TrackMaker Alpha Preview
Bjorn Klaassen sent us an interesting email today informing us of a project he has been hard at work on and is confident that it will be of great interest to the sim racing modding community. He aims to create a tool that helps streamline the track creation process by utilizing an easy to use and intuitive program that drastically reduces iteration times. He has attached an 11 minute video that highlights and describes the main features of his program and even provides an example (8:24 into the video) of creating a track on the fly, importing it, and testing it in game within minutes.
Bjorn hopes to release a public version of this track creator program within the next few months. See below for the full details as described in his email.
Hi
this news isn’t typical “mod released” or “game preview”, but still I think it could be of great interest for the race community, especially for the modders.
The last couple of months I’ve been collecting,rewriting and creating all kinds of tools to assist in the racetrack creation process. The main goal was to be able to create a racetrack while maintaining all dynamic relationships, ensuring the user can still tweak the layout, individual lofts and props….run the exporter and direct iterate in game. This way iteration times should go from hours/days to minutes. Besides that I wanted to make it as user friendly as possible so that everyone with a basic knowledge of a 3d package can use this. Right now it’s a plugin for Maya, I hope I can port it sometime into different packages or as a standalone package.
I see this project as a solid base to build further upon while I’m learning C++. The general idea is to analyse the weakest points and improve them with custom nodes. The first public version will released somewhere before summer (under a creative common license probably)…but first I want to use this in a real production environment to see where the weaknesses and strengths are….it’ll be a racetrack for rfactor 2, located in Morocco !
Cheerz!
Bjorn
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36 Comments
Looks Great
I assume that we will be paying for this? How much approximately?
WoW!! That looks brilliant
That looks awesome!!!
Too many buttons!
It will probably be released under a creative common license …. so in other words, free !
Great job Bjorn
That would be great! Thanks!
Superb tool, but no use for me
can it be used for race 07?
great work! games that will work?
Really really interesting!
Wow!!! I can’t wait to get this in my hands and try it out. Looks great!!!!
Keep it up!
awesome stuff
RallySimBelgium
Nice!
Thanks guys ….Race07? Probably…it’s with the rfactor engine right, so the exporter is probably within 3d max? FBX supports good exports between Maya & Max ….vertex normals, multiple uvchannels. Combined with the force material ID script (within Maya)+convert Max material to gmotor maxscript (both not shown in video) there is a pretty smooth conversion.
“Too many buttons!”
I’ll make 1 seperate section with 1 button which generates completely random a racetrack for you
hahaha yer, how about some templates which auto generate every track out there in the real world, save complete idiots like me a whole bunch of time
Interesting project mate, and the best of luck with it.
Looks like you have a winner on your hands here Bjorn… keep up the hard work!
Sure looks like it yeah …. very supportive racemod community so far, very cool !
Looks excellent, maybe I can finally learn how to build tracks myself with this, great job
Very nice work sir
looks very interesting.
I want this!
DITTO for sure. Sign me up
This could be the ‘Program of the Year’ for a lot of people if it works out allright. Looking good!
Track should be made by who really knows how to do it. This kind of software increases the number of shitty mods on the internet. A number that is already too high.
there is no doubt this will be good, i mean, you play with a keyboard, like a real man.
Will this tool will work for Richard Burns Rally tracks too?
Can GE/GPS or other types of route/terrain data be imported?
Hehe, yeah the keyboard…too lazy to setup my g25
Richard Burns Rally…probably, as long as you can convert the geometry to something RBR understands.
GPS data …have some scripts that read Excel sheet data with GPS data and generates dummy objects from it….not done by a mile and my guesstimate is that GPS data isn’t always in the same format. Difficult to write for
mechamorafa : lukily the good mods always appears to float on top of the pile…besides that, nothing wrong with people having fun creating stuff.
Looks very nice. Can’t wait to try out the final version.
shut up and take my money
Has it been releast yet?
Not yet, but it will be in the next few days !
COOL!!!!!!
Might be sounding like a nagging Nancy, but any more news on this?