TUTORIAL Race Track Builder - Inject elevation data and terrain texture

[Les Neilson]

Take it easy man

 

[Pixelchaser]

and thing is, at worst if its not right then its a conform job onto the proper lidar.... either way ill probably have a track up the same stage as my other.

 

[Pixelchaser]

having tried it in game for smooth track work you cant use any terrain snap on the section nodes, which means camber must always be done manually. either in rtb or max, but its good for basic layout creation but it will always need more done in max or blender as per usual.

 

[Pixelchaser]

little test alongside the actual lidar. it seems very close to me, but no cigar action yet. there is a bit of an orthographic issue still but it can be worked around. one thing I'm confused about is the google texture, not sure whats older or newer .

@Wurstkoffer what you have done is utterly amazing man, many pats on the back to you for improving RTB beyond all expectations. and may cookie monster shower you with cookies for ever more.

 

[Wurstkoffer]

Yay cookies! Omnomnom.

 

[Les Neilson]

Seconded. This is the biggest thing to happen since I got into RTB. Can't get enough of it now. Total respect. Thank you thank you @Wurstkoffer

 

[Les Neilson]

Cracking on with Glaisdale... Added walls, trees, fences, grass verges etc. I haven't made any custom buildings for it yet. I have an idea to make a few generic houses with a stone texture I like, double sided for more reuseability. So just placeholders for now. I haven't found anything I can use for hedges though, which is a drawback, because there's miles of them. I've also opened the area out a bit to make the skyline even more realistic.

 

[luchian]

Looks very intriguing. I'm sure rally fans will love this kind of stuff.
Is the road "smooth" enough ? Or does it throw the wheel all over the place ?

 

[Les Neilson]

For me it's just bumpy enough to seem realistic. My wheel doesn't get thrown around, at least. The edges are rough enough that if you go off at speed you'll be lucky not to roll it...

 

[Pixelchaser]

well I would have thought that the bumpy aspect was self evident from my videos of it !. but realistically whilst fantastic for rally style, those roads are smooth with some undulations. but nothing like in the video, it just translates to bumps very well, in this case the lidar is adding the bumps.

 

[Les Neilson]

I was checking some things in Geoserver, and I've noticed I didn't have interpolation set on for Oulton Park. I might have a look at a small section and see if it makes a difference where I got the stepping. If it works better I can always make a new version

 

[Pixelchaser]

sure. another thing to test is laying a surface and not spend the time poly dividing / painting and generating the high poly underneath, see if there is much difference there, I know in previous experience its not necessary to build on that super high poly, because the road is real from the same data, not the scenery it lies on or subdivided. and well I`d subdivide everything (everywhere) to a standard good for a game, 20 metres everywhere, maybe 10...

subdividing in an area that is covered by road is also bad, because of how the system tries to join the scenery to the road and the fact its so heavily subdivided..

as far as road are concerned in rtb theres not much point worrying about Z axis aspect of the layout in rtb, it wont do cambers like a real spline does. impossible to work with anything other than centre line style adaptations of the data.

 

[bcorner]

Has anyone found a source for Alabama, USA?

 

[Les Neilson]

Take a look at what's on

https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

Zoom in on Alabama, select Use Map, and then Data Sets - Digital Elevation -Lidar

I haven't looked at it, so I can't say what sort of resolution it might be, but there is some stuff there

 

[bcorner]

I’ll set up an account and download the data. What’s the next step?

 

[Les Neilson]

You'll need to start reading from the start of this thread. It's not straightforward, sorry... You need XAMPP to begin with and get that working. If there was a website with alabama data available in the right format, that would be it (although it's slooooow over the web)

 

[Les Neilson]

In practice it's much faster downloading the data in geotiff format for example, but there's the added complication of setting up Geoserver to access it. That's step 2....

 

[Les Neilson]

I'd also recommend downloading QGIS and having a look at the raw data from the earth explorer site. That'll tell you whether it's worth using or not. If I can find a bit of time later I might have a look myself. What area in particular are you interested in?

 

[bcorner]

The area around Barber Motorsports Park. I've done up a track but not satisfied with the precision of the elevation data from google. I noticed that with that qgis product they also can install a GIS Server. Years ago I used to operate a GIS site using ArcEdit for managing layers. Sooo not completely clueless..

 

[LilSKi]

There is already a project in progress for Barber on Lidar data.