I just got the 7Gb of extra LIDAR data needed to make the full mountain. As I though, its going to be a big job sorting through it all and filtering it down into manageable chunks. I only acquired about 1/4th of the mountain, so I'm going to supplement the missing parts with 10m DEM's from Terrainparty. I only need it to be high detail out to about 200 meters from the road anyways. In 3ds Max I ran into an issue with half of the data being in a new format that's not supported by CloudCompare and It took most of the night to find the solution. Its still a mess, with the layers at different altitudes and points all over the place.
This is looking nice ! I'm sure the countless hours you're spending on this will pay out. And I finally managed to get a clean(ish) drive to the summit on the tarmac road, 10:23.82 with the sunburst hillclimb and 2 or 3 unexpected offroad moments. I can't wait for the accurate version to see how I compare to the pro drivers
I got all of the LIDAR data imported as OBJ files, after processing a billion points down to 6 million tris. With the true road shape visible, I had to fiddle with the proportions of the 10m DEM and 1m ortho image overlay to get everything fit together perfect. The overlay matches pretty close, so from top view I can model in the roads and other fine details confidently. The DEM doesn't match up with the LIDAR seamlessly, but it starts way out, 1-2km from the road, so it shouldn't be noticeable. After optimizing and merging all the terrain parts I was able to get a heightmap generated using my new technique. I generated a loft that matches the roads perfect and will be an easy way of rendering the road's terrain paint. Now I just need to generate the huge terrain, grow a forest, model rock formations, guard rails and all the scattered track side objects...
So incredible stuff that I don't know what to say, part of my brain claims to me that I understand it while other part just drools
Sorry for the jargon heavy post. Pics should clear it up . I got the terrain generated, and applied the map image to it. There are still some alignment problems; that's why the terrain painted road is off by a couple of meters. You can see the map edge, but I will soon make a mesh terrain that extends out another 4Km in each direction. Other than being insanely bumpy and little reference for where the road is, I had a good first drive up to the top. Its definitely a whole new experience compared to the old version.
Sorry, now both parts of brain are drooling I think that flying a helicopter over LIDAR terrain could be jaw dropping too, having all those small dips there, have to try that in a future!
Just got done trudging through 12 miles of road smoothing. I used BeamED's mesh roads; at 9 meters wide by 0.01m thick, in conjunction with the align terrain to mesh tool to steam roll a smooth road bed to drive on. I had initially attempted to do it the lazy way and use the super smooth terrain tool, but after smoothing the first 1/4th of the course, I discovered it wasn't working well. I had to try a few setups for the mesh roads to get them to the smoothness I wanted; with their smoothness maxed out, they made a perfect surface. There's still some slight choppiness in the road surface, due to the extreme elevation, which degrades the terrain precision. It also looks about the same with only 2.4m/pixel for the color layer which is quite blurry, like in the previous pics, but I sorted out the map alignment issue and added in terrain detail layers. Needless to say, its now smooth and uber-accurate over 80% of the course - up to halfway between Devil's Playground and The Summit. The old (circa 2005) version is horrendously inaccurate, and I wont be able to use any of it for reference, and I wont be using any of its assets either; some of the more important objects have repeated geometry, and would be harder to fix than just make from scratch. I'm undecided about how and when I will release it; as a WIP, Alpha, or Beta, and it will soon be 100% driveable with working AI. It will be a repository release, for sure when its ready. I need to upgrade my computer and get a mod team assembled before starting the graphical portion, since my 6GB of RAM maxes out and starts tapping the page file right at the end of the 5 minute loading process. The work load is quite immense too, and Id like to focus on the terrain and not get bogged down creating and arranging the assets. In total, the land area will be 18Km, including the outlying mesh terrain; 10Km for the height map, and a 4Km radius of 3D backdrop. I'm going to focus on getting the terrain and other core details out to the guardrails built first and deal with the eye candy when it's more practical. Ive been scouring google earth street view (the google car went up to the summit) and youtube (tons of videos) for references and found a mountain of references for the close up details. I have one more 8x8Km mega-map planned too, but its at the same stage and has similar issues.
I finally got the RAM I needed to get my editing programs and the game running smoothly and finish this monster of a level. 12 gigs seems to be the sweet spot, and I can easily run 3DS Max and/or Google Earth in the background full blast if necessary. Some tasks, like LIDAR mesh editing and high res images use upwards of 9-10 Gb alone. Frame Rates are still bad in-game, with my under-clocked Radeon RX460 and old-gen quad core 3.0 Ghz CPU chugging big time, but at least I'm back in the game. Editing is still slow, since most tasks I do only utilize a single core, but at least it isn't grinding away at my poor SSD with page faults. Cant wait to upgrade to an 8th gen Pentium... At load time: its using 6.4 gigs of ram max, and levels out to around 5.3 gigs, when the car finally spawns after 5 minutes generating the mountain. I expect this number to go up a little when Im finished. As far as progress; I've completed the first pass of detail work: the backdrop scenery mesh (12Km square), decal roads, forest, road signs and posts, rocks, and drainage culverts. I rendered basic terrain paint for the gravel, road offshoots, rock and cliff areas, but still hand-painting some fine details in. I had to redo most of the work on the twisty part from my first attempt, since its a new terrain file. Ive started going back over the terrain surface to add more detail to the upper part where the sides are more rugged, and I can use the unfiltered LIDAR, since there are no trees to mess it up. Now the rocky ledges and ravines are more dangerous. With the smooth roads and detailed scenery its looking pretty close to realistic. Still something missing though, probably because I haven't added ground cover yet. Good enough for some Climbkhana craziness! Next I need to add a boat load of boulders to the upper section to some how make it look less flat - its a mountain, but almost smooth enough to drive on. I'm researching the buildings park signs and huts located around the venue. I found pics of the unique mile markers and other stuff that will add some extra character to the otherwise green-out/ moonscape scenery.
Here's the first test video of the new level with a hill climb SBR that's been de-tuned sightly with added traction control/ABS for demonstration purposes. I wrecked badly, and still finished in good time. Anyone passionate about rally and the Colorado mountains - with the ability to help develop this level, please message me. No specific experience necessary, but basic 3D modeling, texture designing, and other BeamNG modding skills will be useful. Sorry, but I'm not looking for beta testers yet.
I did some prospecting the last few days, and found a gold mine. Talk about attention to detail! Progress wise; Ive been chipping away at the task list, and at a much faster rate. I haven't had anyone volunteer to help finish the track, so I may be changing my plans. I figured out how best to represent the large rock fields which populate the upper half like a forest - all without going over the line. By blowing up a standard dirt terrain's material by 10x, it looks like boulders instead of pebbles. With a few 3D boulders sprinkled in for parallaxing, the affect is convincing enough. I found a huge problem with my layout and had to reload and realign the entire mesh road system used for smoothing the pavement. I also lost a 2-3 mile section of the mesh roads, so it will be another task to rebuild it from scratch, with all the subtle off-camber banking. Hopefully Its not too far off or I may have to regenerate the terrain and readjust the mesh roads from that point. With the lower half driving better than ever, Ive moved up to Devils Playground to do some serious detail work.
The reboot seems to be fine, but the remake is dead in the water for now. Its just too big to make the whole mountain and still have a smooth driving surface. This game is limited in vertical terrain resolution, to the point that precision drops off the cliff for a level with this much elevation. On top of that I broke the level some time back and it wont load, so Id need to go through and find the bug to even play around with it. On the bright side I'm back at it, making something even grander. Precision, who cares. Its a 1800 meter deep pit.
@Ewanc, you can only make something that is best possible, reaching beyond that is just a torturing oneself, now I probably never will learn that myself and I will probably keep torturing myself, but accepting that would make building stuff so much easier
some body should make a ken block hoonicorn custom 1965 ford mustang v2 so they can re enact the climbkana
It seems that repo does not have discussion tab anymore, but @Ewanc here are my specs: Core i7 6700 16GB DDR4 2666Mhz Samsung SM951 M2 NVME Geforce GTX1080 8GB Loading time of the map on high GFX settings 1 minute 8 seconds Vram usage without dynamic reflections on high gfx settings around 4.4GB so people with 4GB vram or less probably need to run on normal textures instead of high. Some maps lag on this system, because single core performance is bit too low on those maps, but your map is running surprisingly low GPU/CPU loads, so your optimizations certainly do pay off! I did notice GPU memory usage being 4763MB or thereabouts while recording video (that has pretty much GFX at max and 1080p, dynamic reflections are only 140 meters and quite low faces per update, but other than that), now waiting for 5.5GB video to upload to YT. This map of yours runs better than most vanilla maps, I would say it is something close or even better than grid map, that is why I think it is incredible feat to get that kind of performance from a map of this size! Also I did drive with Sunburst, so bumps don't feel quite as severe as with some sportier vehicle, must try hillclimb variant later with a wheel, but for me bumps kinda add realism, sure they are not quite intended, but often roads are too smooth, while in real world there are always bumps and undulations which make driving more interesting. However I need to test with something that has stiffer suspension to really feel those bumps and their severity. I did notice at one point that when driving on right lane, I got gravel sound, if you watch 12:00 onwards from video, you should be able to hear it some time 12:30 or so, I guess it needs concrete painted under the road on that spot, also I was bit lost on top as you can probably tell 30 minutes to upload and it seems to take 30 minutes to process, should be online in 15 minutes or so, that is at least estimate right now, YT is so slow sometimes...
Found few things that might be out of interest to you. There are some no texture issues on those squares at ends of the railings. Also smaller rocks that are outside of the road on ground, have no collisions, but I'm not sure if that is on optimization reasons. I did draw arrow to picture so you can see what I mean with rectangle thing which I don't know how you should call it in English. Bit more entertaining video that is bit shorter, still can't remember corners, but certainly this is now one of my favorite maps, it is so much fun, thanks @Ewanc !
