AC Modding Questions Thread

[Fat-Alfie]

That's exactly what I wanted to do I think the 'floating polka dots' look very toy-like and I wanted to replace them with this kind of thing:

I'll keep searching and let you know what I find (if anything)

 

[mrcyn]

Hey guys, first time forum user, I could really use some help here.

I have been experimenting with modding recently, and I have managed to get almost all of the basics of car modding down. However, as I prefer open-wheel cars, I have finally encountered the dreaded animated suspension. Note I am using Blender.

I just don't know how to do it. I have tried everything. No matter what i do, my dummies are messed up or the animation simply doesn't work or something, it's not pretty. Initially i had a simple Blender constraint setup and i would animate, then bake the animation for all the dummies that are parents to suspension components (per each wheel, of course). This didn't work. Then i realized that the orientation of fbx files, and assetto corsa by extension, has Y as upwards, whereas Z is upwards in blender. I would typically have my dummies rotated 90 degrees on the x axis to make them transfer over to ac well, but they would be moving along a different coordinate space with Blender's animation. Ugh. So i rotated my entire car 90 degrees along the x axis, so that the nose is pointing down. I rebuilt and reanimated my suspension this time. This didn't work. I kept experimenting and trying different solutions but none of them were close to working. They all resulted in my suspension either being nonexistent or spaghettified.

I'm just in the blind here, I have essentially no information about animated suspension since there are no tutorials on Youtube, this forum, other forums, or anywhere on the internet, for all Google can show me. I have of course looked at the provided animated suspension example in the sdk folder, and i have duplicated that setup with my car, to no avail.

So, tl;dr, can anyone who uses Blender explain to me how to properly animate suspension? Perhaps, and I don't mean to reach, but provide an example .blend file of a setup that works? I would appreciate any help, as I have spent about a week and a half trying to figure this out.

 

[Mascot]

That's exactly what I wanted to do I think the 'floating polka dots' look very toy-like and I wanted to replace them with this kind of thing:

View attachment 276202

I'll keep searching and let you know what I find (if anything)

That looks quite similar to the graphics that I had ready. I'll have a dig around and see if I've still got them.

Edit - seems I had a few saved:

I think I prefer yours.

 

[AccAkut]

Hey guys, first time forum user, I could really use some help here.

I have been experimenting with modding recently, and I have managed to get almost all of the basics of car modding down. However, as I prefer open-wheel cars, I have finally encountered the dreaded animated suspension. Note I am using Blender.

I just don't know how to do it. I have tried everything. No matter what i do, my dummies are messed up or the animation simply doesn't work or something, it's not pretty. Initially i had a simple Blender constraint setup and i would animate, then bake the animation for all the dummies that are parents to suspension components (per each wheel, of course). This didn't work. Then i realized that the orientation of fbx files, and assetto corsa by extension, has Y as upwards, whereas Z is upwards in blender. I would typically have my dummies rotated 90 degrees on the x axis to make them transfer over to ac well, but they would be moving along a different coordinate space with Blender's animation. Ugh. So i rotated my entire car 90 degrees along the x axis, so that the nose is pointing down. I rebuilt and reanimated my suspension this time. This didn't work. I kept experimenting and trying different solutions but none of them were close to working. They all resulted in my suspension either being nonexistent or spaghettified.

I'm just in the blind here, I have essentially no information about animated suspension since there are no tutorials on Youtube, this forum, other forums, or anywhere on the internet, for all Google can show me. I have of course looked at the provided animated suspension example in the sdk folder, and i have duplicated that setup with my car, to no avail.

So, tl;dr, can anyone who uses Blender explain to me how to properly animate suspension? Perhaps, and I don't mean to reach, but provide an example .blend file of a setup that works? I would appreciate any help, as I have spent about a week and a half trying to figure this out.

This is a bit of speciality of me and I figured a few things out.

For one, you need to export the animated empties (or objects, but only empties is better) as FBX 6.1 ASCII. I'm using 2.77 here and did not change anything else in the export settings.

6.1 ASCII:

the settings I use for the normal model (not the animation), 7.4 binary, are these:

plus unticked "Baked Animation" on the 'Animation' page

AC also does not like chains of animated Empties, its better if you bake and unparent them

You can also use Stereo's ksanim exporter, but I think I only had success with this regarding driver animation, but not suspension or aero:
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/bone-animation-rig-blender.34594/#post-719943

I'm actually right now doing a test stream on Twitch fiddling on my current car model, right here, may be doing that some other time in the future if I find time (its a public holiday here today): https://www.twitch.tv/winkelgassler

 

[mrcyn]

This is a bit of speciality of me and I figured a few things out.

For one, you need to export the animated empties (or objects, but only empties is better) as FBX 6.1 ASCII. I'm using 2.77 here and did not change anything else in the export settings.

6.1 ASCII:
View attachment 276211

the settings I use for the normal model (not the animation), 7.4 binary, are these:
View attachment 276210
plus unticked "Baked Animation" on the 'Animation' page

AC also does not like chains of animated Empties, its better if you bake and unparent them

You can also use Stereo's ksanim exporter, but I think I only had success with this regarding driver animation, but not suspension or aero:
https://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/index.php?threads/bone-animation-rig-blender.34594/#post-719943

I'm actually right now doing a test stream on Twitch fiddling on my current car model, right here, may be doing that some other time in the future if I find time (its a public holiday here today): https://www.twitch.tv/winkelgassler

Wow thanks, that's a huge amount of info I never would have guessed. This answers most of my questions, but I still have one extra: how do you orientate your empties/dummies?

A friend told me to rotate them 90 degrees on the x axis (so that y is facing up) so that when blender rotates them on fbx export, they'd be facing the correct direction, and I've been doing that for all my cars since with great success. But I saw (briefly) in your twitch stream that you left the dummies at their default orientation (0,0,0 rotation). What should I do?

Oh, and another dumb question, unrelated; are solid front axles possible? I have some ideas for vintage race cars floating around my mind, and most of them have a beam front axle rather than independant suspension.

 

[garyjpaterson]

Oh, and another dumb question, unrelated; are solid front axles possible? I have some ideas for vintage race cars floating around my mind, and most of them have a beam front axle rather than independant suspension.

Not possible in terms of physics, but you can kind of mimic it visually with DIR animations.

 

[AccAkut]

Wow thanks, that's a huge amount of info I never would have guessed. This answers most of my questions, but I still have one extra: how do you orientate your empties/dummies?

A friend told me to rotate them 90 degrees on the x axis (so that y is facing up) so that when blender rotates them on fbx export, they'd be facing the correct direction, and I've been doing that for all my cars since with great success. But I saw (briefly) in your twitch stream that you left the dummies at their default orientation (0,0,0 rotation). What should I do?

I don't think you need to orient them in any special way for keyframe animation if you export them in the 6.1 ASCII format. Guess you saw the rear wing moving about, I could just export that as is, in the form it resulted in after "Bake Action...".

for DIR_ animation (the special method employed in the AC engine) you need to hold up specific orientations, in general X-axis' of the two linked Empties facing each other i think

 

[Stereo]

The only empties you need to worry about orientation is the root level ones, that's what blender fbx export changes the transform on to get it to match AC's axes. Everything below that just inherits the root level's 90 degree rotation and works as you'd expect. For my animations I mostly have a static object at the top level and then animate an empty that's its child. This also lets Blender's interpolation work for rotation around different axes (eg. lambo doors). It's tricky to get meshes to be children of these without messing up their transform though... best to do the empties before modeling stuff if possible. Also I recommend using menu option Object>Parent>Clear Parent Inverse on stuff before transferring it to another parent, Blender will do very weird stuff otherwise and only slightly weird if you did this.

Objects don't need the animations baked, fbx export should do that automatically. So just leave it as mostly constraints.

 

[AccAkut]

The only empties you need to worry about orientation is the root level ones, that's what blender fbx export changes the transform on to get it to match AC's axes. Everything below that just inherits the root level's 90 degree rotation and works as you'd expect. For my animations I mostly have a static object at the top level and then animate an empty that's its child. This also lets Blender's interpolation work for rotation around different axes (eg. lambo doors). It's tricky to get meshes to be children of these without messing up their transform though... best to do the empties before modeling stuff if possible. Also I recommend using menu option Object>Parent>Clear Parent Inverse on stuff before transferring it to another parent, Blender will do very weird stuff otherwise and only slightly weird if you did this.

Objects don't need the animations baked, fbx export should do that automatically. So just leave it as mostly constraints.

for my latest animations (aero, shifting) I have the animated Empties at root level/lowest level, and it worked fine via 6.1 ASCII export, but not your export plugin. Audi was the same. I rather had issues with parented Empties not doing anything despite having keyframes,

 

[Stereo]

Yeah, my exporter doesn't do anything to correct coordinate system, just exports animations as they are. It was simpler that way and it works fine on the rigged driver which is the main thing I want it for anyway.

 

[mrcyn]

I don't think you need to orient them in any special way for keyframe animation if you export them in the 6.1 ASCII format. Guess you saw the rear wing moving about, I could just export that as is, in the form it resulted in after "Bake Action...".

for DIR_ animation (the special method employed in the AC engine) you need to hold up specific orientations, in general X-axis' of the two linked Empties facing each other i think

https://streamable.com/x9h08

With your (and other's) help, I got it working perfectly. Thanks a million!

(don't mind the blank textures... i had to re-export the car quite a few times before this success)

 

[Nicecuppatea]

FMOD:
Is it possible to create decent car engine sound with this with no knowledge or do you need to have a solid understanding beforehand of the software and sound engineering in general

It's not too difficult to learn the basics of FMOD, confusing at first but there's plenty of tutorials and tips on YouTube and Google. Finding sounds and making loops to work with can be hard but the program itself is free so all it costs you is the time it takes to jump in, make a mess, and then work out how to fix it. Make sure you get the right version for AC, think it's 1.08.12 but that's from memory so check that.

 

[Ghoults]

1. The sdk has cubemaprenderer tab. Can you do anything with it? I don't think tracks can have their own cubemaps (skyboxes) as far as I know?
2. What does the radius parameter do under the object tab? I'd imagine it has something to do with the object size but does the sdk or ac actually use it for anything?

 

[Lonnopo]

Hey all, I feel like this probably belongs here as I'm new to track making and pretty clueless on where to begin troubleshooting my issue. I've finished building my road and terrain and wanted to test in-game before I start placing objects, all looks good in Blender but once I import it into the SDK my satellite images are all off. (images below)

I've tried doing a bit of research into how to fix this and am assuming its to do with the materials and UV's?? But yeah again, I'm still pretty clueless so not really sure where to begin fixing this. I figured it's probably really simple so hoping someone here might be able to give me an explanation of what's happening

Blender:

SDK:

 

[Stereo]

The only kind of UV that works is UVMap, Blender lets you set a few other coordinate types but they won't be exported. Can't tell from the screenshot how you're displaying the texture in Blender though.

 

[Lonnopo]

Thanks for the reply man

Does this help?

 

[Stereo]

The y mapping being -1 might be the problem, not sure how that got there. Also can't hurt to click the empty area next to Map and check that it's only got 1 uvmap (I believe fbx will export them all but kseditor uses the first, have not tested though)

You might have to switch from 3d view to uv/image editor and adjust it once you do that (eg. mirror on Y), just select all the faces in edit mode.

 

[Lonnopo]

The y mapping being -1 might be the problem

So that definitely seems to be the culprit, it seems to be set like that as I import the FBX from the program I'm using to build the terrain/road (Infraworks). First thing I did was just change this to '1' which caused it to be like it is in kseditor.
View attachment 278315

You might have to switch from 3d view to uv/image editor and adjust it once you do that (eg. mirror on Y), just select all the faces in edit mode.

Is this the reason about needing to adjust it? I tried the 'mirror on Y' in UV/image editor but nothing seemed to happen.

I also went and checked export settings in Infraworks to see if there was anything causing it, but had no luck finding anything there either

I should also mention that for some reason Infraworks splits the mesh into separate meshes, at first I'd just merge all meshes but after some thought i realised this may be beneficial for performance once in AC, as well as allowing for a higher overall poly count, im still yet to research on if this would be the case though. But could the seperate meshes/materials be the case of the UV's having an issue?

 

[Lonnopo]

Sweet, so I finally figured out the mirroring on Y thing which nearly has it right, but its just a bit offset to the right. I've tried playing around with the offset and all those other values but can't seem to get it

 

[Stereo]

When you're doing the mirroring you probably want to set the origin to 2d cursor mode (crosshairs in the menu bar) then place the 2d cursor in the middle of the image (without an image loaded it's 256 wide so you'd set 128, if your texture's another size use half of that)