Pleclair has released an extensive new development update & previews of his on-going Nordschleife for rFactor 2 project.
Based on the rFactor version of the Green Hell made by Com8, Pleclair is equipping the track with new features such as textures and other details to bring it to rFactor 2 standard.
Below are some new previews and an extensive status update by the author himself.??The improvements will be available in the new version of the track, until then you can check out the??current version here??.
Sorry for the lack of update, the last week has been pretty tough by itself. Some regarding the track itself, and some involving real life matters.
I spent quite a bit of time on the road again, hehe, I mean on the track’s tarmac appearance, and I made quite a bit of progress as you will soon see in the new screenshots
I spent some time with a new plugin I got that can pull google earth’s data right into 3dsmax, with whatever resolution texture you want. Pretty neat stuff.
I imported the track into Max, and spent some time figuring out a way to replace the low res far scenery with some better one, but seems like I’m not there yet.
I have also tried different things like conforming the road we have on the new terrain, even tho it wasnt a perfect fit, but the result was like a brand new track ???? The exact same shape of corner, with totally different elevation. Was really odd!
So until I get better with modelling, I’ll put this on hold. The thing is, the mesh is all nicely made of squares or rectangle (triangulated), so its hard to cut in and replace what I have in the far scenery. Would even be harder to replace the inner scenery.
I almost called it quit last week while working on the road. I knew something wasnt right, but couldnt really get it to look like what I wanted, the higher resolution detail/spec/bump map were displayed too big.
After getting it to a size I wanted, thru resizing the uvw channel 2, I found out there was quite a bit of distortion in the uvs, and it resulted in blurry patch in the road.
So I redid the uvs for the channel 2 for the whole track, and I got it to look pretty good!
I will likely darken the road texture a bit, I lighten it up a tad too much, since I also switched to the real road shader, which made the road look darker. Much darker.
I also took a look at the reference picture Richard sent me, and something struck me. The place is bushy as hell. The bushes we had were border disgusting, and far too few. I understand when the track was made, computer were a lot less powerful, but that aint true no more
So I started to bushen the place a little! I replaced all bushes with new ones, and added quite a bit of variations. 9 in total, against 3 there was.
I made sure to pick bushes that looked wild, and not something you’d find in a garden ???? I also started to remove the ugly tree line that was real close to the road. The bushes will fill this space, and I’ll likely add more trees where I see it is more dense on the pictures I have.
As for later optimization regarding the much increased bushes (well, the original bushes where made of 8 polygons anyway, so the total difference wont be as large as it would seems to be, since they are now 1 poly billboard… but still… I’ll break down the bushes objects, and put them into vis group, so people with max detail will get all bushes, and as you go down, you’ll lose some, until you have only those close to track.
Might not make 4 groups, might end up into 2-3 or something like that, we’ll see.
I downloaded some courses for 3dsmax, regarding basics, and some for uvw mapping, making seemless textures. Should help me understand some more stuff and progress further.
So here are the brand new screenshots. There are many!
This session was started at 8pm, and ran accelerated 2 laps to get some rubber in with 12 ai cars. Oh, and I also noticed the texture for the race groove was mapped sideways, it is now mapped properly in the right direction!
It is going to take quite a bit more time than I first thought. But this is mainly because my expectations are now much higher and I wanna do a lot of things I didnt even thought I would be able to do. So, hang tight.
There will still be in between releases, but I learned by my previous releases that most people didnt followed the thread, and are asking me question I already answered, or even mentioned in my updates. So until I got the textures to a point I’m satisfied enough I can resume work on the mesh (I’ll likely do the bushes in between too, and add more trees as well), then you’ll have this version, and I’ll continue on fixing up the cracks.
I also mesh smoothed the far scenery a bit. I couldnt and wouldnt smooth it all, since it would have torn large hole everywhere, plus resulted in many extra polygons, that wouldnt have been that much necessary. So I only smoothed the most jagged parts, couple of polygons per scenery objects. It did a pretty good job, as you can see in the first screenshot well, in the far back.
I also replaced and added more variety of grass too. I havent started to billboard them and increase their number, but will do. The nice hills after the gp overlap will look much better with billboard grass instead of those x shape grass that looks odd, since some grass is very dark since the light isnt hitting them.
The track is already around 350mb now When I’ll be done, I would think it will reach upward of 600mb. So it will be the size it should for the size of the track it is
