Tracks Thomson Road Grand Prix - Singapore

No updates before Christmas, sorry :whistling:

I'm currently working on the 3D grass and it's the first time I have tried adding this to a track (successfully). All the tutorials seem to be aimed at Blender users, and I'm a 3ds max guy. What I have been struggling with is correct lighting on the grass objects that sit on angled terrain. Defaultly, the normals of the grass point upwards, whereas the normals of the terrain point 90° to the surface. This leads to a discrepancy between the light that falls on the ground and the light that falls on the grass. Which looks bad :p

In case there are other modders who use 3ds max I thought I'd post a link to a script I found that takes the normals from one object (my terrain) and pastes them to another object (my grass). It's free, it works, and it's easy to use - bonus!

The script, Normal Thief, is here

And here's a few shots of it in action :)
Je5AMmn.jpg

vJCKDSi.jpg

bmVAYzU.jpg


And here is the grass in-game, with its normals matched to the terrain it sits upon :thumbsup:
Oi4i49Z.jpg
 
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So the solution is to go with weather and lighting such that no light hits anything, normals be damned? :D

(It's probably just me, posted photos always look super dark on my phone but fine on my monitor.) edit: yep... totally different on my PC. Looks nice!

Foliage is shaping up nicely. ;)
 
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Well, at cloudy circumstances diffuse light is indeed almost non-present. Not the best way to show off your normals :p
I tried normal thief once but it failed badly on my machine so I didn't include it in my tutorial. Any hints on how you get it to work nicely? (i.e. settings? maximum number of normals selected, etc?)
 
Hmm... don't know, nothing special I don't think :unsure:

I'm working with grass in 10k vert chunks (maximum), the donor mesh is about 1500 verts. It can take a few seconds but I haven't had any problems with it at all so far. (3ds max 2013, i5-6500, 3.2ghz, 8gb ram, W10 64-bit)

And yes, sorry about that screenshot - not the best one to use. I was just so excited that it worked :rolleyes:
 
I think I have worked out the best way for me to add my trackside foliage. I envisage the grass right next to the track being quite low, and gradually getting taller, more wild, and also darker as it moves into the area covered by the trees. I've tried to do this with a single texture / material,so the texture contains only 5 plant types, but at various darkness.

Thomson Road is like a tree-lined corridor, with 90% of the foliage being within a few metres of the edge of the track. It also has a relatively short viewing distance due to the nature of the layout. I have split the track into 20 sections, each section has 8 different plant types/colours and about 3,200 plants (25,600 verts). I have so far added plants to the first 7 sections, with no optimisation (i.e. those 7 sections contain 56 individual plant meshes still) and I hardly notice any drop in performance :confused: I love AC! :inlove:

Screenshot_ks_lotus_25_thomson_24-12-116-7-47-34.jpg

Screenshot_ks_lotus_25_thomson_24-12-116-8-0-36.jpg

Screenshot_ks_lotus_25_thomson_24-12-116-8-1-31.jpg

Screenshot_ks_lotus_25_thomson_24-12-116-7-59-51.jpg

It's going to take a while to add it all as I have to split each distribution object into 4 strips, so I can ensure that the correct grass goes in the correct place. Then I have normal-match each grass object to get the lighting right in-game :cautious:
grass.jpg

Hopefully it will be worth the time and effort to get this element right. Thomson Road is starting to come together for me :)
 
WOW, that looks like nothing else in AC currently, at least I can't think of anything similar right now. Huge effort and truly amazing results. :O_o:

I have no understanding about track modeling but your methods always seems to be very high tech and super smart, this is going to be something really unusual, it already is in your betas.
 
WOW, that looks like nothing else in AC currently, at least I can't think of anything similar right now.

Just like we knew it would. ;)

I know we're nowhere near this stage yet, but if you can pull off some convincing jungle atmosphere trackside it will be incredible. Nothing else quite like it in the sim.

Seriously, Alfie... that's a jungle. Looks fantastic!
 
Good point :) I do need to rework the large trees, once I have all the foliage in place. I currently only have about 6 palm textures and about 16 large deciduous tree textures. I did start to create new textures using SpeedTree so maybe I need to think about adjusting my balance of palm / deciduous.

It is possible to rotate the tree models but only up to 60° (?) as the models are Y shaped and you just end up seeing the same texture but on the next face. I could flip the texture on some models but then the lighting could look odd as the shadows (in the texture) would be falling in the opposite direction. I think my best option would be to create more varied palm textures as they are the ones that catch your eye, as you so rightly pointed out :)

Oh, I would like to thank @LilSki for his support and inspiration. He is a top bloke and really epitomises the people who frequent this section ;)

Merry Christmas to everyone (I hope you all find some 'you' time to enjoy AC over the holiday :D)
 
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Tree walls added, billboard trees added (6,800), 3D grass added (75,500 objects). Next I need to finish adding the advertising boards, camera facing people, skid marks on the road. It's getting there though :)

 
It really is a different track. The obscured sight lines change everything, and the jump on the main straight is a lot scarier with trees lining the road. :confused:
 

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