i. Preface to Track Making
Nov 1, 2008 22:04:01 GMT 2
Post by ksheppard on Nov 1, 2008 22:04:01 GMT 2
First off there are way better people to talk to than me to get info on this subject. Smoke & sucahyo jump immediately to mind of those I know are still around, then of course Oleg "the mask", Lucky, Megahurtz... Anyway I have a ton of information from mhz that originated from Oleg & Lucky I believe. I'm going to try to disseminate it and make it into an intelligible outline. The info I have was given to me enmasse and not chronologically so as I work through a track or two I might edit this and/or come up with some better methodology.
I will be posting my own findings & comments and cut & pasting info from all the correspondance I have. All my knowledge on this subject are from the above mentioned people and others who have contributed to the community so please don't think I am attempting to pass off others work as my own, I'm really just passing information along. Any editing indicated is to remove specific information to the people spoken to in the documentation and will not affect the process. (See * below) I think I'll post a new thread for each step or concept so that the first post will be a "chapter", then a subsequent dialogue can follow relative to that post. I'll ask Cholerix if this makes sense and if he's ok with using the SpeedSimS forum for this as I don't want to clutter his home on the web with my own junk
I will be making tracks from scratch not converting them. I leave it your own reading to decipher the best ways to accomplish your own ends based on the information presented.
I have all the software needed so as we go along I'll find a place to upload whatever anyone needs but I won't bother using bandwidth until there is a need. Just contact me here or email me and I'll arrange to get the items online asap.
An opening statment from Oleg:
Converting a track from other games is not as easy as it sounds, believe me.
To be able to convert or create a new track from scratch you would need quite a bunch of "big" applications.
My guess is you're into Road Courses...*and the best way for doing Road Courses is using Multigen Creator, but, it involves 3ds MAX as well, so you would need both of these programs, besides, if you are going to use Multigen Creator then the only version of 3ds MAX suitable is 3.0 or 3.1 (there's a plug-in(s) which works only with 3.x versions, plug-in is required to export your model into suitable format acceptable by Multigen).
I started working on tracks without using Multigen and I achieved good results before I moved to using Multigen, but it's waaaaayy too complicated and time consuming to convert/make a Road Course using plain 3ds MAX (though it's still possible). Even if you use Multigen it would still be better and help you a lot if you knew all the steps of getting a track into Heat without using Multigen, it would help you understand most of the MKworld errors (main program used to encrypt and convert track model into format acceptable for Heat) and how Heat works and interprets all data.
Working with just 3ds MAX you have to know ALL Heat limitations (and there's a lot of them), working with 3ds MAX and Multigen most part of information about limitations remains in the background and you can't see it and you don't need to know it to put a track into Heat, i.e. Multigen does a lot for you (for instance you don't even need to know what the heck mkfltbh.exe and fooland.txt is, and it's a must to know if you work without Multigen), which means there's a good possibility of making a choppy or buggy track, and fixing this type of drawbacks can be a real pain.
Going further, Heat is very sensitive to polygons unlike other games, with this being said, most of the tracks you would want to convert have "rough" surfaces, meaning that cars simply bounce around the track and it's almost impossible to control the car, unless the track is flat, which most tracks aren't.
Want it or not, you WILL have to fix almost all drivable surfacesin a track, i.e. you will have to not only delete the track mesh itself but also the track edges and grass meshes and then make them from scratch and later map them over again.
On one hand Heat needs a lot of polygons to make drivable surface smooth but on the other hand it may stutter in-game because of large amout of polygons.
I highly recommend to keep the overall polycount of a track below 55000-60000 faces. The compromise in doing both smooth and low poly track mesh would be creating several lofts (in worst cases, like in Mid-Ohio) and then splicing them together which also requires its tricks to fullfill.
So you see, this means you will still need some knowledge about modeling in MAX, I know I had to spend a fair amount of time to be able to do all this.
Plus, converting textures is another pain. First off, you must have either Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop (Photoshop doesn't support batch conversion, so if you don't have PSP you will have to do that manually).
Usually a single RC SCGT track has around 150-170 textures. They can be devided into 2 parts: Alpha channel textures and non-alpha channel textures.
All of them have to be resized to be square (some of them are square already). But the biggest problem is alpha textures.
All textures are in BMP format and BMP format can't have an alpha channel!
SCGT kernel identifies RGB values, and the standard RGB value for alpha channel is (255,0,255)...and SCGT 'knows' that this is alpha channel and doesn't show these pixels in-game - but Heat doesn't know that 255,0,255 is an alpha channel.
That means that you will have to manually process every single alpha texture to apply a real alpha channel to it which can be and IS a very long, hard and tedious process, it can't even workout from the first attempt so you will have to go back and redo some of them...
IF I have enough time I might study TGA file format with alpha channel and code a neat proggy to convert all 255,0,255 entries in BMP file to alpha channel...but I do it manually so far as well as Lucky does.
This is the main information you need to know by now...Just wanted to enlighten you in what you are getting into So if you are ready to go through all this and have all needed software, time and wish then I will try and help you.
Good Luck
Oleg.
* an example of the information edited out: "as you're one of the F2000 guys"
I will be posting my own findings & comments and cut & pasting info from all the correspondance I have. All my knowledge on this subject are from the above mentioned people and others who have contributed to the community so please don't think I am attempting to pass off others work as my own, I'm really just passing information along. Any editing indicated is to remove specific information to the people spoken to in the documentation and will not affect the process. (See * below) I think I'll post a new thread for each step or concept so that the first post will be a "chapter", then a subsequent dialogue can follow relative to that post. I'll ask Cholerix if this makes sense and if he's ok with using the SpeedSimS forum for this as I don't want to clutter his home on the web with my own junk
I will be making tracks from scratch not converting them. I leave it your own reading to decipher the best ways to accomplish your own ends based on the information presented.
I have all the software needed so as we go along I'll find a place to upload whatever anyone needs but I won't bother using bandwidth until there is a need. Just contact me here or email me and I'll arrange to get the items online asap.
An opening statment from Oleg:
Converting a track from other games is not as easy as it sounds, believe me.
To be able to convert or create a new track from scratch you would need quite a bunch of "big" applications.
My guess is you're into Road Courses...*and the best way for doing Road Courses is using Multigen Creator, but, it involves 3ds MAX as well, so you would need both of these programs, besides, if you are going to use Multigen Creator then the only version of 3ds MAX suitable is 3.0 or 3.1 (there's a plug-in(s) which works only with 3.x versions, plug-in is required to export your model into suitable format acceptable by Multigen).
I started working on tracks without using Multigen and I achieved good results before I moved to using Multigen, but it's waaaaayy too complicated and time consuming to convert/make a Road Course using plain 3ds MAX (though it's still possible). Even if you use Multigen it would still be better and help you a lot if you knew all the steps of getting a track into Heat without using Multigen, it would help you understand most of the MKworld errors (main program used to encrypt and convert track model into format acceptable for Heat) and how Heat works and interprets all data.
Working with just 3ds MAX you have to know ALL Heat limitations (and there's a lot of them), working with 3ds MAX and Multigen most part of information about limitations remains in the background and you can't see it and you don't need to know it to put a track into Heat, i.e. Multigen does a lot for you (for instance you don't even need to know what the heck mkfltbh.exe and fooland.txt is, and it's a must to know if you work without Multigen), which means there's a good possibility of making a choppy or buggy track, and fixing this type of drawbacks can be a real pain.
Going further, Heat is very sensitive to polygons unlike other games, with this being said, most of the tracks you would want to convert have "rough" surfaces, meaning that cars simply bounce around the track and it's almost impossible to control the car, unless the track is flat, which most tracks aren't.
Want it or not, you WILL have to fix almost all drivable surfacesin a track, i.e. you will have to not only delete the track mesh itself but also the track edges and grass meshes and then make them from scratch and later map them over again.
On one hand Heat needs a lot of polygons to make drivable surface smooth but on the other hand it may stutter in-game because of large amout of polygons.
I highly recommend to keep the overall polycount of a track below 55000-60000 faces. The compromise in doing both smooth and low poly track mesh would be creating several lofts (in worst cases, like in Mid-Ohio) and then splicing them together which also requires its tricks to fullfill.
So you see, this means you will still need some knowledge about modeling in MAX, I know I had to spend a fair amount of time to be able to do all this.
Plus, converting textures is another pain. First off, you must have either Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop (Photoshop doesn't support batch conversion, so if you don't have PSP you will have to do that manually).
Usually a single RC SCGT track has around 150-170 textures. They can be devided into 2 parts: Alpha channel textures and non-alpha channel textures.
All of them have to be resized to be square (some of them are square already). But the biggest problem is alpha textures.
All textures are in BMP format and BMP format can't have an alpha channel!
SCGT kernel identifies RGB values, and the standard RGB value for alpha channel is (255,0,255)...and SCGT 'knows' that this is alpha channel and doesn't show these pixels in-game - but Heat doesn't know that 255,0,255 is an alpha channel.
That means that you will have to manually process every single alpha texture to apply a real alpha channel to it which can be and IS a very long, hard and tedious process, it can't even workout from the first attempt so you will have to go back and redo some of them...
IF I have enough time I might study TGA file format with alpha channel and code a neat proggy to convert all 255,0,255 entries in BMP file to alpha channel...but I do it manually so far as well as Lucky does.
This is the main information you need to know by now...Just wanted to enlighten you in what you are getting into
So if you are ready to go through all this and have all needed software, time and wish then I will try and help you.Good Luck
Oleg.
* an example of the information edited out: "as you're one of the F2000 guys"
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