Howdy everyone! I'm pretty new here, and wanted to show off some (slow) progress on my Mount Panorama map made from scratch (and LiDAR data) The hardest part so far was probably importing the actual LiDAR data, because in general, Australia doesn't have easily obtainable DEM information. I wrestled with this in QGIS for days before I was able to get a decent heightmap, and had to write a python program to download, stitch and reproject satellite images from government servers in order to have some kind of accurate basemap to work from... The resulting stitched satellite image ended up being a 4.5GB TIF at about 50k resolution -- way too big for any game, but resized down to 8k and used as a detail map on the terrain helps with a colour reference to build on. This was the first version after getting the terrain and satellite images imported, and painting a rough mesh road around the race course itself: The resolution of the satellite image even scaled down to 4k is pretty decent. I'll probably use it for macro details that aren't too important, and I plan on painting over all of the grass, dirt and sand with a texture paint pass: After a few more hours of drawing mesh roads, the overall layout is starting to come together: Then another few more hours drawing barrier meshes. These still need placement work, and I'm hoping that using the mesh road tool to draw these won't turn out to be a mistake... I changed the texture scaling from 3.0 to 1.0 to make sure that when textures are applied, they're not stretched to oblivion I also have a wealth of reference photography that I've personally shot in my trips to the track itself over the years, but a lot of the scenery, buildings, pit area and props will probably have to be built from scratch as well. I looked around the internet for any props I could download or purchase that suit the track & theme and there really isn't anything suitable. And finally a quick 5min drive around to show the progress so far: I would love to hear what you guys think and if you have any suggestions
One of my favorite tracks, I will be definitely following the progress of this one. Are you planning to only work on the track itself or the surroundings too?
Thanks mate Definitely both. Unfortunately due to size and DEM limitations I can only do a 2km² region of the area, but I will be attempting the surrounding areas as well. There's a cool dirt MX track to the south of the map that I'll be including. These are pretty early stages so far so I'll just be chipping away at it when I have some spare time. So far it's been about 5 days since I started with a few hours work per day... The terrain and satellite imagery was a real pain to get the scale as close to correct as possible
Great Work! I'm working on a similar project with real life data. But I was lazy and since my selected region doesn't have massive valleys or steep mountains I decided to use the blosm plugin for Blender. Making a heightmap from the terrain in Blender is not that hard. For me the hardest thing is having buildings which fit to the german countryside. I'm just learning the modeling stuff. The cool thing with the Blender plugin is that you can import all the roads (even dirtroads) and even simple Buildings as mesh in Blender. Today I imported the (lousy) Buildings in BeamNG, so that I know where I have to place my modeled Buildings. My first selfmade house with instanced colors: Good luck to you for your project Best! Alex
That's really cool I watched your video on how to import the terrain as well, haven't quite got to that point yet but it's on the list to do in the next couple of days. I'm planning on following your example in order to model and place the buildings in the correct location, thankfully the area doesn't have too many buildings and is mostly countryside and official race buildings with regular (large and expensive) houses peppered throughout. I'm curious, did you use the Blender OSM plugin for importing the building footprints? I've also looked into things like Buildify as well but I think that might be too OP for what I need lol
Yes. I created the buildings with blosm, converted them to dae and imported them to BeamNG. You have to import the terrain to blender as well so that the buildings get the right height information. Scaling was a bit off in BeamNG but could be corrected. But I guess that your height information is more precisely due to DEM so that the z axis might be not correct for the imported buildings. There is an option in blosm to generate separate meshes for the buildings. If there are not so many this might be on option for you. For me the blosm buildings are just an aid to place better ones. Buildify is fun but all the buildings look the more or less the same if you don’t make your own building blocks. I will do about 10 different buildings myself. Together with the color instances and some downloaded buildings and some buildings from other vanilla levels I should be okay. I will place them manually in world editor I guess. Or I get an enlightened idea in my dreams, haha. Still a lot of work to do It’s just a hobby and I’m working on it for more than a year from time to time. Learning Blender is quite a thing. I’m from Germany but my sister lives in Castlemaine near Melbourne. Have been there a couple of times. Cheers! Alex
That's a great idea about just the buildings, already working on it I do think that scaling will be a challenge though as you've experienced as well... I know that my terrain, although accurate, is probably more pronounced than the one that blosm imports because the DEM is sourced semi-privately from Aus government servers and ArcGIS don't have access to that information. The DEM I have is 1 meter resolution and I think ArcGIS is something really low quality like 30 meter. The problem I had when importing the 1 meter terrain into BeamNG though was banding and terracing, which no matter what I tried, I couldn't export a proper 16bit heightmap from QGIS, it always comes out as 8bit and causes those problems. I had to manually smooth the terrain with BeamNG terrain brush to fix the bad terracing issues which further altered the terrain from being a 1:1 representation of real world, which is fine for the game itself but makes things like this more difficult to work with because the terrain, even if scaled from Blender will not be in the exact correct position. I think ultimately that won't matter here because it's just the buildings that are going to be the most useful. I feel like importing the roads would be cool but creates a bit of a texturing nightmare.
I had problems with terracing too. I applied a bit of Gaussian blur in photoshop. Maybe conversion to 16 bit and applying this filter could help. I used the imported roads not as mesh but to build the black and white png masks for importing the terraintypes. I used an orthographic view top down in blender only with the roads visible and rendered an image. One for asphalt and one for dirtroads. My scene is the place of my childhood and the time I had a fresh drivers license. Therefore the correct placement of the roads is important to me. With this technique it is really spot on. I used this technique for the heightmap as well. There are some tutorials for heightmaps in blender with nodes and a displacement modifier.
following progress on this one. i have the old bathurst map thats been around for a bit so a revamp would be great. i know the current layout has been around for nearly half a century but itd be cool as to have the old conrod straight without the chicane in it to break it up. then can re-enact the old falcons brake fade into the last corner haha
Sadly this didn't help when I tried it. I tried everything, even tried exporting a massive image and scaling it down and still had issues with terracing. I've been working with heightmaps for many years but this time around I couldn't seem to eliminate the issues, converting to 16bit and using gaussian filters seemed to make the terracing even worse, I've never really experienced this before. From what I can work out, QGIS itself is the problem, and it might be because the resolution of my GeoTIFs are so high lol. This map is about 2-3km squared, and each GeoTIF DEM is about half of that, and huge. I had to do a raster merge in QGIS, which for some reason seems to always be exported as 8bit. Each tile has different exposure values as seen above, and while merging them in QGIS looks ok: and the hillshade also looks great: the exported heightmap image always comes out as 8bit, even when I used "Raster > conversion > translate" and converted the merged image to Int16 or UInt16, it still wants to export as 8bit... From hours' worth of research, it seems that it's the original source DEM GeoTIFs that are causing the problem. This is a max extent zoomed in portion of the top right of the track itself: (16bit PNG in Photo Viewer) (Same area in QGIS) There is actually a German site that can help with this called Geofabrik. Basically it provides OSM data files of the whole world down to a region level that you can import into QGIS and can colour and filter roads to whatever level you like, and it will be projected properly over your terrain. It provides that top-down 2D view exactly in place. You just need to create your own Symbology for the layer: Then all you need to do is a quick Black & White conversion in Photoshop and invert the image to get a black & white 2D roadmap of your area: I was going to use the same method as you but I ended up going with the mesh roads anyway, I find it enjoyable to place them lol, but I also thought it might give me more control over the surface geometry of the track. This place is unique in that it's also a public road when race events aren't being held, and all of the satellite and Geo data seem to be taken at times when there isn't a race event on, so race-specific geometry and road closures aren't present. Anywhere else I would probably do the same terraintypes route as you are but this track I think requires a bit of extra effort for the roads themselves because it's a strangely shared place between races and public roads lol. Thanks Rob and that's actually a cool idea Sadly I don't think it's possible to build variations into a single map, but once I have something more substantial towards the finalised map, I might be able to create a historical version of it to include the old layout. I actually think it might be possible to get satellite images before it was changed as well, as the NSW archives contain a lot of satellite images from way before the computer age, even as far back as the 1940s :O Stay tuned!
yer i thought itd have to be a 2nd map. would be cool. all good current layout takes priority i know. good to know there is imagery of before it was changed. look forward to release
Hello! I was bored and i made some AI Roads for the track and im working on some quite neat missions (Some are based from Real Racing 3 such as "Hunter"). When i'll probably finish the missions i can send you my map version along with the AI Roads. It's still WAY to W.I.P but i can keep posting some of the missions .
