Tracks Ottawa Motorsports Park 1.01

[Thrashy]

Thrashy submitted a new resource:

Ottawa Motorsports Park - A fast, flowing road course built into a wooded hillside.

Ottawa Motorsports Park is a fantasy road course, built on a real-world site in the hills above the La Cygne river, near Ottawa Kansas (a small town about an hour from Kansas City). It's intended to be fast, fun to drive, and modestly technical. The course currently has a single 2.9-mile layout, featuring 14 turns and 140 feet of elevation change.

I built this track to pass the time while we wait for 2020 to stop sucking, but after sharing some images it has attracted a bit of interest...

Read more about this resource...

 

[Billy Pilgrim]

Thank you for sharing this with us.

A few photos would be nice

 

[Thrashy]

A few photos would be nice

Good point! I've added some shots and a video to the description.

 

[LilSki]

Pretty solid overall. What did you use to build it?

First thing I would say it needs is some noise in the road mesh. The majority of the circuit is too smooth. You need to get a little noise in there to get the car moving around a bit. Even the best roads have a bit of noise in them.

Road to land transitions could use a bit of work. Having the sand at the edge the entire way around looks a bit out of place and it's a hard line between road and land currently with no blending.

And one minor thing is the smoothing groups on the flags is missing.

 

[Thrashy]

Pretty solid overall. What did you use to build it?

First thing I would say it needs is some noise in the road mesh. The majority of the circuit is too smooth. You need to get a little noise in there to get the car moving around a bit. Even the best roads have a bit of noise in them.

Road to land transitions could use a bit of work. Having the sand at the edge the entire way around looks a bit out of place and it's a hard line between road and land currently with no blending.

And one minor thing is the smoothing groups on the flags is missing.

Great feedback, thank you! And wow, I guess I should have looked closer at those flags after I added the CSP wind shader to 'em... :/

I've been doing the majority of the work in Blender, with the exception of building some of the structures in SketchUp. Dressing up the track edges and verges a bit were on my to-do list, but I haven't decided how I want to tackle it yet. w/r/t adding some bumpiness to the road mesh, what would you suggest regarding frequency/amplitude? The 'story' for the track is that it's newer and well-maintained, so my thought is that it should be on the smoother side, but I don't know what that means in absolute numbers. +/- 1cm in a meter?

 

[LilSki]

Below are the basic values I used for Watkins which is a recent repave. I'm not talking about jarring bumps. Just small amount of wave in the surface to move the car around a bit. You can tweak the strength to your needs as well as the size and depth values. Also you can use vertex groups to leave out the outer edge so it doesn't mess up your alignment to the land. Or you can shrink the land edge back to the road after the noise is applied. Either will work.

This video goes over my basic process and how the values work.

My earlier tracks I did blend objects and it was a pain to deal with and always had a small hard line depending on light. Now days with Road America and Watkins update I just bring grass right to the edge of the road and then use a basic floating alpha transparent object to blend from road the grass. Simple, easy to make, and looks great.

 

[Mascot]

This looks really impressive but I'm getting some weird artifacts in VR, big black and blue 'domes' appear on the track in front of me, coupled with massive slowdown. They kind of look like a game of Missile Command is being played in front of me.
Anyone else getting anything like this? Merge Meshes is off.
Maybe my GPU is dying - off to test other tracks.

 

[Mascot]

Nope, all seems good on other tracks. Weird.

BTW, these are some of the best looking trees I've seen in AC. Nicely done!
Just need to get out of this Missile Command cabinet and I'll be good to go.

 

[Thrashy]

This looks really impressive but I'm getting some weird artifacts in VR, big black and blue 'domes' appear on the track in front of me, coupled with massive slowdown. They kind of look like a game of Missile Command is being played in front of me.
Anyone else getting anything like this? Merge Meshes is off.
Maybe my GPU is dying - off to test other tracks.

Yikes! I don't have a VR rig to test with, but if there's a way you could capture some images of what you're seeing it might help me pin it down if it's a track issue rather than a hardware one.

 

[Mascot]

Yikes! I don't have a VR rig to test with, but if there's a way you could capture some images of what you're seeing it might help me pin it down if it's a track issue rather than a hardware one.

I'll try, but my PC slows down to a crawl while it's happening.
They start just after the first bridge.

 

[Mascot]

Managed to catch a small purple one and a big black one.
They seem to appear when looking left or right.
I ran some laps at Spa without issue in between sessions here. I might try a few more tracks, I don't want to throwing red herrings around and causing concern if it's an issue with my hardware. I think other VR users would have mentioned something by now if they saw similar artifacts.

 

[Mascot]

OK, I *think* it's a config issue somewhere. If I rename the 'extension' folder the artifacts don't appear.
The groove does flash on and off a little though, and seems to disappear from one eye occasionally.
Hopefully some other VR users will pipe up with their own experiences. Sorry about this!

 

[Thrashy]

OK, I *think* it's a config issue somewhere. If I rename the 'extension' folder the artifacts don't appear.
The groove does flash on and off a little though, and seems to disappear from one eye occasionally.
Hopefully some other VR users will pipe up with their own experiences. Sorry about this!

Given that the artifacts look like billboards and you knocked them out by disabling the CSP configurations, I'm guessing there's something screwy happening with grassFX... any change you could share your CSP grass settings? I'll have to poke around and see if I can figure it out; in the meantime if anybody else with VR can replicate the issue that'd be helpful too.

The groove things sounds like z-fighting, and I'm not terribly suprised to hear it due to how I've modeled it. I can probably reduce that problem a bit in the next update.

 

[Mascot]

Here you go. What makes you think it's GrassFX, and what do you mean they look like billboards? They're dome-shaped and appear on the track, not around the perimeter.

 

[Thrashy]

The two you posted look like they are flat circular geometry oriented directly at the camera (a "billboard" in game graphics), and at least the purple one looks like it's centered on a point in the track verge that is generating grass. That, and that it went away when you deleted the CSP configuration file (which right now only configures grassFX, wind effects on flags, and the wind turbine animations) helps to narrow down potential culprits.

Actually, if they do appear as 3D domes elsewhere, try maybe turning off "Cast shadows when possible" and see if that helps? A shot in the dark, but that's the only big difference between your config and mine.

 

[GutBomb]

I'm getting the same thing too, also in VR. My grassfx settings

They seem to get worse when looking left and right too, I get them less (but still get them) when looking forward.

Otherwise it's excellent and I really like it!

 

[bob76]

dont know whats up but the track crashes cm for me

 

[GutBomb]

Ok, here's more info that might help you track it down. I can reproduce this 100%. If I sit in my car at the hotlap start and look directly out of the right side of my car performance tanks to seconds per frame rather than frames per second. If i look forward, stuff improves to normal. When I do this the sky also turns burgundy, but when I turn back to the front it looks normal. It's almost like when I look that direction a very dense object spawns right on top of me, like a dome.

 

[Thrashy]

GutBomb, Mascot -- I've been able to reproduce your issues (both the laggy doom domes and the groove popping in and out) on CSP 0.1.62, using the free-look camera mode. However, reverting to CSP 0.1.46 (the "recommended" version in Content Manager) resolved the issues. I'll keep digging and see if I can resolve the problem, but I might just chalk this one up to a buggy CSP preview release.

 

[Frizbe]

This looks really impressive but I'm getting some weird artifacts in VR, big black and blue 'domes' appear on the track in front of me, coupled with massive slowdown. They kind of look like a game of Missile Command is being played in front of me.
Anyone else getting anything like this? Merge Meshes is off.
Maybe my GPU is dying - off to test other tracks.

Given that the artifacts look like billboards and you knocked them out by disabling the CSP configurations, I'm guessing there's something screwy happening with grassFX... any change you could share your CSP grass settings? I'll have to poke around and see if I can figure it out; in the meantime if anybody else with VR can replicate the issue that'd be helpful too.

The groove things sounds like z-fighting, and I'm not terribly suprised to hear it due to how I've modeled it. I can probably reduce that problem a bit in the next update.

I don't use VR myself but I have a TrackIR setup and I am getting those artifacts, if it helps I took a video with Afterburner open, the game slows down a bunch but that doesn't really seem to be reflected in the FPS. I also noticed the track rubbered in line disapearing which you can see in the video.

Also if you watch to the very last 10-15 seconds you'll see the sparks acting real weird when I fly into the gate.

EDIT: Ooops might help to put the youtube link....

EDIT EDIT: Eh oh well I see you posted about fixing it with a different CSP version, I'll try it out and see what's up.