WIP Lemalands...scratch made, fantasy, by LeMaX

[Alexander Knoll]

Hello all,
to day i got the permission from LeMaX for his wonderful scratch made fantasy track Lemalands, a very nice landscape and a temporary road course...
...here some pic's for the moment...


...hope you like it...

Alex

 

[Mr Whippy]

It looks good!

The far terrain is very nice. Is that a looping image, or a full unique panorama? The blend between the track and the panorama is really good on the rFactor track.
If you check the shaders there is a panorama shader where you can scale the fog effect, it might be worth using that to try get the blend perfect here in Racer (iirc I had some issues with it being buggy due to vert density, so you might need to up vert density on it)




Please don't rush it, take your time and do it right and make it an example of how to do a Racer track.
I'd like to be able to enjoy these rFactor conversions but most only hit about 25fps tops at my end... and I can otherwise run Crysis 2 or Shift 2 etc at full settings with 60fps!

These tracks run 100fps+ in rFactor on my machine so they should be doing the same in Racer with the right tweaks!


Good luck

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

Hi Dave,
it's a full unique panorama of Aspen , Colorado (original size- 18500px * 1800px).
I take a look to this panorama shader...you are right the fog is a little to much...
I already startet to make it right...atm ~85% of all trees are using the same texture and are in one .dof....will see how much i can reduce it...

Alex

oh...this track is also made for GTR2 and GTL....and Racer^^

 

[smr597]

Hmm, cant see the link anywhere, would love to try it out

 

[luthobu]

oh...this track is also made for GTR2 and GTL....and Racer^^

Cool! Found the GTR2 version and converted it to Race07. It is a really great
track to drive, and the way the landscape is sculptured is pure inspiration.
So few objects, but so much texture going on! Just like OmWeg (have
converted that to Race07 as well). I know this is not Racer stuff, but I
think that we could learn a lot from other modelers, like these. If I could
create the same kind of atmosphere as in Lemalands and OmWeg, well,
then I would be really, really happy

 

[Mr Whippy]

I'll have to take a look how it's built too. It does like great the way the terrain just melts away into the panorama background.

The sense of scale must be really nice when driving around!

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

Hmm, cant see the link anywhere, would love to try it out

the racer version is wip...and for the moment not uploaded...
If you are interestet on any other version look at NoGrip...

 

[smr597]

Oh I was reading whippys post about low fps, thats why I asked. But thanks.

 

[Alexander Knoll]

progress report....
~60% of the road remapped with the new atlas texture....
...i test witch is best...one big road file and one shader/texture...
or some small road files with one shader/texture...
...what do you think, should i release a W.I.P. at every point?
will say...unoptimised, tree optimised, tree and road optimised...and so on and so on....?
...the rest of this week i have nightshift so i'm sure i get not much progress...stay tuned

 

[luthobu]

...what do you think, should i release a W.I.P. at every point?

No. Get a beta tester, and wait with a release until it is "almost"
finished so you can track down the final bugs. Just my 2c

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yep, I'd just work at it until you don't see anything obvious and consider it close to finished, then release and let people give feedback... they can then give you a snag list from bugs to feature requests like more cameras, sounds, that kinda thing... that can all go into one or two patches in one bit editing session.

Generally if you start doing too many releases then the WIP releases take precedence and distract from just finishing the project in the first place... or they can in my experience.

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

ok...so i do...

 

[Alexander Knoll]

Hello all,
to day i finished the road....i have reduced the 15 road parts to one file and the 2 shader to one with one big atlas...and WoW...the fps rises to........................
Yep, its exactly the SAME.....
now i think here is no optimization needed....because it took me a lot of time to remap it and get no resoult...

 

[Mr Whippy]

There might be a few reasons for that.

First is that if you haven't imported all the items into the track yet, then the shader count is still low, so that is fine. If this is the case and you add more and more shaders, then having reduced 15 to 2 shaders will benefit you later!

If that isn't the case, then it could be that the 15 road parts are often not all seen together in the first place. Perhaps you only have 3 or 4 within your usual draw distance at the most.
There is also the downside that you can't now give each road texture a different material property, like more/less grip etc... so sometimes for these things it's ok to run more textures/shaders as there is no avoiding it if you want many materials!


Obviously managing all this is time consuming and can be quite complex. You really need to get an overview of what textures/shaders are used where.
Ie, atlasing a shader for a building at one end of the track with a building on the other side of the track when you never see the other will be pointless. Just LOD the other off after it goes out of sight and you've saved yourself some work.


Making a track for us is as much about considering these things as much as anything. We don't have scripts/workflows that can do all this for us... so it's a job we have to manually work through.
Infact, originally, these track resource might have been heavily optimised with files within the rFactor engine... but they won't move over to Racer easily if at all. They are totally different graphics engines an era apart!


Optimisation is important, don't lose faith in it yet.

See those 10 or so saved shader calls as extra potential later to add more details, scattered grass objects, add more bump/spec maps etc etc...

Every bit of optimisation lets you invest elsewhere to make stuff look even better



Just as an example I have. On my course I have about 300 cones. They are all individual DOF so they can all be knocked over as movables.
Downside is that is about 300 render calls!
So I simply added very close LOD drops, so the models go away by about 150m for the small cones.
Now suddenly I lose about 250 render calls. I still get about 50 or so as 50 cones are in view at any given time, but the FPS benefit is really clear!


Just work at it, I swear it'll be worth it in the end... just try look for the worst culprits for hogging shaders for now.

In rFactor tracks the number one problems are trees and track side items.


Again, on Roggel atlasing the trees got me about 25-30% more FPS, so it's well worth doing it in cases where there are clear cases of many textures all being visible at once, but in separate shaders.
Look out for those types of things and they will get you the biggest gain


Thanks

Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

hey Dave, i've not deleted it
...oh...there are all objects in it
...i look at next for the houses...here is a lot more potential...i hope

 

[Alexander Knoll]

hmm...playing again with the shaders...
i've tested this panorama shader...but i get only a verry dark "siluette"(?) is some one out here who tried it too?
...here is the code i use:

vf_panorama
{
  vertex_shader
  {
    file=panorama_v.cg
  }
  fragment_shader
  {
    file=panorama_f.cg
  }
}

and...

shader_panorama1~vf_panorama
{
  sort_offset=-220
  cull=back
  compression=0
  cast_shadow=0
  layer0
  {
    diffuse=0.3 0.3 0.3 1
    map=panorama1.dds
    alphafunc=gequal 90
  }
}

...hmm...

 

[Mr Whippy]

Probably turn diffuse to 1 1 1 1

Then use a 'scale' input to scale how foggy you want it to appear. Well that is the idea any way!
So in this case your panorama might be only 2000m away, but you want it to look 15000m away. To do this it needs to be effected more by the distance fog, so you scale it up to make it look 15000m away, even though it's not.

shader_panorama1~vf_panorama
{
  sort_offset=-220
  cull=back
  compression=0
  cast_shadow=0
  scale=0 > 10 whatever you want to get the fog looking right for your needs
layer0
  {
    diffuse=1 1 1 1
    map=panorama1.dds
    alphafunc=gequal 90
  }
}

I think that should do it, but I had some problems with it before I think. Mainly I think because I was using a simple plane (two triangles). It shaded funny. I think you need more mesh density for the vertex lighting to work right (rather than just four verts/two triangles)


Dave

 

[Alexander Knoll]

THX Dave, i test it...

EDIT:...hmm...i get every thing but not a nice looking panorama....i changed all scale values between 1 and 10....the color changes from yellow to green...

what do you think about this one?

 

[Mr Whippy]

I think that looks great.

I had trouble with the pano shader and ended up making my own iirc.

Thing is, if you will not run TOD which still gives best visual look, then you can 'bake' the fog into the texture/pano image any way, well, you can bake more or less in so it appears the right distance away even if it's much closer than IRL.


I'd also check the lighting of the sky dome, your track, and the pano. Right now the shadows on track look right with those on the pano image, but the sky looks like the sun is in front of us, so maybe you want to offset the sky dome texture to the left 90deg or something?!
That way everything lines up and you don't notice the apparent wrong lighting


Looks good though, I can't wait to have a drive

Dave

 

[Eholov]

any news about this track please