Hi, i've been contemplating a modding journey for beamNG. My experience in modding is helping phoenix make LA Canyons for Assetto corsa, make a few cars, still for AC, and then a small island for assetto : Union Island. (https://www.overtake.gg/downloads/union-island.45276/) Now i'd love to adapt it to BeamNG. Just, i'm not sure where to start. Nor how to. I've watched few videos about it, nothing really detailed though. But here's where i'm at: For Union Island, i've done everything with 3Dsmax, railclone and forestpro. Assetto corsa doesn't do much more than static objects everywhere. No scatterer no nothing. BeamNG has a level editor, can use heightmaps, trees, grass, scatter objects and so on. It's a real editor after all, an that would be pretty great to use. Now that i have done everything already, i was wondering what's the best course of action not to start everything from scratch. Plan A : export my terrain from 3dsmax to a static mesh for BeamNG, losing the ability to sculpt it, but it would be rather fast to do i imagine. Plan B : generate a height map from my terrain, and import it in the world editor. Then draw roads, or import my splines from 3dsmax etc. Longer than plan A i imagine, but... embracing all the possibilities of the world editor. These last few months, i found out some people had converted my map for the game. But i guess they went the plan A, not bothering much with using the whole world editor and just adapting my dds and so on. I found few things on the forum : "starting-a-new-standalone-map-using-heightmaps" is dead https://www.beamng.com/threads/beam...-a-new-standalone-map-using-heightmaps.28087/ i found a basics tutorial from 2016, but how up to date is this compare to 2024 ? https://www.beamng.com/threads/tutorial-how-to-create-your-own-map-for-beamng-drive.19598/ and a lot of things for blender. so here i am If you have advice, that would be very welcome. I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment, not knowing at all the pipeline from 3dsmax to a driveable road in beamNG. And not being sure whether to start or give up straight away XD thank you for reading
Hello there! I'm Luca, lead environment artist at BeamNG. Sorry for the lack of informations out there. We are actually working on a proper documentation on Level creation that will be out as soon as possible. In the meantime I can give you some points about how to proceed. So, first of all you can check the actual documentation in the World Editor section to have a general idea about how the tools work. Personally I would start to check if one of the actual map can fit your needs. You can start with something already in place, duplicate the map, clean the assets from there and update the heightmap so you'll have the freedom to change everything, terrain related, directly in editor. This video from 2016 can work compared to assets relink. Using a free text editor (sublime text or similar) you can bulk edit quickly the previous map name path to your new one with a single action. Some areas were updated, like terrain materials creation but that can still be used. Legacy will be kept anyway. Compared to road layout and how to deal with it we have released a new tool called Road Architect that can help you a lot with the features included. Take a look at it, you can also find an extensive documentation. You'll find out that with the tool will be quick to design a road network and edit a ton of stuff. You also have a precedural placement of decalroads, can edit your road as you wish and automatically conform terrain accordingly. Using a mesh for terrain is an option but it also depends on the dimensions of actual terrain and obviously you will have no control if not going back and forth and will not exploit the terrain optimizations. Not really ideal. Let us know if you need any other support, and happy creation!
Hi, height map based terrain has a clear FPS advantage cause the mesh is homogeneous and always orthogonally. The renderer also does not have to check for vertical overlaps and the physics engine does not have to check for terrain from above. It is no big deal to render a mesh into a heightmap with the help of Blender. But it is very important to use the full resolution of the 16bit grayscale and to set the max height in your BeamNG project accordingly if you don't want to lose topology data. Also you have to consider the square size of you mesh, in the export task and in BeamNG to be the same. Just some little hints, maybe it helps you to decide . Good luck! --- Post updated --- Edit: I forgot to mention: On height map based terrain the renderer applies an automatic adaptive degradation, what means that the mesh resolution is lowered on far terrain. This mechanism does not work on object based terrain. You would have to split the terrain in many sub parts and provide level of detail data in order to achieve a similar effect. This could be much more complicated as the height map strategy.
thanks for your replies ok i haven't gone very far first step in 3dsmax was to find a way to create a clean height map. i used the "ink & paint" shader from default scanline, having a default gradient map, with a mapping on the whole terrain. and don't forget to put your gamma back into 1.0, otherwise the default gamma 2.2 breaks the gradient : I launch the game It seems you have to be in a map, so i usually take "the island" or the grid since they load fast i press F11, it launches the world editor. Didn't find another way to access it more directly ? Then file, open level... i made my little "union" folder ctrl+2 for free camera to fly around Then "terrain tools" / import terrain figured my meters per pixel is 1.45 if my map is 4096px (for 5.9km displayed in my render) - or is it the other way around Also figured 5k and above won't load at all. max height is about 300m height map, i tried png, jpg, dds uncompressed (crashed), but didn't manage to have smooth surface i didn't figure out how you make it a driveable surface. i can move the car spawn point, or the car, using the sceneTree oh, and a lot of that as well but yeah anyways, that's a lot of text for not much achieved. There's too much i don't know, and too little to read about starting everything from scratch, it's a little overwhelming at the moment and the free time is limited, so i started writing down shorcuts, as i'm forgetting everything every time i get back to it XD
