The "What Are You Working On?" Thread

[Trava]

I need to take a seat after this one.

 

[whoolkan]

It started with a "let's make a simple rally track, the one where i used to go see rally races when i was a kid", and that was about 5km (Rally di Cividale-Castelmonte, Italy) but the project expanded to something quite ridiculous, encompassing all the valleys and mountain roads i used to drive around a lot when i was still in Italy.

The goal is to make a huge looping mountain pass track, full of hairpins, tight roads, wide roads, flat ground, in the middle of forests, city and villages. I'm setting it up to be played in full or to be split in smaller pieces as touge uphill/downhill tracks and rally tracks too.

It's my first track in AC.
Yes, i'm a dumbass to go straight away with something this huge.
Yes, i don't have a set time to complete it but i want to first release small pieces that can be played on and expand it with updates along the way.
Yes, i will probably lose my sanity and i have no idea if i will ever finish it, but the first milestone is to get the Cividale-Castelmonte playable and iterate on that to make it a decent track and use what i learn from it to expand further and work more efficiently.

Down below an idea of what the area looks like:

Down here is instead the google maps overlay of the roads i'm going to make

The black lines under the roads you see are the road splines i made so far (a bit more up north, it's about 60% covered).
Next step after the roads are done, is to adjust the road spline to the terrain elevation.

For reference, the green line is about 2.4km(see bottom left of the full map). I haven't calculated yet how much kms of road there is in total but i estimate well over 60km, probably much more.

I do not intend to make this utrarealistic to the real life version of these roads but to use that as a major reference instead to work on. I want to focus more on the actual gameplay of this map so i'll take some liberty on the fidelity for the sake of enjoyability.


For context, i wanted to make a racetrack for a while and i was ultimately inspired by the recent photogrammetry tracks made by Todd K (https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/authors/todd-k.445006/) and his Snake, Muholland Drive and Topanga canyon maps.

I work in the gaming industry as a freelance hard surface artist and i got to say i'm quite excited for this project: working on environments is a new (excuse the pun) environment for me and a nice opportunity to grow.
The final intention is also to release all the models i make for this track for people to use in their own projects so that one doesn't have to spend so much time making everything from scratch or recycle the same assets.

if you have any suggestions on the workflow to make maps this big, or just simply on how to keep my mental sanity, constructive criticism, feedback and suggestions, those are all welcome.


Wish me luck, i'll keep you posted

 

[Kyuubeey]

@whoolkan

I regret to inform you but the decision to begin modding AC robs one of any mental sanity they might have had to begin with. Good luck.

 

[whoolkan]

I figured as much.
But you know what? I haven't had this much fun in playing a videogame in a few years now and learning to drift and drive tons of cars and different maps is a breath of fresh air and i have the technical knowledge to make decent models now so i can spend the last bit of sanity i have left on something exciting as this.

At least i can enjoy again roads i used to drive when i'm no longer in the same country, and if someone else enjoys them too, that's good enough for me

 

[aphidgod]

I mean, for the most part it's worth it.

 

[Trava]

After all modders aren't masochists or anything..... right guys??

 

[Raymond Racing]

View attachment 492104

Sanity slowly fading, but it's been a good aid in making sure the geometry actually makes sense spatially.

Which Vintage Formula car is that going to be?

 

[Kyuubeey]

Which Vintage Formula car is that going to be?

Here's a hint. Some will know.

 

[67JTM]

Is that a... Brabham?
Edit: No, probably not- but still exactly the kind of Car I like to Drive

 

[AccAkut]

Captain Slow at the wheel

I also have no idea why and how the Nav screen works, I did not set up anything for it in the config, it must just work of whatever is there in vanilla AC things (Ai line, material names etc)
Whole building is still below 100k tris and 8,5 MB of textures

 

[stingray_SIX_TWO]

Trying to get the suspension under control, it still drives like wet towel. If I ever do another car I'll start with one empty as a model and design the suspension first.

Flames are positioned...

Hillclimbs and twisty roads are the only ones I'm testing on as that is where the susp needs to carry the brick first, high speed stability will follow.

Door handle, fender flares, roof line, pop up lights and bumper model irregularities are being taken care off to resolve reflection and surface issues.

Specular on the rear lights is a 'tad' high...

Still happy with overall proportions and sizing, it's only been under development for...4 years?

 

[Nedddo]

@stingray_SIX_TWO its like TDUs, NFS 1-HP2 and Test Drives 1-6 at the same time and probably some other exotic games. Wonderful environments, impressive machine!

 

[whoolkan]

Final map, about 220km. which means that is stupid big and i will cut a whole bunch of stuff or even split it in multiple parts, depending on which roads are the most fun to drive, so when i will post the first drivable road, let me know what you think. It's going to take a while to get there though.

Now i need to elevate the road splines to the actual terrain height so i need to prepare the terrain on zbrush a bit but in the meantime i can use the base terrain as template for the elevation.

To do that i will try this:

I have a plane i subdivided and deformed by moving a vert upward with soft selection on.
under it, a bezier curve as an example

With shrinkwrap modifier i can project the curve on to the surface by limiting the deformation on the z axis. If it doesn't work try changing how close to the terrain you need your curve to be to project well, so make adjustments accordingly.

The ZBrush pass will be to refine a bit the quality of the terrain that will be used and where the road goes for both the visual and driving model, hoping i'll learn something out of my comfort zone and that i can make a realistic enough to drive road.

I'll post my first attempts at zbrush, i'll choose to do a 5km part so far and focus on making that drivable and expand on it

 

[stingray_SIX_TWO]

I didn't even realize the track selection, if you're interested it is Tajo, Glava Zete, Hong and Shotuko. I also test on LAC and Algarve. But looking at the shots you're right, like a Best Of of classic arcade racers .

 

[Kyuubeey]

@stingray_SIX_TWO

If your car ever comes out and I am still around, I can take a look at the physics and make some decent Cphys tires and go over the suspension implementation if you want. I know Assetto Corsa will be a vintage simulator by then so I will need to brush up my skills a little.

 

[stingray_SIX_TWO]

Thanks to Ilja, this sim will be getting better and better and survive well into 2030 which is when I plan my alpha release.

 

[fastfab]

You are joking but when ACC came out and Kunos changed dimension from indy to publisher backed I thought AC and its outdated tech was dead and kinda quit modding. Thinking pouring hundreds and hundreds of hours in track was now useless. Ilja single handelingly revived the game and got a lot of modder back onboard me included. I don't even play ACC anymore lol...

 

[Kyuubeey]

You are joking but when ACC came out and Kunos changed dimension from indy to publisher backed I thought AC and its outdated tech was dead and kinda quit modding. Thinking pouring hundreds and hundreds of hours in track was now useless. Ilja single handelingly revived the game and got a lot of modder back onboard me included. I don't even play ACC anymore lol...

You gotta give credit to JPG and Stereo too. They've been very involved in developing CSP and Cphys. None of Cphys would be possible without them and it's unlikely anyone would seriously do AC physics anymore. Ilja had almost no hand in that apart from providing CSP.

 

[fastfab]

Of course ;-)

 

[whoolkan]

So far the road curves seem to hold. Of course there is a whole bunch of manual smoothing i will have to do since the geodata is not perfect but there's a start.

Now i'll focus on making the Cividale-Castelmonte rally track which is a bit more approachable.

EDIT:

Last one is the ortho view of the whole climb.
there's a bunch of kinks in the road that need working but for the first part it's not too bad