You are right, I should be more carefull with such a short words, it may cause misinformation
Of course, we are doing it in the best way possible, we are doing our best to do it very acurate and model track as close to real life as possible, so there is really no place for artistic impression. It needs to be done properly.
Properly means also that if there is a flat track in real life, it should stay flat in simulator, right?
We visited Spa few weeks ago to get references, we were walking around track, checking everything, taking pictures, talking with drivers and getting materials from racing teams ect. And I must tell you that Spa is damn flat track, I don't need laser scanned data to know that, I have been there
As for laser scanned data, it's just a reference material, as many others. At the end, you are creating normal mesh, normal polygon, and that point cloud from scannig you are using as a reference material. Final result in game is the same, polygonal mesh.
If you don't have lasser scanned data, there are other ways to model a track like CAD data.
Very often CAD data contains all elevations changes so you can create very acurate track.
Of course you can say, that CAD is just a project, kind of basic design, and track has plenty subtle diffreneces and it's getting different after every race, it's getting damaged, bumps are showing slowly (at the begining mainly in braking zones) ect. so CAD is not giving us all those information, and it's true.
But let's not forget that laser scanned track is acurate only at the time when it was scanned.
You need just couple of months to have basicly different track.
Track is getting old every day and you would have to scan the track every few months to keep it acurate in game.
Good example is Lime Rock, in iRacing that track was scanned, in rfactor 2 it was not. iRacing version is very bumpy, rfactor2 version very flat.
Guess, which one is more accurate?
That one on rfactor2 since it's new and the data used by iRacing is already outdated (really very old)
And let's not forget also that final result in game/amatour simulator is only very simplified model. You can scan a track with few mm precision and similar density, but that kind of data goes only to profesional simulators that are used by car manufactures ect. They have very powerful computers designed especially to handle with that kind of data. Our PCs at home are not ready for this (obviously...yet)
But as an artist I would like to work on it anyway, that technology is very interesting, so I hope I will be able to work with that kind of data at some point