понедельник, 16 декабря 2013 г.

How I made the grass @ Bryce Canyon

I had not much poly amount left, minding that enormous quanity of rocks. But yet I still wanted to have dense grass/bushes to add some detail to the track.

It's actually useful for engines like gMotor, which do not have grass rendering built in the engine. That means, on some other platforms you have like 1 model/template of grass, and the engine clones that template to all the scene, according to some material, or specific map.
But in gMotor engine, each grass blade is an unique object. Yes, you can put them in groups but they still will be unique polys, increasing the polycount and overall load. I've actually tried to make very dense grass in rFactor track, using standard X-shaped objects, and that was a pain in terms of FPS. Also a pain in terms of 3ds max, it tends to crash all the time, if you have 10 000+ objects.

So, as one of different ways, here is the way I've used at Bryce canyon:




You can imagine the grass is 3D but it's not actually. At least not the usual way:



Remember the woods in Il-2 sturmovik? They were done the same way.

What it is (and you can clearly see here) that the grass is 2-3 planes, mainly optimized copies of the terrain, with lowered polycount, raising a little above each other. The lowest layer of that "cake" has vertex color in full black, so it looks like shadow, or shaded part of grass.

All the vegetation you see, is just a tiled texture, or few textures and variations of them.
On Bryce I've basically made some desert grass/bushes texture. But if you spend on texturing more time, and if you take that idea to the higher level you can really create some very dense grass verges, which are impossible if doing them traditional way. (If only your game engine doesn't provide cloning of grass object by itself, like I told in the beginning of this post).
What's really painful to do - is a good tiled texture which won't be too repetitive for the brain; having some randomized mapping will help too.
On a Canyon it was just a concept and benchmark. Now imagine if there are more than 3 layers, and they use DIFFERENT textures for each layer, each texture with it's own unique alpha.
It gives a lot of opportunity to experiment with!

Hope that helps someone.
yours,
Kitt

четверг, 12 декабря 2013 г.

Bryce Canyon 2.0 for GSC 2013 and rFactor: released


Glad to announce the release of overhauled version of Bryce Canyon, including 3D trees, grass layers, rubber reflections and more new things.
GSC013 version is altered to use the benefits of GSC013's improved lighting.
rFactor's version now has both tracks with 24-hour lighting, now the only difference between them is RFE-related stuff.
This is the last version of this track for rFactor. Clearly I will make more tracks for rF; but with this one I have to stop in order to make new content.
GSC version tho, may get some improvements with time.

суббота, 5 октября 2013 г.

Bryce Canyon: released!

Lastly I have so much sudden stuff here and there so I literally forgot to post it here in my blog.
The Bryce Canyon Raceway is released! Currently it's v1.02 already, fixing sudden problems with pit timing and lacking shared texture. (all people who tested the track had other my tracks installed, so we missed it during beta test).

Download: http://www.nogripracing.com/details.php?filenr=39186
Mirrors: http://www.sendspace.com/file/psnbkc
https://mega.co.nz/#!JYRR0QKJ!FZw-qGsCn ... HYpqYhpAcc

See readme.pdf file for all the RFE installation instructions.

...and have fun!



пятница, 27 сентября 2013 г.

Finally... My rF tracks are alive!

Champions Motell v1.1 incl RFE version released!
Download: http://www.nogripracing.com/details.php?filenr=39142
Mirror 1: https://mega.co.nz/#!QFAhXDDK!AYScciJ6KGX-QkZ-cMwQAXkmrUEwBxlCkeQq5lVQ_yg
Mirror 2: http://www.sendspace.com/file/q4m79w

I knew RFE plugin was published some time ago, but I only had chance to test it out today. And I'm very, very impressed. The guys behind this project - you are awesome!

BTW what happened with blogspot image compression? It never was that bad before. All the colors are over-saturated like hell, because the compression corrupted all the deeper colors. Yuck!




суббота, 21 сентября 2013 г.

Facebook page and a portfolio

Just wanted to warn you that I've set up two new pages, a portfolio-page and a facebook group where I will post all the news I put in this blog. So join the page, and watch for updates!

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/kittxtracks
deviantART portfolio: http://kittxtracks.daportfolio.com/

Cheers!

пятница, 23 августа 2013 г.

Good news

The Bryce Canyon raceway is complete model- and texture-wise.
Now it's passing through final touches (with some help by Pizzaman).
Meanwhile, I'm importing yet another epic terrain into Max :)

среда, 17 июля 2013 г.

Been editing the AIW...

...and made some aerials :P
View to canyon from Inspiration Point to Sunrise Point (where's the track's last turns are located):
I've made a trick with placing the trees. Oh no, I havent been placing them manually. And didn't scatter them as well.
The whole operation required even shorter amount of time. Just a bit of thinking.
Track layout:
        
The cams are almost done, the aiw is almost done too. :)

вторник, 2 июля 2013 г.