How to: make a track for Assetto Corsa

[r@m]

Hi guys I just joined to find out if there are any details about track making for Assetto Corsa yet, I've had a browse around and it seems the format will be the same/ similar to Netkar.?
Info is very thin on the ground, as are examples / tutorials, all I've manged to find are a few videos in the Italian language, which is not my native tongue, so doesn't explain very much.
Are there any technical breakdown of formats and specifications for the game anywhere, animations, gfx, effects etc? Any detailed workflows from 3DS Max to Netkar ?
I've been modding GP4 for some time now but grown tired of it's graphical limitations, so I've just started researching AC and NKP.
Assetto Corsa looks the real deal with full modding capabilities, so for me wins hands down over PCars, which is a total lockout in all departments.

Any advice would be appreciated.

btw, I have some of Melbourne, and a 80% complete Abu Dhabi, built from scratch by my own fair fingers, so I have plenty of material to work with.

 

[nothke]

Making a model is one thing, making a full blown sim vehicle/track in game is another. I can't do either of both so kudos to those artists that manage to get a full working car/track in Assetto Corsa.

Absolutely true, when I started modding, I had one project in mind, and it was done! When I realized I managed to finish it and that I am capable of making mods.. I rushed too quickly and started 5 new ones =( That killed me, and it kills me that I can see this only now when I look back. I took a paper yesterday, I realized I am developing 9 mods at the same time!!! (rF, AC, Kerbal Space Project) And it's faaaar easier to start a new one, than finish an old one.. It's an awful feeling and situation. I have to rethink my life

Back to the bright side. To all modders, think through, start "light" and stick to a single thing!

 

[radome]

Nice Work r@m! As I'm currently modeling the old, pre-99 Sebring pit complex, I can appreciate your comment about pouring over internet photos for reference. If you want to get some idea of how the Kunos team uses artwork, normal maps etc, it's pretty trivial, yet tedious, to unpack the dds files in the magione.kn5 file. All you need is hexedit, dd. and a couple of calculator windows. dd commands like:
dd if=magione.kn5 of=concrete_old1.dds bs=1 count=1398256 skip=51265993
(btw, I'm not letting anything out of the bag.) That boat sailed here.

 

[r@m]

Nice Work r@m! As I'm currently modeling the old, pre-99 Sebring pit complex, I can appreciate your comment about pouring over internet photos for reference. If you want to get some idea of how the Kunos team uses artwork, normal maps etc, it's pretty trivial, yet tedious, to unpack the dds files in the magione.kn5 file. All you need is hexedit, dd. and a couple of calculator windows. dd commands like:
dd if=magione.kn5 of=concrete_old1.dds bs=1 count=1398256 skip=51265993
(btw, I'm not letting anything out of the bag.) That boat sailed here.

Thanks but I'm not familiar with hex, I prefer right click -> extract to here

 

[Mr Whippy]

Hopefully if the format is quite transparent then eventually we'll get 3DS Max > AC format without having to go via an intermediate FBX.

That workflow sounds tolerable but a bit lossy vs storing those steps you'd make in the editor within Max (somehow). Though a thorough understanding and appropriate Max management will be fairly important.


But I'm very happy an FBX workflow has been implemented


Very nice work above too, though I'm assuming you'd par back the poly-count a bit and revert to transparency maps and normal maps to add back in apparent detail?

Are these partially meshes to bake textures back out from?

Good stuff though... doing that for an entire circuit is truly a dedication to a good track

Dave

 

[r@m]

Thx, Yeah, that's what I'm realizing, but what a track needs imho.
Transparency/Alpha maps and normals with texture work, will reduce things to a manageable level....for the entire circuit it may take a while, usual complaint of not enough GOOD reference applies
I'm learning normal workflow now, it's easy to make normals, it's hard to make "good" normals.
My only enemy is time.

 

[nothke]

Hopefully if the format is quite transparent then eventually we'll get 3DS Max > AC format without having to go via an intermediate FBX.

That workflow sounds tolerable but a bit lossy vs storing those steps you'd make in the editor within Max (somehow). Though a thorough understanding and appropriate Max management will be fairly important.

I missed to say this in the first post.. When you load the FBX first time in AC editor, assign the shaders, properties and everything else, you will be able to save this data (probably to some sort of AC "project" file), so if you make a change to you model and import fbx to AC editor again, you don't have to assign everything AGAIN, but the editor will remember your assignments. As long as the object names are the same.

So, don't worry, developers are making it really easy =)

Personally I like it that we use FBX cause usually what happens with other games, is that I can't move to a newer version of modeling software until the devs make a plugin for that next version. (I am having a huge problem with rFactor1 cause devs stopped supporting, latest plugin version is max2010) The fact we are using a standardized format brings a lot of flexibility and reliability that it will work in all softwares and all versions.

 

[r@m]

Personally I like it that we use FBX cause usually what happens with other games, is that I can't move to a newer version of software until the devs make a plugin for that next version. (I am having a huge problem with rFactor1 cause devs stopped supporting) The fact we are using a standardized format brings a lot of flexibility and reliability that it will work in all softwares and all versions.

Amen

 

[radome]

I'm sure there is a flag shader for waving flags. How about a banner shader? Like for a cloth tarpaulin over the grandstands. What should the flag mesh look like?

 

[r@m]

Good question, I was wondering what the animation capabilities of the AC engine were, It looks like mesh animation on the flags I've seen.
I made some for GP4 but was limited to 10 frames in a .tga sequence, the loop is pretty obvious

I'm more concerned about pitcrew/marshall/crowd animation, I've read they are in the devs pipeline, but of course nothing is confirmed.

 

[nothke]

Wow! These are great looking flags!

If I remember correctly (and I might be wrong!!) from the conversation with Simone, the flags in AC are geometry shaders. A concept I don't understand very much yet.. (maybe I mixed it with something else, but I am sure I heard "geometry shader" at one time xD)

 

[r@m]

Easy peasy with this tut.......

http://vitsly.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/loopable-flag/

the boring tedious bit was rendering them all out.

re: Geometry Shaders.....a bit of Googling and all I can find is REALLY technical info,

http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/www/tutorial27/tutorial27.html

Ugh....AC had better make it easier to use than that

hopefully there will also be some kind of image sequence, I reckon it looks more realistic than the flags I've seen in ncPro.

 

[nothke]

Right now on Maggione, the flags look like an animated mesh with all vertices swinging in the wind.

Edit:

 

[r@m]

Right.... so they've obviously been concentrating on the cars then.... ..not very realistic.

 

[nothke]

OK, Simone confirms flags are geometry shaders

This is what he said: The geometry shader moves vertices of the mesh. You can make them by applying the geometry shader. It needs only to have one texture/material per flag and be mapped 1:1 on the texture. When I asked Y U NO animated textures? He said they don't have animated textures in AC. The reason is that in the future, it will be more possible to implement flags moving with wind intensity with the mesh, than animated texture. The animated texture is always that, slower or faster.

I guess this means in future they wont be so loopy =)

 

[r@m]

Yup makes sense, full on dynamic wind / gusting etc...coolness.

 

[Stereo]

Yeah, downside of geometry shader is you need a high enough polygon density to distort realistically (instead of just a quad with the flag on it) since it moves the vertices around in an animation, but you probably save so much memory from not loading textures that it's worthwhile, and you also gain abilities to tweak how it reacts to ingame properties (wind speed+direction and so on).

Will users be able to write their own shaders for special uses?

 

[Mr Whippy]

I can't see a practical reason why they would try prevent user made shaders. Maybe to enforce content styles/standards you might see it though.
If their base shaders are good enough then people should only want to do their own if they probably want to do something that they can't in the first place I think.


Those flags look bad right now, but like many things it's just an artists tweak away. Give someone an hour and I bet they can improve on that so I wouldn't worry too much

Good thing is on a calm day with low wind speed you can get dropped flags waving just a bit, or throw in a windy day with cars moving around etc, and you can have the flags whipping all over, and maybe some extra audio of high winds to add yet more immersion.


All good stuff

 

[radome]

I wonder how the implementation of CG race fans, or spectators is being dealt with. Will it be a "billboarding" type of shader? Would each race fan be a single quad or multiples? How does it work in other sims or games?

 

[nothke]

I wonder how the implementation of CG race fans, or spectators is being dealt with. Will it be a "billboarding" type of shader? Would each race fan be a single quad or multiples? How does it work in other sims or games?

Currently, as seen on top of the pit building in Maggione, they are just "cardboard" spectators, non-bilboarding.

rFactor2 uses per-quad bilboarding for spectators, and it looks reasonably well.. Other games like shift2 (and probably P-cars) use bilboards with simple "rounding out" normal maps to make it look more 3d so that the light is cast on one side of the poly. You can probably make the same effect with stretching away vertex normals.

 

[BanjoMaster]

Shift 2 intersperses the 2d crowd with selected animated 3d figures (marshals, photographers, a few spectators) and the effect works very well in my opinion. This is the approach hope Kunos take, as it really adds a lot to the immersion and atmosphere.