Speaking from my own personal experience, having another project to move to temporarily helps a lot. Or just stop modding and start enjoying the sim, you'll get the itch to open up 3DS again
Big shout out to @Leonardo Ratafia for first draft on replay cams. @Johnr777 has also offered to help on the 3d grass when the groundwork is ready and he has some free time. I reached out to him and asked if he would consider taking look. Huge thanks in advance there! So this is shaping into a nice collaborative effort! Heres a quick edit of some of the cams Leonardo did.
Ground Textures and overall look and feel. The ACC Barcelona track is close as dammit. So at least this is a great reference to chase. Will be shooting the ground textures at the track on Tuesday. Hoping we can get it somewhere in the ballpark of below! .... eventually!
Yesterday was a great day at the track. Being a private event and during the week, I had tons of access to the circuit and was able to walk the entire thing! A friend of mine came along and helped me photograph reference shots and texture material. Between us we shot more than 3000 photos! :-D So: "a good day at the office" ! Our pit garage was adequately comfortable We were really spoilt by a friend of mine who organised the day. --------------> .. and the real winner - more images than I know what to do with! Next step will going through these, and stitching together kerb lengths, tyre walls, tarmac surfaces etc ... Kind cool to use the photos of the ACTUAL kerbs to make the textures for example. This is the southern hemisphere, so were just coming out of winter, and its hella dry, no rainfall in the last few months, so grass is completely dead... so need to think about how to approach that ...
Your reference/texture set looks fantastic. When I visited Motorpark I only did a half-assed job, that in the end required also external textures to build something decent . Great work as usual @Prototype !
Thanks chaps. Kinda curious as to what difference this new texture update will make. I hope its going to push it a bit! Im excited to dive in. BUT, what I havent really spoken about is the photogrammetry data method, and how SUCCESSFUL it is. I finished my last lap, said goodbye to everybody, drove home (about 10 mins), and then hopped straight into the sim rig. This is my first time on the real track since having what I considered a "final" track mesh. I wanted to do a direct comparison while the feeling and memory was still fresh. And I can say with confidence, that the AC track is accurate. No question. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my confidence on the real track was higher as a result of it feeling so familiar after doing so many test laps in AC over the last couple of months! Its also pretty cool that we have sims and consumer hardware at this level already! The experience at home being such a good facsimile of the real thing. The biggest difference is G-force, and in particular, lateral G. Thats really to my mind the biggest immersion barrier. If that ever is resolved or figured out in sim hardware without having to have crazy huge gyroscopic devices, it will be amazing!
Sorted through all the photos today. Did a quick test of part of the main building and the pit track surface using the new pics. Bit of pre-prod to help me understand things. ------------------------>
Thanks guys :-D (@Nericksenna youre funny ) More textures and shader tests. ------------------------> Thanks to @Johnr777 for the advice on making the track edge textures longer so that there are less repeats. Its really helped a lot. Spent most of the time wrangling the ksMultilayer_fresnel_nm shader. Still got a little way to go before I'm happy with the road texture, though. I tried to stitch a number of the tarmac photos we shot, but still trying to beat the repetitions and seams into submission. However from a lower cam angle you dont really see them, so might get this into the build and see where its at.. replay cams etc ... Thanks to @LilSKi for the tutorial: Post #6 https://www.racedepartment.com/thre...n-track-making-plus-tips.122794/#post-2256511
Your work is absolutely astonishing! Will this track be made available for AC? Been using the 2000 kyalami mod and it feels nothing like what Kyalami is today, which makes me so excited for this mod! Thank you for your time and effort that you have put into making this track!
Thanks guys. Still concentrating on setting up textures and shaders, and doing tests. Worked on getting edges of different ground textures to work seamlessly with each other and making tillable textures. ------------------------> Above is a transitional gravel edge loop texture. Above is a general tillable grass texture that works in 4 directions, and also buts up against the track edge texture.
Rumble Strips After some messing around today with new rumble strip models and textures, going to rebuild all the kerbs again ... for the 3rd time! ------------------------>