The Off-Topic Thread

[KS95]

Just to avoid spamming threads, how about an off-topic thread.. basically to ask stuff and talk about stuff that doesn't need it's own thread or isn't very relative.

I'll start lol. Is anyone else having problems downloading from tracciontrasera? I just get redirected to the homepage every time

 

[QuadCoreMax]

@Bumper

For the normal maps, only the steering, dashboard & leather + carpet for the interior ; the rims tread + tyre for exterior.

Don't worry about what's inside, the engine + the underbody, nobody gonna see it.

Keep in mind ~80K x 10 ~ 1.000K Polys if 10 cars present on the track & probably the FPS will be awful.

For the shaders, they all self-explanatory & you will find enough infos on Ruud Website in /tutorial + /reference. Back in the days, I've create a little script that updates your car every 3 sec., so you could play with all shader variables & see instant results in Racer...as you would do in Maya with the amazing IPR Renderer.

For the AO or light-mapping, it should be subtle, since you have a real-time sun that we can activate with fast_time 600 & that shades the car automatically.

Use some lights in your scene & bake it to 1st UV Channel. You will find on Google more infos. There's a ton of different ways of doing it.

Last thing, for the wheels, you could use a alpha channel texture that overlays the rim at particular speeds. I've been one of the few guys showcasing, one of the best blurred wheels you can create for Racer.

Check my Racer-Max Website
In Images > Diaporama 1

Inspiration from other AAA racing games...I've been analyzing for months all racing games & have an extended understanding of best techniques to bring full realism to Life.

 

[Bumper]

Sorry for late reply, Quadcoremax.

We'll see how well the model performs ingame, I'll try to optimize it if I'm getting lag. The engine is somewhat visible from behind the grilles, so I'll definitely need to have something behind them. The underbody is less visible, but modelling it with low polycount won't hurt anyone since Testarossa's belly is pretty much flat.

How do you get models from 3ds Max (2015) to Racer by the way? I seem to be having trouble with both materials and the normals. Using .ASE breaks my normals where I have seams in the mapping. Also Racer's modeler doesn't recognize most of my materials, but I'm not too worried about that. Any ideas on how to overcome these little obstacles? I really don't want to manually redo the normals in Zmodeler or some other primitive program.

I've finished mapping and texturing the interior and have very few little details to model. Then I'll of course have to UV-map everything outside the car...

edit: Meanwhile, have a screenshot:
Only bumpmaps enabled this time.

 

[QuadCoreMax]

It looks amazing, good job !

Yeah you're right. What I usually do for the alpha textured grilles, is offsetting a black plane behind it.

For exporting from 3DS Max into Racer, there's a Racer 3DS Max plugin, but I don't know if it's working with 2015 version. Check it out, it's in the Racer folder. On racer.nl /reference or /tutorial, you'll find some info how to use it. From memory, the materials all appear in car.shd but needs to be accordingly tweaked manually & that depends on what shaders you want to use in Racer. I use Modeller after exporting from Max to verify the car. You see graphically if something is not right.

The normals is a quite complicated subject & I had a lot of issues in the beginning when learning how to port cars to Racer. Basically, you need to decide for your smoothing groups. In Maya, before exporting to 3DS Max, I do 'soften edge' function on all smoothing groups / meshes after a vertex merge on the mesh.

As for the ASE file, same here, to get it right, it took me time to understand what was wrong. The thing is, I combine meshes together per material & leave the file/car usually with 10-15 meshes. Some materials are re-used in some other meshes to keep shaders count low. So, same name. For example the leather on different parts. They are lately exported as 1 dof file. Check the Mini Cooper I released. Since the car.ini has dof for lights, wheels etc. you export those meshes separately.

Careful, per mesh / piece, not more than 20K polys/tris, or Modeller throws an error, so check out the polycount in the final stage.

Don't forget to UV layout your body mesh correctly, so no overlapping, you can after map some nice 'liveries' / textures on all parts of the cars. A tip, I select some faces & project them from perspective camera aligned usually to one of the 3 axis. Sometimes, you need some cutting on edges before unwrapping. All depends on the situation.

Check out YT videos, there's some nice UVs tutorials showing how to do a clean job.

Once you succeed, write it down, so next time you'll know more easily what's your best way of getting the job done quickly.

 

[Harey]

edit: Meanwhile, have a screenshot:
Only bumpmaps enabled this time.

Wow that interior looks great, but I can't help but look at that shifter and think, maybe we could use scripts when its finally in Racer to make it move when you change gears.

 

[Bumper]

Thanks guys!

A black plane behind the grilles sounds a bit low-tech, so I'll stick with my lowpoly engine model.
Might even have to make the engine in higher detail later, in case I decide to put this in GTA V. Remains to be seen.

Yes, I know there is a dof export for 3dsm, but neither the one supplied with Racer nor the Some1 version work with 2015 version of Max.
I did, however, get the ASE export to work somehow. I didn't know Modeler had a 20K polylimit, but even splitting the mesh doesn't seem to work perfectly. I can export the interior stuff, wheels etc. as separate models and they come up fine. But for some reason whenever I try to export the body shell itself, I end up with Modeler exporting a corrupt *.dof file. The model shows up right in Modeler but the exported file is broken and won't work in Zmodeler. I can't really understand what is causing this, as it happens even if I set the body model to have the same material as interior. It's not the polycount either as the interior as whole is higher poly than the body mesh, and it works fine!

I think I've got the UV mapping covered, just need to get the motivation to get started on the body. Testarossa is not the easiest shape to do with minimal stretching but we'll see how it goes. I'll probably do everything else first and leave that one last.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Ah ASE parsing to DOF in the Racer tools.

Seems so complicated and convoluted but really should be completely transparent to the end user, ala Some1 tool which just stops the current chunk in a DOF and starts a new one where it finished. Seamless.

I think for the ASE to export nicely, you'll need to split the body into a separate object in Max.

The ASE parser will take chunks of the same mesh and combine them before it tries to turn it into a DOF. Because the whole exterior bodywork likely shares the same material, that 'material/shader' in the DOF creation, overflows at ~ 20-25k verts or so... so after that you miss out on triangles being created.

I'm fairly sure last time I made a car with about 50k of actual bodywork polygons I just split the bonnet/roof/boot lid parts into a separate object in Max called bodywork1, and then the doors/wings/bumpers were called bodywork2 or something along those lines.

IF that doesn't work, then give each object a different material name. Ie, bodywork1 give it a material called body1, and bodywork2 object, body2 material name.

Once it's a DOF, open modeller.exe, load the DOF, then rename the body2 material to body1.

In theory this is just a simplification for the shader file... in practice the 'split' will still exist and you'll have two render passes rather than one for the bodywork parts. Not a huge issue though. Cars are already pretty heavy on shaders because of each wheel, brake, caliper, interior parts, wipers etc etc...


Pretty sure that is how it works any way. I'll have to re look over the cars I made a while back that had really high poly bodywork to check.

Normally I'd go through Some1's tool but given I had to have the ASE > DOF workflow working then I had to make it work via the ASE parsing in modeller.exe.





ALSO possibly worth checking which versions you're using. In the last 2 years up to the RC5c or so versions, Ruud did do some detail changes in the handling of ASE parsing in the modeller/tracked tools to make them better, but not perfect.

So definitely check the most recent versions if you're not already.

Dave

 

[Harey]

Wow its gotten quiet around here, here is something that might interest everyone...
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/05/14/2017-ford-gt-spy-shots

 

[Mr Whippy]

That looks pretty damn nice.

The only issue for me is the Aventador style rear 3/4 which might just go too far ahead of the styling language on the rest of the car.

But overall the language they've used throughout works nicely on the GT40 profile and base design... I'd have just toned down the rear arches a bit more I think.

Dave

 

[sti228]

Hi. I don't want to open new topic for my question so if it's wrong topic for my question. Sorry. How you people make cars look like this ? Some graphics tweak, mods, ENB, ReShade ?

 

[boomer541]

We use 3-D graphics software such as 3DMax, Blender, z-Mod or any ather that will allow transfering the graphics into racer and work our ass off doing it!

It really isn't all too hard, though.

 

[Mr Whippy]

The main things for good looking car materials are good shaders.

Really it's about making sure the reflection map and base maps are good.

Base maps are up to you. Ie, diffuse, AO/shading built in etc.

Reflections, mainly make sure you use fresnel with 0.04 0.96 4 for the coefficients, that is 4% perpendicular reflectivity, 4% + 96% parallel reflectivity (ie, 100%), and 4 for the falloff coefficient (the steepness of the falloff of reflection with viewing angle)

Having the reflection coefficients out by just a few percent can make things look quite 'wrong'

Dave

 

[Sven Hielscher]

Did you know that the organizational rules of the ADAC GT Masters does include blueprints of all cars driving in the championship!? Me either...until now!

 

[Mr Whippy]

Nice find, thanks for sharing!

 

[Alexander Knoll]

jupp THX

 

[sti228]

If someone know any road name please tell me Post

 

[sti228]

Hello. This is max settings for Racer ?

Render once - for what this function belong ? Someone use Nvidia control panel AA or some other settings ?

 

[Stereo]

Render once means the environment map is rendered when you load the game (looks more suitable to the current weather than just having a generic one) and then never updated. It's pretty much the lowest possible reflections quality setting available.

 

[Mr Whippy]

But yes they are also the highest possible settings via the menu.

In practice if you go editing the ini files, you can improve the image quality more by increasing the multi-sampling setting to say 16 or higher.
Obviously FPS drops a lot but hey.

Here I run "sides per frame" as 1 which gains me lots of FPS and has little noticeable difference for my tastes, so I can then run other elements at higher quality which I do notice (shadow update speeds/distances/resolutions, multi-sampling etc)

Dave

 

[Silver Ranger]

Went to a car show today. I love how every street you drive down there's a classic. It's like my town went back in time for a day. And the sounds! You just can't beat the sound of those lopey big blocks and high revving small blocks echoing off the Appalachian mountains as they cruise the streets.

First time i've seen a Cuda' in real life.

 

[sti228]

Hello. There is any proper way to scale car from GTA SA in correct dimensions ? I use 3DS Max but still can't get 1:1 result. Maybe someone know how to properly scale GTA cars ?