RELEASED-wip Vancouver City circuit 98

[JrC]

Came across Luchian and Lilski's posts on trees so I had a look at that and got the KSTREE_ block transform working.
I didnt realize it but the trees werent showing up at all and after a little fiddling with directions and making sure the conventions were right it all showed up in Kseditor with the Block transform.

those trees also had a bark mesh and so i didnt combine the meshs for the trees and trunk but used KStree for the tree mesh and combined all the bark meshes into a single object with a single texture.
Ive been tracking the dip on a spreadsheet just to see what effect this is all having.

bigger tree here has the shader and is part of block transform and has origin set. smaller one does not.

 

[JrC]

trees look way better now.
for comparison

above they werent even showing up due to a problem with rotation and shaders

Here they are now.

I also checked the DIP sitting in pit lane and last night before the edits i was at 3752
Today after doing the block transform on the trees and combining the bark meshes i got 3706
While I was doing the trees I realized they were all casting shadows but way too far away to really matter and same with BC place so by removing those DIP went down to 3678

fwiw Im doing these tests in practice to remove the AI component and Cars.

 

[Johnr777]

trees look way better now.
for comparison

above they werent even showing up due to a problem with rotation and shaders

Here they are now.

I also checked the DIP sitting in pit lane and last night before the edits i was at 3752
Today after doing the block transform on the trees and combining the bark meshes i got 3706
While I was doing the trees I realized they were all casting shadows but way too far away to really matter and same with BC place so by removing those DIP went down to 3678

fwiw Im doing these tests in practice to remove the AI component and Cars.

That’s still very high considering you are the only car. But don’t think you can do much without extreme measures, like combine multiple textures into a single texture sheet and unwrap the objects.

 

[JrC]

That’s still very high considering you are the only car. But don’t think you can do much without extreme measures, like combine multiple textures into a single texture sheet and unwrap the objects.

Good to know. I still think there is a fair bit of headroom and part of the high DIP is me.

I just seperated all the trees in T6, T7 and T8 and have gone through the naming convention to group them.
The road meshes are in parts as well so I think if Im smart i can at least give some headroom for lights.

I tried a race with just the VRC indy cars road kit last night and it was much better.
I think part of my high DIP was me running 26 different car types too which is how I enjoy playing as well in multi class races but it sure was a blast from 1995 to play with a full field of CART cars last night.

 

[JrC]

It was bugging me that Greg's gloves werent right so I did a quick job on them myself. On the plus side thats his real signature from a real set of his gloves and so are the logo and the tan patch parts

its not the greatest but its a bit better. You dont notice some of the issues with the details when you are driving.

 

[JrC]

Thanks @maruto

Lots of them to place and some of the corners are blind. But it works... Need a headlamp with the Indycar though...

 

[JrC]

@luchian - I came across your post linking to the location of the newbury dev track in the steam files but I dont have it. What happened to that track?
It doesnt even to seem to show up in a DDG search.

One other quick query... sorry two,

1)what does everyone use as a baseline for ambient and diffuse settings and specular for buildings in Kseditor. I couldnt figure out why it looked almost cartoonish compared to Trois rivieres and other tracks and I had my ambient way to high and it was blowing out the textures. Same with my trees.

2) Is there any point to the illumination settings in kseditor or does SOL do it all.

 

[maruto]

1)what does everyone use as a baseline for ambient and diffuse settings and specular for buildings in Kseditor. I couldnt figure out why it looked almost cartoonish compared to Trois rivieres and other tracks and I had my ambient way to high and it was blowing out the textures. Same with my trees.

I can't talk for everyone but i found out i looks better when i apply lower settings to ambient and diffuse.... 0.2 0.3..., there's no rules ,though, it depends of the texture also, you can play with luminosity in photoshop

I try to have something neutral, sol does it's magic after, and test drive a lot under different conditions, weather, time

use the object inspector app to explore settings of kunos track for example it might help, CM has incredible tools for dev.

 

[JrC]

I can't talk for everyone but i found out i looks better when i apply lower settings to ambient and diffuse.... 0.2 0.3..., there's no rules ,though, it depends of the texture also, you can play with luminosity in photoshop

I try to have something neutral, sol does it's magic after, and test drive a lot under different conditions, weather, time

use the object inspector app to explore settings of kunos track for example it might help, CM has incredible tools for dev.

Yup... it sinks in when you have to go back and change every single object in the editor

Definately the lower settings made it way better. I was up at 0.6 on some on ambient and it was horrible.
Cranked it down and it looked much better. Your cams on 3R look photorealistic in some cases.... I got closer last night.

The trees are bad though. I may have to make those again from scratch. They do look way better now and in analyzing the scene there are some opportunities to dummy up some areas to make them look fuller but reduce trees that arent in view.

I seperated and renamed all the trees into in the kstree groups and next optimization is to test changing the tire walls to normal meshes and just use a plane or something similar for the wall collision mesh and see if that helps my DIP.

I saw your post on OIapp in the lane thread and i searched for it already this morning only to realize its in CM... I find it amazing what Ilja has accomplished with that and the community...

Im still not ready to get to the texturing side... Its really helpful to see all the posts as people build their stuff so I think I will get there eventually. Just so much knowledge to layer on right now... plus time lost on cleaning up my mistakes although I always find you usually learn something else while tidying...

Major hurdle accomplished though getting the pit road sorted out and the walls looking decent. Added a couple of tire walls along the pit walls i redid...

 

[luchian]

@luchian - I came across your post linking to the location of the newbury dev track in the steam files but I dont have it. What happened to that track?
It doesnt even to seem to show up in a DDG search.

One other quick query... sorry two,

1)what does everyone use as a baseline for ambient and diffuse settings and specular for buildings in Kseditor. I couldnt figure out why it looked almost cartoonish compared to Trois rivieres and other tracks and I had my ambient way to high and it was blowing out the textures. Same with my trees.

2) Is there any point to the illumination settings in kseditor or does SOL do it all.

I do not know what happened to it. By the looks of it, it was removed - but no idea when . I have not used it since the early days of the SDK Editor.

 

[JrC]

I do not know what happened to it. By the looks of it, it was removed - but no idea when . I have not used it since the early days of the SDK Editor.

wow... must have just vanished... i can find a conversion of it but not the sdk version...
oh well...

thanks for letting me know!

 

[JrC]

Ive been through it a ton of times and I just cant seem to figure out how to mirror the textture onto the back faces.
Ive seen double sided checkbox reference but I cant find that in the newest blender and Luchian suggested that faces need to be mirrored but I cant seem to find that either. The ones I can find say mirror X or Y and the topology mirror but those dont seem to change it either. When I go into edtior if it go the the back the whole tree is invisible.
Im trying to build the trees the way Lil ski does as the trees have way more extra vertices then needed but I cant seem to get the texture to show up on both sides so right now it disappears at certain angles.

 

[maruto]

Try this code in the ext_config file:

[SHADER_REPLACEMENT_...]
ACTIVE = 1
DESCRIPTION = tree fix double sided
MESHES = KSTREE? ;put your trees mesh name here,
MATERIALS =
DOUBLE_FACE_SHADOW_BIASED = 1
CULL_MODE = DOUBLESIDED
IS_TRANSPARENT = 0

This is an easy way to transform AC's single sided materials into double side materials, but i don't know the impact on cpu load??

@fughettaboutit what do you think?

better to physicaly construct double sided mesh with inverted normals (double the face number) or to use this code?

 

[fughettaboutit]

Try this code in the ext_config file:
@fughettaboutit what do you think?
better to physicaly construct double sided mesh with inverted normals (double the face number) or to use this code?

Yes, you can do that with config, but then its not there in vanilla AC without CSP.

@JrC
In blender enter edit mode with tab, select faces you want to make double-sided, do Shift+D to duplicate, confirm position with a click inplace or with return, then use Alt+N for normals menu -> Flip. Done.

 

[fughettaboutit]

 

[JrC]

@maruto and @fughettaboutit

Thanks a lot Gents. Really appreciate it!!!! I spent a few hours just going through stuff trying to find it but its like they moved the buttons in every version and each internet search was a wild goose chase .

Got it! So I built the meshes for this Y tree (nothing spectacular I know) and actually did the UV mapping using the existing textures... So I have a small understanding of how the projections work and how to use the color tex grid.

So another small hurdle overcome. The current tree meshes are six sided so Im going to try all Y trees for Turn one for the view from the pitlane and see what it does to the DIP.

Thanks Again!!!

 

[fughettaboutit]

thats the old problem with using blendmode ALPHA_BLEND for the material.

Trees should use ALPHA_TEST only.

When using ALPHA_BLEND you have to set IsTransparent=True for the object.

(i mean your first pic)

Also use alphaRef > 0, ie. 0.5 for the material to get shadows that are according to your texture.

 

[JrC]

thats the old problem with using blendmode ALPHA_BLEND for the material.

Trees should use ALPHA_TEST only.

When using ALPHA_BLEND you have to set IsTransparent=True for the object.

(i mean your first pic)

Also use alphaRef > 0, ie. 0.5 for the material to get shadows that are according to your texture.

It was great seeing the shadows appear once I did that .. thanks a bunch.

I checked the DIP in turn one now and its down from 3670 to 3619 and the trees look better so its interesting that it seems that once I had them set up properly with the origins in the right place and the shader numbers set up better that it seems to be costing the scene less but it looks better?

In any case Ill take it. Over time Ill redo all the trees to the ones I redid and see if I can add a few more.
Might try a couple of hedges too...
Now that UV mapping doesnt seem so intimidating... this whole scratch built thing is looking more and more possible... famous last words

 

[JrC]

Thanks to John777's light post's we have some working stop lights... for the night races.. not that we are stopping

I have some idea for some spotlights to light up the blind corners...

in the long run it might be easier to seperate the light stand meshes from the bulb and stand and then use the meshes from the bulbs to generate the light... you can see from this shot the street lamp isnt generating an emissive light. For the white light...
It has the spot lamp but not a point of light generating it

 

[JrC]

Thanks @fughettaboutit

working Jumbotrons at Vancouver.