Ford Racing 2 is a game I loved as a kid. The game has 6 settings, 4 have 3 tracks each and 2 2 each. They are so named and structured: Code: BAY — BAYA, BAYB, BAYC DES — <<>> FLOR — <<>> JUNG — <<>> SPRING — ...A, ...B OVAL — ...A, ...B (There is also a third track on the second last not available in the game. If I ever come that far I'll include it no doubt.) So far my plan is to port BAY, A, B, C. The three tracks are all very close to each other and in most settings they intersect. This means that on modern hardware I should be able to merge them. Spoiler: first post For now I only have the track in blender. The layout lays on a 2048x plane: This would be my first mod, so I need some help with it and maybe this isn't the right thread, I'm sorry for that. This is the current topology (straight out of the game) The first thing I'd like to do is make is playable, then other things might come. Ideally make it pbr, multiple groundmodels (tarmac, concrete, grass) and place the missing models, with beamng ones, that populate the world in the original map. This is the second release. The map is almost complete but so much more enjoyable. Trees are now in! If someone wants to add racing or traffic and post in the thread, you're welcome! bay_a.zip Video: Now I should add the other 2 tracks, but, while that is twice the job, I consider this as out of WIP. What come next is a plus
will there be a romanian map that next? i want to see a huge map that goes from bucharest to ploiesti and calarasi, and pitesti too
Why don't you make a Romanian map yourself instead of asking virtually everyone who posts about converting maps from other games to BeamNG? I have already explained to you how to do it.
Very little progress and a question (or 2). I am following map in 30 days tutorial, I have baked the terrain but in the wrong way, so I've spent time focusing on beamng when the problem is how to get a linear texture of height going from black to white. I could get the max height right, this was throwing me off, but the track was off by a few meters. Now I have to get a correct heightmap from blender. The question is: why the preview of the heightmap shows as red? And does it have to be stored as BW? in my case colors caused spikes, likely because some (or a lot) of information goes nowhere. Anyways, I spent hours on one simple step, next is materials. Those seem more complex.
Ok, I fixed the heightmap and here's how: Following this video: he exports in EXR, there is a way to have the ''same'' result with PNG: this way color space is still linear! It is very important to set the material precisely so that the very top is black, as he says (remove greater than to render). It is even more important since elevation is not a few cm but, in this case 105 meters, and half meter off was imprecise when I imported the road mesh. And here's how to import any mesh, set in blender with origin at world origin and everything applied: the world is 2048 so position is 1024, Z is to give a bit more space so that the terrain does not show through. I could also import the guardrails and with same setting they work nicely. Project is still very far from playable since materials are still a mistery, but I could drive on the NO TEXTURE road Errata corrige: I created the terrain with no offset, but the map is 2048 so offset should be at -1024,-1024, and imported mesh with origin at world origin will work when set at 0.0,0.0.
I got to a point where I want to add materials but the map is a weird shiny black or the no material one. Materials are there, I can feel asphalt and grass, but not see them. In the material preview I can. Also I don't know if or how should I texture the road mesh.
I have placed a minimap, just as a png image, that I might refine. I do not know why minimaps for other maps have multiple layers. The placement was the hardest. Offset is 0,2048. I do not know why. Also, when I clean cache, even after saving the level, nothing was there. Nothing. How can I share it if it does not survive a cache clean, that I might have to do to troubleshoot too. These are my questions for today. Out. Errata corrige: Minimap offset is now -1024,1024.
The map now has materials, for the ground at least. This is how I imported them. First, I copied a material texture-set in my map, then I copied the .json code for that material and adjusted the map name. With that done the game can recognize by itself the material. One thing I do not understand is how to properly have those whole-map .png and what exacly they do. PBR here seems different from blender. As I'm writing I see that cache clear still deletes my map. It is now in mods/unpacked/bay_a/levels/bay_a/... Luckly I now know where to take back the files. This is how the map appears. The asphalt has a weird interaction when the sun is seen from this angle, but the road is there, smooth, part of the terrain mesh. It is perfecly driveable, still lacks the spirit. I will not be working on it for a while. If I understand how to share a working copy of it I will
How did you manage to manage to extract the map data from the game? I've wanted to do this myself for quite some time but I struggled to figure out how to get the data out of those files.
New version with trees in first post! Let me know if they are a problem to performance, since I made grass and trees as one big object and imported as so (the map should otherwise have very good performance, way better than any other official map because of very low detail). I am not totally happy with how they look, but the map does look better with them in.
As I am recomposing the second of three tracks in Blender, I want to make a post about textures. The game (FR2) has extremely small textures—one of the biggest I found is 256×256, some are just 64×64, like these cabins, seen only from the road, that can afford it. The entire bridge at the beginning of bay_a (I will soon name the tracks properly as they exit development state, bay_a will become "Route 50" and all three will be named "City Limitys," as they are called in game) is textured by just one 128×128 image with three surfaces (except the road surface, which is another image). For this and other textures I've taken the albedo/diffuse/color map/image and made a black and white bump map and baked a normal from it. In the same way, I made a roughness map. Some other textures I just create with multiple gradient lines (like the guardrail normal map, which needed more depth definition). Most materials only need three (diffuse, normal, roughness) textures, some need ambient occlusion, alpha, and metalness, although I don't like how pure metal looks in BeamNG. One VERY important point is that you should follow the naming convention for them to look right. That's it, just a name, no need to export with special linear jargon jargon space settings, just name them as you should (link). Right out of the game I have a bunch of meshes that have to be merged together or separated, and most of them have too many materials named something like mat5.008, so I take one of them, make it my favorite version of all its siblings, name it, and apply to where its siblings were so that they can be ultimately forgotten and the game can happily map a material onto a material which is the material I intended to be. For this reason I call the in-game material with the same name of the .dae material, although I suspect there is a better way to map them. To close off this post, work on bay_c is proceeding well. I should also follow another procedure to place objects that will make them have the same position they have in the original game, preserving the artistic design choices. I will update bay_a to include this change, as well as other improvements and additions.
