Not really Racer, but playing with capturing imagery for photogrammetry purposes so I can build real locations more accurately!
These are just low density clouds for general use, but the high density ones for the road surface mean I can get a nice accurate surface, conform polygons to it, and also copy the colour data from the point cloud to a texture lookup, or even normal data for really great looking surfaces with a low poly count.
Then combine with the asphalt shader to add the grain, and et voila, a pretty close copy of a real road!
I'm slowly testing to figure out the best processes. The next step is to do 2km of road and see how much it drifts/distorts by, but so far it appears small with very basic tests.
Eventually the goal is to figure out the best camera height/angles/intervals of shots and so on, so I can just build a rig and fix it to a vehicle and drive many km and get good results right away.
So far for the road topography itself, it's easily capturing the camber and crown of the road. The point cloud 'noise' band that makes the surface is about 10-20mm deep maximum, so it's even picking up pot holes and other lumps/bumps really nicely too.
For a 50cm grid road surface you're easily getting a very close representation of the real surface.
Throw in a normal map taking the higher density data from the cloud, and the look of the road would be near perfect to reality too!
Not so great for race courses as you'd need open access for a day, but for roads it's pretty cool as you just drive along them
Fingers crossed for some more sunny days so I can go capture more. I'll be sure to post the test results as they come in!
Dave
