Hey all,
Here's a little tutorial for getting best results from all 3D worlds, it supposes you know in depth :
BTB & Xpacks
3DSimEd
Your 3D app : Blender 3D, Sketchup, Max, Maya, XSI...
Racer / Tracked
- Create your track with BTB. Insure you have packed UVs into a bunch of texture maps (the more UVs in 0-1 space the better => that avoids setting afterward too many specific game shaders/mats). A 4x1 grid pattern resulting in a 2048 x 512px res texture is a good example. Racer can be set to any texture resolution. Remember dds files are quicker to load & suited for gaming. BTB on Racer export, does unfortunately a tga conversion, so that will drop GPU performance & shading computations, that's another reason why an X export instead...
- To avoid somehow BTB 'dirty' exporting job (shaders/materials wrong naming, missing feature of number of dof files export (binary / optimized Racer files) & ini files BTB default config on export => special.ini, geometry.ini wrong setting => should be 0 for most of them & then create cams, timelines, grid/pit positions etc... in Tracked 'manually' afterward. So, the best is to go through 3DsimEd, once X exported from BTB & then re-export to dae files. You can leave everything as is, the only thing is to re-assign the texture, if object isn't textured correctly, in 3DSim scene. You'll end up with as many objects/sobjects from your BTB scene in your 3D scene which could be unhandy without custom scripts to manage them.
- Other method (the best one) is to create a new material in 3DSim & reassign it to all selected exploded faces at once & finally purge the whole. That will boost your final tweaking inside your 3D app avoiding dealing with UVs Sets/channels & letting you control the number of splittings once Tracked processed.
- Import your 3DSim dae files to your 3D app, check the material names & rename them eventually, split also the bigger meshes into smaller ones, Modeler can process a mesh lower than 20K & later, when loading your scene file with all big meshes (-20K/mesh) into Tracked, you can split in any number of pieces (what BTB doesn't do ATM, missing function...) along with their mat/shaders names/files. Do the final work, X files are split triangles, so remember to merge all vertices prior of final exporting to ase files. Do the same eventually to your UVs, sew them into bigger UV shell.
That's one of the cleanest work to get a perfect job done, maybe I forgot to say the kerbs could be merged to the road vertices in your 3D app so the collision proxy meshes & physical Newton calculation ingame would process as you would imagine, getting a final smooth feedback on G25/G27. I've used Tracked 0.8.14 version 'to spline' my whole track for AIs & then ported it to 0.8.32 which is actually the stablest version.
Cheers !
Here's a little tutorial for getting best results from all 3D worlds, it supposes you know in depth :
BTB & Xpacks
3DSimEd
Your 3D app : Blender 3D, Sketchup, Max, Maya, XSI...
Racer / Tracked
- Create your track with BTB. Insure you have packed UVs into a bunch of texture maps (the more UVs in 0-1 space the better => that avoids setting afterward too many specific game shaders/mats). A 4x1 grid pattern resulting in a 2048 x 512px res texture is a good example. Racer can be set to any texture resolution. Remember dds files are quicker to load & suited for gaming. BTB on Racer export, does unfortunately a tga conversion, so that will drop GPU performance & shading computations, that's another reason why an X export instead...
- To avoid somehow BTB 'dirty' exporting job (shaders/materials wrong naming, missing feature of number of dof files export (binary / optimized Racer files) & ini files BTB default config on export => special.ini, geometry.ini wrong setting => should be 0 for most of them & then create cams, timelines, grid/pit positions etc... in Tracked 'manually' afterward. So, the best is to go through 3DsimEd, once X exported from BTB & then re-export to dae files. You can leave everything as is, the only thing is to re-assign the texture, if object isn't textured correctly, in 3DSim scene. You'll end up with as many objects/sobjects from your BTB scene in your 3D scene which could be unhandy without custom scripts to manage them.
- Other method (the best one) is to create a new material in 3DSim & reassign it to all selected exploded faces at once & finally purge the whole. That will boost your final tweaking inside your 3D app avoiding dealing with UVs Sets/channels & letting you control the number of splittings once Tracked processed.
- Import your 3DSim dae files to your 3D app, check the material names & rename them eventually, split also the bigger meshes into smaller ones, Modeler can process a mesh lower than 20K & later, when loading your scene file with all big meshes (-20K/mesh) into Tracked, you can split in any number of pieces (what BTB doesn't do ATM, missing function...) along with their mat/shaders names/files. Do the final work, X files are split triangles, so remember to merge all vertices prior of final exporting to ase files. Do the same eventually to your UVs, sew them into bigger UV shell.
That's one of the cleanest work to get a perfect job done, maybe I forgot to say the kerbs could be merged to the road vertices in your 3D app so the collision proxy meshes & physical Newton calculation ingame would process as you would imagine, getting a final smooth feedback on G25/G27. I've used Tracked 0.8.14 version 'to spline' my whole track for AIs & then ported it to 0.8.32 which is actually the stablest version.
Cheers !
