Thanks gentlemen. Forest Hills will be unique I think and will transcend any clichés. As for the lakes my original intention was for just some small swampy type lakes or ponds but the geology is set and anything larger will require using T3D terrain tools......and I'm not real fond of wrecking things right now. That's the beauty of doing this with these programs, so much to do and so many ideas to be had one lifetime isn't enough! Maps not even finished and the authorities are already hungry for revenue.
One of at least a couple groundcovers and rock. This is pretty much maxed for a ground cover and will kill frame rates on a mapwide scale but it's damn purty'. What do you guys think of the rock? It looks good in both macro and detail and I've spent some serious hours getting the hue the way I want it but opinions do count.
A feel for the dirt roads. Smooth now but will get "ruttier". These roads will snake throughout the map and should provide for a major change from the interstate. Current progress includes major texture work, groundcover creations, final road tweaking, final lake placements and water tweaking and big picture "final look" choices. I'm very pleased so far.
Work continues! Groundcovers and particles figured out finally....glad that headache is over. Dirt roads and lakes done. I am encountering some fairly serious framerate drops around the area of the two bridges. Currently adjusting vegetation densities to help offset that. May need to adjust lake graphical settings. Turning postFX off gains 5-10FPS and doesn't really impact the visuals too much. Up next is full on tree and plant placement. After that will be fine tuning materials and groundcovers tight to the roads. Beyond that having some ideas about a few abandoned DOT shacks and some old piers on the lakes. Also snow for the mountain tops and higher roads. Still haven't destroyed this thing yet. Updated the pics on the front end and will swap those for others as progress permits.
I'm running into a material glitch. I created a material called "Forestfloor3" and it's the main material for the main groundcover. When I open the map a nasty green artifact appears on the rock texture. When I select the Forestfloor3 material and paint it all goes away. I immediately save the map after it goes away but it re-appears on every load up. It appears quite randomly and in "splotches". It's definitely not the basetex color, that's a much darker green. Anyone have an idea what's up? This happens regardless of what I do with the cache. Working away on this and roughly halfway done with the forestation. Snow on the mountains looks pretty good. Trying to keep the framerate manageable but it's a struggle, getting creative with the trees is mandatory now. Currently with full GFX it's at 25-30FPS without DR.
Maybe your diffuse map have green point on this zone and you have choice to paint rock to this point ???? weird, if I had your screen under my eyes I can help you but here this is difficult ...
AH...I see what you're saying. The rock texture doesn't use the WM diffuse because I screwed up the macro colors and it was too late to change it...derp. Noted for next map. The rock texture is using various different diffuse, detail and normals to get the look I wanted. Same with the grass material. Pretty sure this is the typical T3D material spazz we all know and love. I really need to figure out what the T3D basetex is/does frankly. This map is 2048X2048 but the basetex that updates realtime is saving at 1024X1024?. This may be part of the problem, not sure. I'm hesitant to re-size the Torque basetex.
I do not think it had something to do with the basetexture, have you inspect materials.cs in c:\user\document\beamng\levels\foresthill (something like that) it is where changes are done, maybe you have several materials with the same name, inspect all materials in this file (material.cs) if they take textures on the good folder etc...
You can set the basetex to 2048 in the terrain block object, baseTexSize. The texture is saved as DDS, which you see next time you load the map. DDS compression can cause the color mixing between different ground materials, and subtle green/purple spots. 2048 basetex size should help a bit. Unfortunately it doesn't go higher, even if the map is 4096 pixels.
Thank you! EDIT: okay so the green goo issue was caused by the basetex in the cache and for some reason it was 1024....no clue why. I had another basetex that was .png in the level folder (probably the original from the WM macro), that was sitting there doing nothing. I went into the editor and changed the 1024 to 2048 and it held. I then copied that from the cache into the level folder and deleted the .png basetex and then deleted the level cache altogether. So far the green goo is gone and I gained a couple FPS it appears. Learn something new every day! I made the macro for the 2048 map 4096 for added detail like Doullpepper suggested but I didn't really see an improvement over the 2048 texture. The fact that T3D won't accept a 4096 basetex really defeats a high detail macro texture? I guess my question works out as "so a 4096 res macro won't make a 2048 map look more detailed?" I wasn't really able to get the crisp mapwide texture like CoS has and definitely need more experience in WM.
well, actually in Canyon of speed, macro map (diffuse map) is 4096 and my height map in 2048, to adjust the macro to my map scale is 2 m per pixel for the height map, but the basetexture is in 1024 and has no impact on the visual details .. (well I think ??) I do not understand what it is the role of basetexture... - - - Updated - - - I never tried to replace basetexture by the macro texture WorldMachine reversed ..? ..! I must try this!
I might ask in the T3D forums for a basic overview of the whole basetex theory, no doubt a common occurrence in various iterations of 3D engines. I'm completely at a loss on the subject. Something else I have run into is the cache seems to be doing something with the basetex. Everytime I add the Forestfloor3 material the "green goo" shows up proportional to the amount of painting done. As I said before I think copying the documents cache version back to the main level folder and deleting the original gets rid of it. I need to prove that theory 100% though. I can't wait to see how the WM macro reverse works Doullpepper! EDIT: My progress on Forest Hills is plodding along fine and I'm having serious issues learning how to stop adding stuff. After seeing Ouerbackers new map and the tree count it has I will be amazed if I get away with my tree count. The more I do this the more I admire Hutch for his clever arrangements of forested/meadow areas in ECA to help keep the FPS manageable. Right now FH is 75% forested and the max GFX FPS is in the 20-30FPS range. The inevitable "thinning" will no doubt happen. I am going to add one more dirt road that will roll through a special area. Not sure if I'm going to use the Dougfirs for that or find something suitable to download. Hutch's dougfirs scale nicely though. - - - Updated - - - Overview of progress. Late afternoon romp in the ole' 172.
Having a ton of fun getting the mountain snow looking right! Map 95% forested and I can't wait to get that grueling ordeal over with. I am an absolute perfectionist to a fault. Every single terrain material applied by hand. Dirt roads done, no more! Started placing some structures that are DOT related "shacks" of sorts and mostly abandoned with junk left behind. Structures will be ECA stuff because I'm light years from doing Blender anything right now. Once the forestation is finished I plan on working on the lake areas, small fishing piers, water plants and other details. After that I will place final structures as the ideas flow in and work on the roads for the final time, placing signage and guardrail. I like the way light plays on this map and will probably put in a TOD scheme. I want to thank Doullpepper and Occam's Razor for the mesh guardrail and the traffic signs respectively, Thank you guys!!....eh, I need to figure how to make them work though. Haven't done much tree thinning because so far the FPS has held steady at around 30 FPS on max settings but I have a feeling folks with lower to medium performance machines will need to do some GFX adjustments...hopefully not too many.
Hoo! You work like a crasy man! Very nice snow effect... Hummmm but Visually the road seems a little too wide on your screen, but it is a personal point of view.
Yeah, I think I may need to slim the roads a bit. They are excellent when driving fast and do not look that wide but when parked it looks weird, I'll figure out a good compromise after driving a few maps with different road widths. Luckily there's nothing catastrophic in the way on that. Thanks for the critique!
Your mapping is immersive Aboroath. I am excited over Forest Hills. Scale wise I think everything is correct, only the highway texture being made for something else. The center lines look accurate to my eye in size comparison, but the white line does seem expanded incorrectly. If only the white could be moved inward, wide shoulders added, and center lines kept as is. Anyways, awesome teaser, thanks.
That snow looks awesome! This map is already turning out to look more beautiful than I thought it would be. The scenery is so nice... Great job making the terrain Aboroath! It really does look so much like Washington/BC... This seems like it could easily become my favourite map.
Thank you! I looked at the decal road scenario in Torque and I may have screwed the pooch on the road size. There's no easy way to change the size "on the fly" that I know of. I will look into the level files deeper later. I appreciate the honest feedback folks are giving and if it means I need to re-do every road to get it right then I have no problem doing that. My gut has been telling me not to finalize the roads until the very end anyway. I'm fairly confident in the decal road workflow and be it known I've lost them all once already early in the game. Nothing has changed the fun this is. - - - Updated - - - Thanks Pickle330! I'm blown away with some of the "vistas" that have formed and quite by accident! You should hopefully crack a smile at some of them.
