Nurburgring Nordschleife by Pleclair - Page 4 - Circuiti extra (extra tracks) - DrivingItalia.NET simulatori di guida Jump to content

VELOCIPEDE

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Version 0.97l (full, no update): Repositioned trees, moved and removed tree lines, optmized road, curbs, and scenery objects, merging and splitting them into smaller pieces, and optimized the LODs and shadows all around. Further optimization possible with shadow groups and vis groups. Reduced bump amplification on concrete extensions. Reduced dust output on the curbs and concrete a tad further. Might be forgetting stuff as usual :P

download -> http://www.drivingitalia.net/forum/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=5541

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Version 0.97N (full, no update): Updated lots of the lower resolution, nearby track, textures. Guardrails, metal post, all fences, wooden post, antenna tower, castle, environment texture (top down trees), and more... tweaked further the LODs, and fixed the rear view mirror mostly. Few popouts occurs near horizon line... nothing disruptive.

download -> http://www.drivingitalia.net/forum/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=5541

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  • 2 weeks later...

Pleclair non riposa!

 

Hey guys!
I figured I'd drop by and update you on what's happening! It's been a while and I've made good progress since.
But there is something I need to tell you first, I have come to conclusion that I cannot do the 24h layout as I have planned. I will keep working on that mesh and use it for the tourist instead. The reason is, the gp circuit is in really bad shape. I haven't had a good look at it before I made the announcement, but it almost looks like that part was made differently from the whole rest of the track. For instance, there is no track edges. Right after the road polygons, there are large grass polys, and no edges.

I cleaned up a whole lot in this area, removed all overlapping faces, and there was many. I started work on it, and added edges for the stretch going in the circuit, but when I got to an hairpin, I was a bit in the blue as how to handle the wires and everything. The road connections are horribly done, and there is no way I can smooth them without redoing them all, and I have no clue how to rewire those section properly to have a good density for rf2.
A few days ago, I was really curious to see how things were in game, and at that point, I hadn't seen any of my changes live in game. So I took a day, and split the track and export it to see how it looks in game. I had applied a one time mesh smooth on all roads, including gp, and it wasn't enough. The gp is still very rough with one mesh smooth, and the tourist is far better, but seems it really need that tessellation to make it perfect.

So I was a bit bummed out with the fact that the gp section is horrible... but if I were to continue in that direction, it might took me too much time at the moment... or we would have the tourist looking good, and the gp circuit looking sub-par.. and I don't want such a huge contrast between both.
So here is how the mesh is looking right now:


8ev5.png
tntw.png
eoj4.png
oukv.png
fmc7.png
z5ji.png


As you can see, everything that I went over is completely redone. One would look at that mesh and could never guess where it comes from. It's all brand new! I've hunted all overlapping faces, edges, vertices, isolated vertices, multiple edges, and t-vertices... and very few remains. I had to let go a few in the bridges sections... but everything is now connected together.

Since I never done terrain blending, I tried to think ahead and add vertices and geometry in areas where I wanna blend some textures in. I'd like to use a forest floor textures for areas where there is heavy trees... there shouldn't be heavy grass in those areas...

As you can see from the number of polys and verts in the screenshots, the clean up I did accounted for a lot, with all that extra geometry added, I'm still below what I started with when I imported everything. And I'm only a couple 2-3k more polys and verts than I had on my last update here.

So, now you must be thinking, wait, you tried this in dev mode, so where are the screenshots? Here they are smile.png Don't expect to be blown away tho, all mats are still not redefined, and I'm using all default textures for now, since the mapping needs to be redone for a few textures, and I don't want to make it heavier in Max either yet.

But if you are familiar enough with the track and how it looks now, you can extrapolate and imagine what these smooth hills will look like when properly textured and with all trees, fences, etc added!

(screenshots need to be taken into a new post.... too many images again)

I'm still trying hard to come up with something for christmas, but it might be tight. I'm currently past the adeneau bridge. I already went over it already, since I smoothed stuff initially until the village... but after seeing comments about the mesh, and how mesh smooth messed it up, I decided to do it manually, and rewire everything.

I've taken care of all those funky parts like the bilstein bridge, where those parts were an object sloppily added over the terrain... Now those parts are part of the terrain and all connected together.

Really sorry to have gotten your hopes up too fast on the 24h circuit. It will likely still happen, just need to improve further in order to rewire it properly, and add the needed geometry.

But the tourist should be looking reallllllllllly good.

I have also went ahead and bought GTR Evolution so I could have the best reference I can have on PC. I'm not using any parts from it, but I'm using it as a reference on how hills should be etc... again, don't expect it to be exactly like it, it won't be, but it should be closer to reality than what we had before.

Unfortunately, I cannot fix the layout itself. I had already overlapped the 2.2a over google earth's data, and the layout is similar, all the curves are looking about the same etc... but everything is a bit different, and if I overlay the stretches so they mostly fit together, then the rest of the circuit is not matching... and it's not a matter of redoing a corner or two... or three, or four... its the whole thing.

When driving on it, it might not seems all that different, but it is.

I have overlayed evo's version on google earth data, and it is 99% accurate, and the 1% probably comes from my tracing... since there is an area that is screwed on google earth, and I had to extrapolate.

But after driving evo's, I can safely say that the 2.2a version is more interesting anyway, in the sense of driving pleasure. The elevation changes are more pronounced, and some corners tighter... the evo version felt a bit faster.. it is particularly evident in the first corners after the main stretch... the U corner is quite a bit more opened up.

So what I'm trying to do is combine best of both world. I'm using evo as reference on how hills and scenery should be, and I'll keep the 2.2a layout to keep driving pleasure at a maximum! One area that will be quickly noticeable is when you exit the double s turns after the gp overlap, the hills right around the last s turn should be a lot bigger than we have, and I made it look like evo's. Another part that will be striking, it the adeneau bridge. The hills before the U corner should be much smaller, and also runs toward the bridge, and become higher for the bridge section. The hills we had were stopping after the corner, and then a lone hill was supporting the bridge (on the right side)...

Hmm, why not a screenshot to better show what I mean...


yewr.png


Having evo's will also be useful to determine how a few really bad textures should look like, since some were so bad I could hardly figure what is was... and what to replace it with...


@Denstjiro, Funny that you mention it, cause it was something I thought a while ago! And if I wasn't so busy at the moment with what I'm doing, I would probably have done something like add a christmas tree and some decorations in the paddock area, and maybe some tatoos, etc... but I'm already sleeping short nights trying to pull this off for xmas...

@J.Persson regarding the road bumps, I wish to make it more bumpy as well, cause I also think it is too flat. But like it's been said, the original mesh was way too low to have any bumps defined. It was bumpy because the polys were so huge.. smile.png But I would feel confident in creating some bumps now, only need to know where they go, and how much bump to apply, and the kind... is it all across the road, or over a defined part, like a pothole or something... althought I doubt there are many of those on the circuit smile.png We aren't in Montreal after all! (We have such ugly roads... :P)

So having someone with actual knowledge of the track would help... someone who's ran it many times in real life... cause looking at videos and pictures... unless they are taken for this purpose, to show the bumps and stuff... it will only be guess works... and I can already do that by randomly putting bumps in sections I see the camera shake in videos...

And the missing screenshots...


u5jg.jpg
6bpf.jpg
w5r3.jpg
y5ik.jpg
k9p6.jpg
tnmw.jpg
yzm2.jpg
vmpl.jpg

Edited by Uff
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  • 4 months later...

pleclair è tornato

Long time no see. I'm really sorry about the disappearance.
I do not wish to go into details, but you guys still deserve some explanations.
Going back to december, I worked pretty much the whole month non-stop, and I cut much into my sleep working really late on it, trying to meet the deadline I sort of set myself. Wanted to give you something for xmas. Althought I'm not really into xmas, it still meant much for me, as I felt you guys were awesome with me.

So, on xmas, my gf and son left for her parents for 3 days, and I stayed home working on this. This was the perfect time to really get some work done without any distractions. And it went rather well. On the 27th, when they came back, I had the whole terrain smoothed out. I was only left with the racesurface and curbs.

However, I thought it would go fast at that point, it wasn't such the case. So, they came back, brought fever and cold with them, and two days later, all three of us were having fever and feeling bad.
My son had all his habits changed, he sleeped with his mom over there, due to lack of extra bedroom... etc.
I tried to work but wasn't able to do anything good, as this type of work require good concentration. If you are distracted and do something else, it's hard to remember where you were, or even what you were doing sometimes.

To top it off, a few weeks later, when the cold was at its worst, my left leg started to hurt like crazy. I've been hit by a car some ten years ago and I have a metal rod and screws in my leg, and for the first time since the accident, I had a pretty rough time. Had problems walking, sleeping was hard.
Anyway, now it's been maybe 3-4 weeks now that my leg started to be okay again, so at least I can sleep better.

About the same time, we lost our internet due to overcharge... so we got tired of this crap and went for a provider that offered unlimited access, and got it yesterday. However after 3 hours it went offline until I dunno, this night or morning, it was online when i woke up.
The thing is, I read a lot of negative comment on them (after signing with them, but we don't have much choice, do we? Not much providers in our area), so I hope the downtime yesterday on the first day wasn't significant.
Well, I thought of making it short, but I somehow failed! But it is shorter than it could have been!
So what can you expect by downloading this 1.5 update of Nordschleife?
A lot!
I don't want to break any of the surprise, so that is all I will say for now, go ahead and download this:

 

v1.5 -> http://www.drivingitalia.net/forum/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=5541

As you can see, the filesize gone down considerably and I will be able to trim quite a bit more. I still have unused textures in the maps folder I need to clean up. But since they are still assigned to mats (not assigned to any polys), they are needed to load the track.
We can probably expect 50-100mb reduction still. Not too shabby.

The track itself should be around the same performance level as the latest update was. All I will say is, since I redone a whole lot of uv mapping, I decided to listen to advices and go for 2048 grasses wink.png So this explains the filesize reduction and probably help the performance of the much heavier mesh.
Please note, there is still quite a bit to be done to match where I was before. I got some mats I will need to update as they was before, cause if you remember, I started from scratch this version. Only the objects (trees, bushes, signs, etc) have been imported from before, so those mats are fine.

The terrain mats are fine as well, it's stuff like paddock buildings and stuff.
Since there was heavy work on the whole terrain, some objects are now floating or deep in ground. I will need to do this one last time. I have already done the fences and guardrails, since those were the most problematic for this release.
The couple floating trees doesnt distract nearly as much as the floating fences and guardrails, since they are a lot closer to us.

Let me know your thoughts!
I will go into more details later today on what was done and what needs to be done exactly. I don't want to ruin the surprise smile.png
One question I had, when I packaged I felt the status of conversion wasn't really appropriate anymore, and scratch isnt exactly it either. What is the other one? Composite? Is it what I should pick? Or go scratch? I don't want to take full credits, and will still mention com8, but I feel the track is more of my own now than ever. The mesh itself is pretty much brand new.

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