This is going to be my tread on my original kyalami track build. This classic version of the circuit has been made by a few sims over the years but sadly none have been very accurate as the information on the old circuit does not exist online. Having been doing research for nearly 8 years now talking with people and collecting folders worth of images of the old track from the Original Kyalami facebook group I am in a position where I can in my opinion get the layout near perfect to what it was. The goal of this project has always been to get a accurate version of the old kyalami in the world for histories sake and to race on it once again. The original circuit was demolished before I was born but I want to rebuild it for others like me who have sadly missed the magic of the real circuit. Kyalami was built in 1961 it was 26 feet wide and 4094m long this is the layout that f1 started to race on in 1967. this layout was very basic with the track being verly new and still mainly a road in a empthy field. In 1970 the track was widend by 10 feet all round except for the main straight which was widend by 14 feet, the track was now 36 feet wide and 40 feet and measured 4104m long. From this point to the tracks demolishion in 1987 only the runoff areas where changed and the track basically remained the same. The two layouts I want to make is either the narrow 1968 version and the last version of the track from 1987 but any suggestions from the community would maby have the versions change. I have never made a track for ac but I have been building the circuit in sketchup so learning blender is still hard but I am not starting from zero at least.
This is the track just shortly after it was built in 1961 you can see it was nothing more than tarmac in a field but the designer of the circuit Basil Read knew what he was doing and built an amazing circuit.
The drawings of the original circuit that exist online are inaccurate and its safe to assume that many sim versions worked from these drawings and thus created tracks that where inaccurate. It started with Grand Prix Legends that made the circuit and although it was pretty good a few corners were wrong and the track elevation changes where off. That version of the circuit was ported over to Rfactor and only changed textures and a few items to make it work. Automobilista made a good attempt at the circuit with "Johannesburg classic" but again the actual layout of the circuit was wrong, the first corner has a big radius when it was much tighter in reality, the elevation changes of the circuit was off as well with it being far to flat. Its alot of small errors in the versions of the circuit that exist but that's my aim with this build to get the truth out there and rebuild the circuit as it was in real life.
Here is a few typical drawings that show the old circuit with the new and you can see how far off the drawings are with mine at the start of the thread.
Ah got it! The modern version Prototype built is very accurate, but again, modern specs and built on recent photogrammetry . Going the historic route always poses lots of challenges, and most of the time its all up to the modellers interpretations.. tricky.. . But looking forward to your version!!!
Yeah the version Prototype made is amazing and I looked at the phtogrammetery proses and it can at least help with getting some elevation data correct but because the original circuit was build in a field and very little earth works where done the surroundings around the track wont be that hard to recreate and it wont effect the why the circuit drives that much. I am going to get the track mesh as close to the original as i can and then build the landscape around that and it should give a believable representation of the circuit.
I believe that is the converted version from asm to ac if im not mistaken? and if it is yes it is inacurate as well.
This is a comparison between the layout that i'm going to build off and the track shortly after it was built, my version is in the 99.88% braket of the actual length of the circuit which was 4104m this could be down to how google measures or earthworks on the part of the track that was built over however I'm pleased with the result knowing its very close to the actual circuit.
Very happy to see this, I love every layout of Kyalami. Good luck with the project! What is the 10 m difference between the 2 versions? It comes only from the widening?
Today I got the full 3D model finished and can now build the mesh in blender to start testing the layout and tweaking the elevation changes.
Can someone please take a look at this for me, I am not able to open the FBX file in ks editor of just the road surface so that I can test the layout. I have included the FBX and Blender file in the zip. I have looked for fixes to the issue on the web but I don't know what is going wrong. Keep getting a black circle in ks editor but the scale in blender and export settings are as should be by my understanding. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KkpiUh1KLSGJ_Bm5dX2AKgEWYztoxYgL/view?usp=sharing Thanks in advance.
So today I got a exiting update, I got hold of the laser scan data that the New Kyalami did when it got upgraded in 2015, so now I can compare my Google Earth Data to the laser scan and get the scale 100% right. The only issue is working out the heights for the part of the old track because now I'm using two sets of data instead of just the Google height data, but exciting problems to have.
