Mini nK Track Tutorial

[Guest mickyknox]

I was lucky enough to receive a lot of help and advice from many members within the community (at both DI and RSC) and would like to return the favour by collecting what I have learnt and putting it down for others to take advantage of.

I would start by pointing people to this track building tutorial. It is clear and easy to understand. (While this doesn't add much, I find it useful in places, especially the banking section).

I recommend reading through the first sections of these tutorials to start with, just to familiarise yourself with the technique and general approach. Next I would read the nK track guide, and again familiarise yourself with what it says and get your head around the approach required for making your track work properly in nK.

The track tutorials really tells you pretty much all you need to know about the general ins and outs of the lofting process and getting your track mapped with a multi-texture. Once you have your loft, and have your mapping adjusted, you must do the following to tweak the track and for the sake of getting the track (and specifically the texturing) to work correctly in nK:

1) Make a snapshot as REFERENCE

2) Select the new object and add the TurnToMesh modifier

3) Add the EditMesh modifier

4) Put all your materials created in the first multimaterial to empty slot of material editor

5) Select elements in the new mesh by ID and apply your standard material instead of multimaterial

(Thanks to Outrunner for that bit )

Now you can edit you mesh (sorting out folds, creases and overlaps etc) while retaining your origonal loft in tact, so further changes can be made to it.

Sector naming is explained pretty clearly within the track guide, and shouldnt cause too much trouble, but perhaps one thing that could be useful to know is exactly why it is necessary. The different material labels, eg Road, Out, Grass etc are pretty self explanetary as they define the phyisical properties the different sections display. The bit that seems to catch people out a bit is the sector numbering. As far as I understand it, there are two mains reasons for breaking the track up into different numbered sections: i)To ease the load on nK ii)To prevent cheating/wrecking.

The first reason is explained by the way nK deals with collision detection, and basically the numbering system allows nK to discount all the other sectors and work out the collision detection simply for the sector the car is in at any instance, hence easing the work load nK has to deal with.

The second is by the way nK follows your progress around the different sectors. As I rememeber Kunos explaining it, nK "alerts" if it notices you making an incorrect jump from one sector to another (ie progressing from one sector to another which does not follow it numerically), and then if the next jump again does not follow the correct pattern it will boot you out.

These obviously puts some limitations on what you can do track wise in nK, but a bit of logic yields work arounds.

Well, that's about it for now off the top of my head. I'm by no means a proficient track maker, but have learnt enough to get a track built and into nK, and hope I can help other people like others have helped me.

Any corrections/suggestions/questions are most welcome and where possible I'll edit this first post to try and correctly cover everything.

Regards,

Simon

[Guest ChrisAW11]

Thanks a lot, that solves a freakin lot of my problems and makes me thing that track modelling could actually become a process centered around playability and beautification of the track, instead of a process centered around precisely moving hundreds of vertices just in order to create a smooth transit between asphalt and grass..

[Guest mickyknox]

I'm glad it's helped.

From my limited exerience it's certainly something that requires, and more importantly rewards, perserverence.

Simon

[Guest outrunner]

I'm glad it's helped.

From my limited exerience it's certainly something that requires, and more importantly rewards, perserverence.

Simon

Great work!