Tutorial - Objects for BTB with Sketchup

B

Biggles1212

  • Biggles1212

Hi I've completed a full tutorial that should be comprehensive enough for just about anyone to make objects in Sketchup and use them in BTB for their favorite sim.

I'd appreciate any good suggestions.

It took me a few hours to work all the snags out and there was a lot of great information already here at Race Department.

I've uploaded the tutorial here.

http://forum.racedepartment.com/downloads/btb-library/38/full-objects-sketchup-btb-1805/

If you have any questions post them here or PM me. I'll do my best but I'm no guru at this.

Do enjoy. Thanks
 
I also wrote this warning on https://www.facebook.com/groups/BobsTrackBuilder/

Small warning when making xp-packs. I found out that windows can create jpg extensions written in capitals. For example door1.JPG! Try to find a file explorer which shows you how the extensions are written. When you convert door1.JPG to a *.dds file and import it into xp-packer, you could be faced with 2 converted jpeg-files. Here: door1.jpg file and door1.JPG, while only one door1.dds file is available. This can cause the xp-pack to crash in BTB!
 
Yup, you need these to be as simple as possible, you can let them be a little blocky.. You need to really take time to optimized these, you'll be having ten thousand copies of it in the track, so that 400+ polycount per object goes to millions really fast. My tirewalls have around ~20 triangles each.. That means only 6 sides, it's far from being round but with some clever normal control and baked textures, you can do wonders.. Basically my favorite part of modelling, trying to figure out ways to decrease polycount

Complex objects can play a useful part here. You make two or more versions of the same object, with different amounts of detail, and import them all into XPacker. Set their properties so the one with the highest detail is visible between 0 and 15 metres, then the next most detailed one is visible between 15 and 50, and so on. The most suitable numbers depend on the object.

Then, make a new complex object and add each of the above as child objects.
 
Well, LOD will correct a lot, it's just a lot of work for objects that are using lo poly models 90% of the time anyway. But, yeah, that's how you're suppose to do them. I've relied more on the texture LODs than meshes. But for objects that are close in some parts but far away on others (like a tree that's close to a camera in one corner but can be seen far away.) complex objects is the answer. Don't see a lot of them so this could be a nice detail that makes a track to stand apart ;)

Wouldn't start making SObjects with different mesh LODs thou...
 
10 sides, and vertex smoothing on will make you swear the tires wall are round.
Only when you watch from above the normal driving angle you could see they are not perfectly round.

tirewall.jpg
 
I don´t know if anyone talked about this already, but a cool thing about Scetch Up is that you can import a landscape with correct heightprofile and texture from google earth that you can export as .3ds and pack into Bobs Track Builder. I used this to optimice my track that i imported from a .kml file and it´s cool to position the objects because you see where they have to bee on the google earth texture. Also this helps to form the terrain correctly.
 
I don´t know if anyone talked about this already, but a cool thing about Scetch Up is that you can import a landscape with correct heightprofile and texture from google earth that you can export as .3ds and pack into Bobs Track Builder. I used this to optimice my track that i imported from a .kml file and it´s cool to position the objects because you see where they have to bee on the google earth texture. Also this helps to form the terrain correctly.


Join the club, sketchup is indeed a great tool for extracting landscape data.
You can replace the standard generated textures by a higher resolution version, to have even more detail for placement.
 
How it's possible ? I mean change textures.

Make a screenshots from google maps in your favourite browser zoomed almost fully in.
One step less than maximum.
(the last zoom step is mostly just enlargin the pixels, so that a waist of space).
Create a new file of 24000x24000 or so pixels in photoshop.
Than use the command paste in photoshop, the screenshot will be there on a seperate layer.
Delete the bits you dont need/want.
Go to the next part of the google maps in your browser, but have some overlap with the previous part.
Do a screen copy again, and past again in photoshop.
Than place/move the 2 layers exactly in photoshop.
Making the layer you work with a bit transparent will help to get them aligned on the pixel exactly, when aligned make it 100% again.
Remove the parts you dont want from the screenshot layer, like the navigation bar and other browser specific things.
Than you can merge those layers.
Repeat till you covered the part you need.
Than flatten all those laste parts.
(Save a extra copy of this file, just for later use, or when thing go wrong..
As stiching them together can take a few hours depending on the track.
Would be a shame to loose your work by messing up.

Open the lowres texture you want to replace, selects all and copy.
Paste it on a seperate layer in photoshop.
Make the top layer 50% transparant.
Than scale that layer with the lowres texture exactly over the highres underneath.
Crop the whole image on the size of the lowres texture.
Switch the top layer off.
Than save that image over the lowres image, replacing it basically.
Or when you already have imported those tiles in Bob's, than just replace the texture from within Bobs texure editor.
If you have multiple parts repeat this step from the base big google maps texture.
One big ground texure of 4096x4096 is no problem for a modern system.
For the seperate tiles, i would use not more 2048x2048.
Giving you a great resolution to work with.
Later you can clean up that texture, remove all objects and shadows that you dont want to see.
And you be left with a great looking groundtexture.
Depends on the track if you could use one mega texures or multiple tiles.

I just use the google earth data especialy for the parts around the track.
Creating a new ground based on the parts I imported from Earth.
So i can use much less polygons, but i still know the basic surrounding is correct.

Here some example where is used this big texture blended with a basis ground & grass texure. This is the Sachsenring.
The track itself is based on proffesional GPS data from a GT3 team.
I have only used the buildings from a excisting rF version.
As it's not finished i ask permission later..
But i might do them again too, not sure yet.

sachsenring3.jpg


sachsenring.jpg

sachsenring2.jpg
 
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Method 1: Explode all of them, then select all and "intersect with model". Do step 2.
Step 2: Make a new panel, as large as the whole area is. Make it float above you model and paint with the texture you want, position it and mark it as "project". Alt-click on it to sample the texture, then you can paint the whole model with one projected texture with shift-click (or paint group/components one-by-one. ) Projected textures should be used a lot anyway in SU as this makes the textures continue without a break between faces.
 
Kennett Ylitalo

I do method 1 and explode all parts and then intersect with model. Export it as 3ds, but in about 50% program crashed. Try again but the same. So for test i export simple one. I resize all textures 512x512 in Photoshop. Here is some screens. P. S. Thank you for help.

37d50c4ca6b7.jpg

8af4dcc5333c.jpg
 

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