North Cheyenne Cañon Park is an open space park on the western outskirts of Colorado Springs, CO, proximal to Pike's Peak, home of the world-famous Pike's Peak International Hillclimb. This open space features waterfalls and a multitude of hiking trails leading to arguably the best views of Colorado Springs. Background This project is my love letter to this magnificent park, a place where I've held many dear memories, grown as a person, and literally shed blood for. I started this project in the summer of 2023 and worked on it extensively for a few months, learning the ins and outs (and frustrations) of the World Editor. Unfortunately, I shelved the project, but I kept backups in case I ever wanted to return to finish it. Over the years I've been seeing the recent World Editor additions, particularly the biome tool and road architect, which resolved two of the biggest pain points in level creation (imo). So that brings us to the start of this month, when I decided to revive the project. This map was created initially using publicly available LiDAR data from the state of Colorado. The terrain was imported to BeamNG as a 4096x4096m heightmap. I don't think I can say this is a 1:1 scale recreation of the park, but it is close. That said, I've gone through pretty painstaking detail to try to recreate the visuals close to reality, which you can see some below. (Some scenes are more WIP than others. Also sorry for low quality jpeg, I hate them but for some reason the site would not allow me to upload the PNG versions) The level is mostly comprised of the main asphalt road, North Cheyenne Canyon Rd, the main dirt road, Gold Camp Rd, and the surrounding mountains. The asphalt road is fun for hillclimb, but I think it shines most as a downhill asphalt rally. The dirt road is fun for high speed offroad with steep dropoffs, also featuring two tunnels through mountains. Progress The main road scenery has been recreated based off the park as of summer 2023 (my reference footage date) and December 2023 (latest street view). The main road is fully drivable, but scenery is ~90% complete, missing some bridges and guardrails and roadsigns, as well as the Seven Bridges parking area which leads to Gold Camp Rd. Gold Camp Rd will likely not achieve the same level of realism scenery-wise. I couldn't get reference footage in 2023 due to it being closed, and reference footage online is pretty limited, no street view etc. I'll be moving away from Colorado later this year, but hopefully before then I can get some good reference footage myself. Currently, Gold Camp Rd is fully drivable, but missing scenery/detailing. Bare minimum, first release will have the forest items placed on the whole road. Currently, I'd say I'm about 90% to first release. The level is very playable in its current state, but due to my reverence for the area, I don't want to release until I'm very happy with the attention to detail. I'm targeting a first release in the next 1-3 months, depending on how life goes (May/June are very busy for me) Long term, I think it'd be fun to put in some rock crawling trails etc, which aren't there in reality but would give more activities to do. I'd also like to setup rally stages with pacenotes on the two main roads. Performance As it stands, the level performs decently, I'd rank it in the middle as far as performance requirements (West Coast USA being the most demanding). Polycount is similar to the more demanding BeamNG maps, but with thousands less in avg drawcalls, which matters a lot more. Install size is currently around 500mb, but I'm hoping to reduce that where I can. I've tested the level in VR, on my Valve Index at 80hz and 120% SS, the framerate is stable and about 70-85% utilization. I do play BeamNG in VR on highest settings except lighting on low, and most post processing disabled. For reference, I am running a 7900XTX and 7800x3D with 32gb ram. How about low spec machines? I've also tested the map on my Steam Deck OLED and I can say it is Steam Deck 'verified' I've targeted 45fps@90hz for this level on Deck, as 60fps is rare in BeamNG on Steam Deck. Some of the vanilla levels can't even hit the 45fps target. In my recent testing, it holds stable 45fps around 80% utilization. Thank the BeamNG devs for the incredibly performant tree LODs. Hoping others in the community will get some enjoyment from this level, but mostly I made it for myself to sorta immortalize this place that means a lot to me before I leave it behind for the next chapter in my life. If you have any questions, suggestions, etc, please leave a reply below. I'm always open to feedback. Stay tuned! - lolrus
Looks absolutely stunning and very promising. I hope you find the motivation to get this to a releasable state!
Thanks for the kind words! I am committed to getting it done this time around for sure, it really is just a matter of time.
I'm looking to do this as well, but with LiDAR data from a different state. Didn't find too much in the way of how to do that was recent. Did you follow any tutorials to figure out how to do this?
So best I can remember (this was almost 2 years ago tbf) I didn't follow a specific tutorial to do it in BeamNG, a lot of it was general tutorials and trail/error. I'm not fresh enough to give a detailed explanation, but I can do my best to give you an overview and point you in the right direction. Assuming you already have your LiDAR data acquired, next step will be to load it into a point-cloud reader. I used CloudCompare for this project (open-source and free to download). Depending on how the data is setup, you may have to exclude some layers until you only have the ground layer. For example, mine had layers for creeks/trees etc, which had to be filtered out. (Sidebar, it would be interesting to see if there would be some method to use that extra data to place forest objects!) From there, you'll need to bake the point-cloud into a mesh, which you can actually use in Blender. Depending on the detail level of your lidar data and your PC specs, this could be a lengthy process.Once you get through that, the complicated part is pretty much done. Next you'll just need to import the mesh into blender, and then create a heightmap from the terrain mesh (1024x1024 px, 4096x4096 px, etc). The difficult part here can be getting the elevation/z-axis scaling right when you generate the terrain from the heightmap in BeamNG. You may have to adjust the heightmap settings in Blender a bit and do some trial/error until you get to a scaling you're happy with. Perhaps there is a better/more accurate way to do this, but I'm not sure. So instead of searching for Beam specific tutorials, frame your searches more like "How to get a pointcloud from LiDAR data", "How to convert a pointcloud to mesh in CloudCompare", "How to create a heightmap in Blender" etc etc (I'm pretty sure there are some Beam specific tutorials for that one) Hopefully that helps!
This is so exciting! Ive driven this road and gone through gold camp up to Cripple Creek sporadically for the past 30 years. We hike the seven falls weekly. or did, the road is currently washed out....Old Stage Road is fun, and scenic too. This being so close to Pikes Peak (Today is hillclimb day, yay!) gives some fun ideas about maybe linking some maps, like pikes peak, and adding some Colorado Springs, Woodland Park, or Victor/Cripple Creek stuff. Your are literally adding some of my favorite roads, and its bringing out the child in me! 4 year old me used to dream of being Tommi rallying up the hills.. All of the surrounding areas are super ripe for this game. The roads are a blast, and i can only hope to live out some of my teenage intrusive thoughts with this map! I really hope to play your map soon, and i can only dream that this area gets built upon. much fun to be had. You are an awesome creator for doing this, and i hope you find some good luck, and maybe a cookie!
Wow, thank you for your kind words! They really mean a lot to me and it's exciting to see that this project can mean so much to others. Update: June 24th May and June ended up being even more busy than anticipated, between deadlines at work and flying back and forth from Colorado to Louisiana 3 times in 5 weeks, among other things... I haven't had much mental energy to spare when I've had time to work on the project. However, things are easing up in life for the moment, and I'm getting back to work. All that said, there has been some unfortunate news regarding North Cheyenne Canyon Park. The unusual frequency of rain we had in May and early June caused the creek that runs along the main road to swell to its highest point in 10 years, resulting in a washout with major road damage! Here is a shot of the same area in game (0.36 broke the road edge decal references, please ignore ) Due to this damage, of course they have closed the entrance to the park for the time being, and due to the continuing rainy conditions, haven't been able to come up with a timeline on repair because they have to stabilize the creek first and foremost. They've also closed off the only other entry, via Gold Camp Rd, because that dirt road absolutely cannot sustain the level of traffic that would occur if it was the sole entry. It's got drop-offs with no guardrails, and many sections that are only wide enough for one car to pass at a time, which includes 3 tunnels through the mountains. The timing is unfortunate on multiple fronts. Due to the closures, I'm unable to get the reference footage I needed for Gold Camp Rd for the time being. I'm really hoping they can get these repairs done quick, so I can get that footage as well as enjoy this beautiful space a few more times before I leave for good in October. Latest Progress Despite the lack of update in the past 2 months, there has been progress made in dealing with a lot of the more tedious details of the map, particularly with signage and guard rails. I could be guilty of 'not seeing the forest for the trees' (pun intended) but I've gone through painstaking efforts to recreate the park signage as accurate as possible. For the simpler general road signs, I've actually reverse engineered the method that the BeamNG devs used for most of the signs in the official maps. To avoid needing a bunch of redundant textures, they made a lot of the signs using clever vertex painting and UV mapping tricks. For signage lettering, basically I've mapped out a plane with all the letters and numbers contained in their own 'face', then I assemble the sign words by duplicating the faces. Almost all of the wording is finished; they just need to be attached to actual signs and imported into BeamNG. That stuff has definitely been very tedious. The less tedious side of sign-making has been in creating the trail and park-specific signs. In yet another effort of accuracy, I took the time to digitally recreate these park signs in Photoshop, even down to figuring out the exact font they used for these signs. After a lot of research coming up short, I was literally about to call someone who works for the city about the font, but I was actually able to figure it out with the help of AI. It took a few tries and back and forth with the AI guessing wrong, but it did find the exact font. Anyway, here is the result of some of that work. In addition to the signs, a lot of work has been done on guardrails. Currently, about half the guardrails needed are complete, the other half have all been created and placed in Blender, but their splines need to be finished and imported into BeamNG. I've also done a fair bit of work on terrain painting, overhauling the materials along the entire main road. I'm quite happy with the result, the more realistic and blended rocky terrain painting has made a decent difference in the visual quality. Where Do I Go From Here? Well, I really want to push to have this ready for a first release by the end of July, but if I don't feel really good about the state it's in, I will push the date back. In August I will start prepping for my move, so the hope is to get it out before that point. Here is the list for first release: Finish laying guardrails Complete sign models and place in-game Complete Seven Bridges parking area Complete all small intermediate parking areas along main road Complete misc set-dressing along main road Collision testing Resolve 0.36 missing texture references That's all for now. If you've made it this far, thank you for your patience and support on this project, and stay tuned! Until next time, Lolrus
