W.I.P. Project: Shire, Glen Rannoch

basic quick test of moonlight ive made to explain to someone re how to make a more realistic night environment. one can go extremely far with this. its pretty cool. using same shaders just different settings and ofcourse a night weather I mocked up quickly.

 

Definitely not start to finish which is important to note. Much like you are doing it starts in RTB and moves to a proper 3D program. It is misleading to make people think they can make something like this 100% from inside RTB. Anyway yes you can tell it originated from RTB from the wire frame of the terrain.

 

Ha ha! My first thought was, 'I could do something as good as this with RTB...!'

I'm from Scotland, and my second thought was, 'is Scotland as drab as this?'

 

another scot. I'm a Glasgow man. they deem this track Scottish, but its not, it wasn't built by a scot and that's what matters a great deal, theyd be better building an Italian countryside track and their you would see a more localised feel. my track will have a more Scottish fauna feel.

 

looking closely, I assume you are to lilski. but its not a great build. it has the hallmarks of rtb inaccuracy. I think better can be done. ill say this for any good modeller with polygon knowledge rtb will half your build time. and in the hands of those who have done it before. the end results are not far from what you might pull out in 3dmax. and that's all that matters. yet the scope achievable via rtb is much higher in terms of conceptualised content. whilst you don't need to id love to see what you could pull out of it lilski.

another aspect I find interesting is the general build methods and simplicity that arises from rtb, I think their track could be much better. i am aiming for... less lazyness, most of whats there is built based on what the camera can see. but I can also tell. they were afraid to really touch some areas. very much like iam in rtb.

also whats with the shockingly bad trees they use now. sheesh ! exactly half their texture memory used for trees is wasted as every single bloody tree has been mirrored out from the trunk and only ever using 1 side of the tree on the texture...

other good stuff is how they do pruned hedges. very basic and sloppy. but it works, need that idea. and also the rock formations. exactly what I started doing few days ago. nice to have ideas that stray you deem being useful to then see them being used by the official creators.

 

Well I tend to agree that their last few free offerings have been less than stellar. Silverstone 67 I think could have been a ton better. But I get it that they don't want to spend a ton of time on free content.

As for building a real track. Until RTB can deal with stuff like LiDAR like BTB could, then it is stuck in fantasy world in my opinion. I never doubted RTBs ability yo create layouts. But I re-create old and new real life circuits where accuracy is key and RTB can't do that yet.

 

that is very true. brendon always suprises me though, I expect if functionality like that comes it will be pretty decent. if he could give me world based coordinates id do a fine job from gps data. that's all it would need to break into a more realistic realm.

 

interesting, the content of the main highlands track file is 2.8 million vertices covering a high and low lod track model split (no grass.trees included) ive just achieved 1.1 million verts on my track with what I though was pushing the bar out. but it seems not. I was beginning to wonder why there are no performance losses or changes no matter what I add .

 

Cool track wip, it needs its own thread.

I agree pixel pusher on ACs shaders stopping fun/creativity.

I wrote a nice shader for Racer, for 'roads' which had a wear map and base maps, and asphalt 'grain' scale, so you could do most uk asphalt styles in relatively low res (256px wide for road) and literally unwrap uniquely over km of road for near infinite variation.

So smoothed down bits, newly laid stuff, coloured rough bits at roundabouts etc.

Throw in vert colours and you could do loads more.



On night time looks, can you bake vert lighting yet? Lightmapping?

Without those you're stuck baking lighting into diffuse with lots of unique or well lined up textures, and well calibrated 'emission'
Unless emission can be mapped into a spare channel with some shaders?

A shame AC stopped with their renderer features just as it got going.

Sunny fine day, great. Anything else (like average uk weather haha) not so great.



Is current AC shading full fresnel and pbr, or a bit hybrid?

Shouldn't it be pretty easy to get 'right' results by using real values, assuming their sun/sky values are good?




On trees, usually just rotating a 3D one two or three times to get 'nice' angles is enough for normal variation to hide repeating with 2D x trees imo.
Scaling you can push them 15% each way.
So a 5 12 and 20m oak with two or three variants each should do for your oaks for example.

I did two big 8x8 atlases for x trees for s project, 4096px square, so 512px each.
The track had maybe 30,000 trees, most placed accurately and where required specifically to match real ones... so more than enough variety to get the 'look' in that kinda atlas size.

I rendered my trees with skylight only, since the 'sphere' normals and diffuse light do your diffuse influence.
I did however add a specular only light to get some glint off leaves.

I tried doing normal maps and ao so map on alpha which looked very nice, but ideally you'd go 2.5d on trees that important with normal mapped 'boughs' any way.

Can you atlas trees in AC? I never looked.
Or vert colouring for subtle variation?
Or vert/uv waving to simulate slight movement?
Not looked at AC properly for a bit so not sure if these got added or not.

My issue with AC 'greenery' was it was so static and 'paused'. Any video looks terribly fake from a static camera.




Anyhow, the track looks good.

The trees look nice from Speedtree too.
In the end I decided photo sourced 2.5d would be the best.

Get pic of typical tree you need (often uk roadside ones are heavily asymmetric and 'cut under' by the size of a lorry), redraw main branches in 3D, texture up and make look nice (possibly do all this in photogrammetry and tidy up).

Do the boughs as photogrammetry created modules. Maybe two or three variants, normal, spec, gloss.

The overhead in geometry is higher yeah, but the up close look is tons better, but the alpha checking is probably lower.

Also with 'road' courses where you're under trees a lot, or very close, the X type get a bit naff looking as you go under them.

On the track I did I'd have preferred to use the same approach but 2048 atlas and then do all nearby trees in 2.5d (2d/3D hybrid)

Just making them was impossibly time consuming... just plopping the right 2d ones off my atlas took weeks!

BUT, make good ones once and they're done forever.



I'll check something out tomorrow on my big atlas.
I *think* it's been deployed in a 'free' package so you could grab that for now for a load of uk variation, at least till you remake all the ones you need!

Remind me as I'll forget


Cheers

Dave

 

I use a 4 tree atlas per species. 4 pine, 4 broadleaf and 4 conifer, (2048)...same format for grass. my tree walls are 4096 x 512

 

another 30 hours with what appears to be not much to show. but slowly adding furniture, need to deal with the bulk assets first. so these iterms ive made are everwhere with the idea of creating reasons to remove them according to further street furnishings and scenery additions. I love the rocks mechanic they use on the highlands track so i might try similar. though not quite ready for its own thread until next build is running.

I'm also deciding to just paint scenery via the mask directly that's why I use the mask as diffuse. its jarring but very effective when you set the shaders back up properly. still many more grass side variations to make though.

 

overall starting to look pretty good I think and before any fixing in max, mainly road normal.. adding all the extra stuff has made it subtly even more british in such a quaint way. my tight twisty roads have chevron directioning now and wow its actually raceable in very road like way .

 

If this is Dales, you definitely need dry stone wall variants

Looking good though! We need a new thread

PS as I live in the Dales, and am making a Dales course too (real course though), I'm more than happy to share my stone wall sets once I capture them!

I've done tests, but it's essentially gonna be generated from photogrammetry, low res meshes and normal maps etc.
More distance (lod1) will be 2d planes (2sided in ac? Maybe not) with baked in diffuse only I guess.

So quite poly heavy but then cheap after a few hundred metres.


Afaik Drive Clud did a Dales course? I'll have to look it up. That game looked so nice, shame it was arcade poo.

 

It's looking better than pretty good. It does look like a typical UK road. Funny how the small details make the most difference. The bollards in the top photo for example. Without those it could be anywhere in the world, well, anywhere with similar weather. OK, not so many candidates then.

 

wow nice comments there. I'm laying these details absolutely everywhere, the design idea is to always lay everything then pull it back into variants or new details where needed. the constant edge distance to the fence will change, and that will allow tree lines to come closer to track things like that. slap all the main driving ethos detail objects in at once then bring some design out of it based on the necessity or requirements of other things. that way nothing will be "out with" any designs. so everything is placed for a reason etc.

I love my wonky farm fence so far. RTB has fantastic randomisation function for stringed objects, destroying the neat look of stuff etc. love it.

I cant afford any nice new techniques to be honest. photogrammetry is great. but I'm pushing 3.5 million triangles all combined so far. so I certainly cant be having any higher than normal poly stuff.

I do require a good stone wall texture and will try anything with any new trees if anyone has any explicitly british variations.

dales... its ment to be Scotland but that's only because I'm Scottish. the scenery I look for was a 6 mile wide basin that would act as an island. and I only found what I needed in the yorkshire dales somewhere I could pretend had a lake or Loch.

is kunos highlands track Scottish ? no not really. if it was really Scottish their Lake.dds would be called Loch.dds .there isn't anything that Scottish about it besides the ambulance and a few tourist style signage billboards. (added after my comments on the official forum ) the notion of Scottish or English or welsh or irish scenery is actually all the same thing really at the end of the day, so ill call my scenery british with a Scottish name.

Luchian yeah sure lets separate it. I didn't want to create new thread until I came up with a format to show whats already been done like some reverse conceptual work etc. but if you can separate it. that would be nice.

 

sad to leave the rtb thread. because its a really good program. and it needs some love and some success from the community, It really does. most of anything ive demonstrated was only made possible so quick because of it and one aspect I failed at to be honest was demonstrating exactly what rtb was doing for me. so I may keep the rtb thread going (coz nobody else will) and actually demonstrate its individualy cool functions which are super powerfull when content is adapted to it like I'm doing now.