levels.



Fences and trees refitted to new levels.

Farm buildings skinned and fitted(using the lidar again for sizing )  Just the new building up at the football pitches left to make.



Right then.  Hedge time!

new: trackside objects animation support
new: spectator support

Are these things done and ready to play around with?
If so - how would someone go about playing around with them?   

I'm getting quite a few crash-to-desktops with the bike hitting the walls(and fences).  Five or six so far, all on the M2(the only bike I've tried in B15).

It seems to be mainly when I've crashed and the bike is on it's own.  It slides or tumbles into the wall and GPB locks up for a couple of seconds then folds to desktop with no error message.

My first impressions were pretty positive.  The front-heavy feel that everything had in B14 isn't there at all on the M2 bike, in fact it feels beautifully balanced.   

Front end washouts - yeah, I had a few.
Some I thought were a little harsh but others I felt were deserved and it was nice seeing them really.  Some betas have been a little forgiving for my liking, I prefer to be punished if I mess up...

Speaking of which - the grip on the grass is way too high.  There's no sphincter clenching at all if you clip it. 
I'd noticed it at Victoria out of the last corner but after that session I hit nordschleife for a while which showed how bad it is.  Clipping the grass at speed should be a worrying moment and just now it just plain isn't.

Nordy also showed how nicely balanced the M2 is.  It's taking the nearly-jumps well, sliding and popping wheelies in all the right places...

I don't feel the engine braking is too harsh(roll-off entries are fine)...
...so much as I feel the issue is with the clutch disengagement. 

It's partly the fault of my control setup - I play using a joystick, so if I'm on the brakes I'm also completely off the throttle(because they share an axis).
Using manual clutch it's fine because I can ease the clutch out but on auto-clutch downshifts are definatly harsh.
More options for slipper clutches would help the matter.

Hmmm, just crossed my mind that you may be able to add ramp adjustment for auto-clutch engagement/disengagment in the settings.  That'd be nice.   

Anyhow - great job.
...and yeah, much nicer demo bike than the 125.   

We raced a few DS tracks in the moto2 series last beta and I don't recall any problems.
90% of my playtime since then(also B13) has been on DS tracks and no bother there either.

The DS problem was random lockups wasn't it?  (By the time I got here folk were all running NDS races so that's all I rode until recently)

Agree that an off switch ingame would make life easier from a track-release point of view.
...but I made life easy with Oliver's Mount by only releasing a DS version.    Figured if folk had problems I'd put up an NDS one too...
...but no-one did.

Personally I really hope NDS is over.  Every DS server I've been on I've learned things from the tyre tracks that the quick guys have left behind.