Hello from Tirol

Hi guys, just a quick hello from me - hoping to learn more about track modding and the 3d-modelling-for-games side of things. I'm coming more from a research geosciences background, where calculation times of several hours are perfectly acceptable, so the realtime optimizations are very new to me, as is working in Blender in general (doing all sorts of GIS work in my job, so I hope I can get into it with the help of all those thousands of blender tutorials out there).

Am living in beautiful Innsbruck, which is also going to be the location of my first track - the old and by now very much non-existant airport race at the international airport of Innsbruck-Kranebitten (LOWI). I'm lucky in that there is an older track mod for Race07, and that the creator (Neteye) was friendly enough to give permission to overwork it and port it to AC, so I got my work cut out for me.

So cheers, and hope to bother you guys soon about my questions and problems

- Christian

 

Hallo, good luck and have fun!

 

Thanks! Yes I'm learning a lot already, and I think luchian is spot on with his idea, that's exactly what I want to do - first port over the race07-track, which is a present-day (=fictional, they stopped using the international airport for racing in 1977) version of the track. Once I'm comfortable putting that out as a first version and have learned the ropes, I have several ideas which will require having become a "bit" more comfortable in blender than I am today - first of all being, the original vintage track (I'd say around 1965) which was raced by the likes of Jochen Rindt, seen races between Porsche 904, 906s, Abarth racecars such as the OT2000..., later it housed Alfasud cup, Ford Escort cup, Renault 5 cup, Formula 2/3/Super V/V/Junior races, and the location was hailed by the legend of german-language motorsports reporting Rainer Braun as the most atmospheric airport track he'd ever attended as track speaker. So that also involves a bit of historic research and I guess way more effort on the physical meshes (rough concrete), but I'm happy to say I got several good sources of images and descriptions for the track, and a rather good 1970 orthophoto showing the original concrete runway in it's various stages of decay (nowadays paved over with asphalt).
Also, the entire area is VERY expendable for good tracks as a bit of an open road scenario, that's why I'm putting most focus on the terrain handling right now - just like three kilometers away, there is the old Axams hillclimb, also active in 1965; very much nearby is the old Brenner pass road, which would make a nice rally-like road circuit if connected to the Römerstraße on the other side of the valley... *cough* not that anyone would ever take their motorbike to drive over the speed limit in these parts.

Here are some very work-in-progress impressions, hope I can get the mountains to be more detailled (and less glowy - I guess I'm have messed up my specular settings when splitting the model into three parts yesterday), and I need to learn how to efficiently make grassy areas look good...

 

Thanks for your kind words! And yes, the steep wall visible on the right side of the first image is called Martinswand, a rather popular climbing spot and very prominently visible from the airport - would definitely make sense to fill it with some life, such as having some climbers on the wall and the actual train going through the little galleries there (in this terrain model, you can only imagine there's a railway by the brighter line). Will have to learn how to include animated objects for that obviously... but first things first. Terrain is still far from good, and at the same time I started playing around with the best way to include stacks of tires as track markers and barriers - setting them as walls and steep kerbs at the same time seems to be the way of choice in vanilla AC?? Since this is an active international airport, the temporary nature (open for a single day of the year) of this racetrack should definitely come across by such elements. I really don't want to add kerbs and solid walls all over, especially not for the 1965 version, in which bales of hay were exclusively used as track barriers.
From reading through their github documentation, I think CSP extended physics such as soft collision and deformable walls might bring the solution, any quick "better not, this will make the track next-to-impossible to use for most people/that's fine, go ahead with the crazy extensions" on that?