Hello fellow racers
today I am suggesting something that I would love to have, as you all know you are not allowed to edit published vehicle mods without permission. However, I also know that some of us may want to change particular details of some mods, so my suggestion is to be able to fully edit and customise mods any way we want however they are only available in single player. Now this is a very complicated topic and I know it is unlikely for this to happen and files may be sent to other players and stuff, but essentially the only thing that is stopping full mods customisation is that when you try to edit and mod and save it, you need some dds files (i don't know much about files system or the editor) which you are unable to get other than from the publisher themselves. So that is my suggestion. I know it is very complicated and prob will not happen, but I hope something similar will be available in the future.
thank you

I have made some objects in the editor some banners and so (not published yet) how can i place them on my layout etc since they are objects and i cant move them , i seen ppl made stuff as karts etc with wheels to move it but that still would Need 1 connections per object i wanna place.

Can someone give info about how the object works that the community have Done

Damn you always amaze me , and everything done in lfs editor

We're not gonna see any screenshots i think

Cant even recall when was the last progress report....

Too many modder editor updates that is so uncalled and useless but its what its

However, I give +1, as not every steering wheel position is dead straight in every car. It may be tilted and may contain several different adjustments, along with driver position.

EDIT: I know this is more like to LFS Editor itself really... I went too far from this topic... but my point stands.

Hello!

I was looking for a template to try drawing in the editor, and I came across a template for the "Ford Fiesta" vehicle and I started drawing.
Since it was my first drawing, I got help from (Rubbel_31) and (Skorzz) on issues I did not know.

I've been modelling a gt4 version of the Porsche 718 cayman for 3 days now, based on my other mod. It turns out that I like modelling more than messing around in the LFS editor

I decided to release the secret of the milanesa, a little how-to on some results you can accomplish with Blender. You're gonna need these models:
https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/95307-NEW-Blend-and-OBJ-Files-for-All-LFS-Cars-Updated-v1-2%21
Also there's a video and a post that goes onto some of the stuff i'm doing, credit where credit is due:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkRlqbFo0SA
https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/95303-Tutorial%3A-Procedural-skins-using-Blender%21

First and foremost, Blender has a feature which lets you bake textures. Meaning you can make a procedural skin and bake it into an image. This allows you to have a seamless, form fitting texture that you can apply to a multitude of cars.
To make it you will need to have enabled Cycles as a Render Engine (In Render Properties, the camera icon in the lateral bar) Then the Bake section, put Bake Type in Diffuse and check "Color". You don't need Indirect and Direct, but if you want to you can enable them and put an HDRI image for light. This will give you a texture which has shadows and ambient colors, which would look good if the same enviroment aligns in LFS. It wont.

Now, let's say you want for example, a camo skin. Go to the Shader Editor (or Shading tab at the upper bar) and add a Noise Texture, a ColorRamp and connect this to the base color. Change the Noise Texture from Linear to Constant and move the arrow to the middle, if you select the arrow and click it's color at the bottom it allows you to change it. It does look wonky though, to fix it add a Texture Coordinate and a Mapping (in that order) or press Ctrl+T if you have Node Wrangler enabled. Play with the values until it looks good, i recommend having a reference picture to compare it (i didn't and it looks like this). If you want to add more spots, select the previous concoction and duplicate it. Then add a Mix Node, change Float to Color and connect both lines into it, and it into Base color. Shift+A allows you to speed up this whole process.
Few things to note, you CAN change the color in the ColorRamp to be transparent. Then connect the Alpha into the Factor and Mix it that way. Or change from Mix to Multiply, or Overlay, or anything you want. There's multiple ways to reach the same goal, chose the one you prefer.

Also Adding a Snap Node with a value connected to increment makes the camo look digital. Connect it between the Mapping and the Noise Texture.

Great! Let's bake it. Add a Image Node in the Shader Editor and Click New, make your prefered options (1024x1024 should work fine) and keeping the Image Node selected AND the mesh selected. Click the Bake button in Render Properties. Now you should see your texture in Image Editor tab, click the 3 horizontal lines>Image>Save As and you have your texture.

Moving on into a more versatile example. With a Gradient Texture connected the same way (Texture Coordinate>Mapping>Gradient Texture>ColorRamp>Base Color) add a color stop in the ColorRamp, change its color to transparent and move the Arrows until it looks like a stripe. Connect the Alpha wire from the ColorRamp into the Alpha from the PrincipledBSDF and bake it. This image you can Paste as a layer in any image editor and you will have an instant Stripe in any skin.


With the knowledge from the previous example i made this rainbow stripe, placing it is tricky but with trial and error it's feasible. If you want it to only appear in certain panels of the car, i can show you another trick. Go to Edit Mode (Press Tab) deselect everything (Press A twice) and with the mouse over the panels you don't want, press L. Then go to Mesh>Separate>Selection (or press P). You can bake this meshes separately now. Or join them again with Ctrl+J.

Some few uses for the Gradient Texture, change Linear to Radial and you can achieve this. Or change it into Quadratic to achieve this, the limit really is your imagination.

Moving on into the next feature, you've baked your image and now you want it to have stickers. Fair enough, select the image and connect that into the Base Color. Then go to the Texture Paint tab, click New then click Open in the Texture Properties tab in the lateral bar (checkered square). Search for your PNG and after you select it, disable Interpolation. You can paint the sticker now, for better placing go to Active Tool (the first tab in the lateral bar) and change the Mapping to Stencil. This enables you to move the PNG with your mouse, using right click, Ctrl+right click and Shift+ right click. Change the Falloff to Constant for a sharper edge.

Placing your stickers this way allows you to control the way it looks, in the sense that it changes with the perspective you're placing it with. Putting the camera close and it will look very deformed, put it into Orthographic (numpad 5) and it will look mostly perfect. If the Stencil looks somewhat weird, click Reset Transform and Image Aspect and it should be spot on.



This is the end of my ramblings concerning some of the uses you can bring with this tool. If you're sane after subjecting your eyes to my horrid creations, leave a comment

*Just realized i made a blunder uploading the images , welp here it goes again.

Last edited by neuroticat, Mon 4 Mar 2024, 07:01.

(The pictures are probably all out of order)
It came time to make a new team drift car with preferable specs in mind, hopefully this being my first successful publishable mod. I decided to use the open-derivatives SLX141 as my base. You can find the main inspiration for this car by searching "Omid's 240" on Google. First I optimized the base textures from 5.0 MP to 1.7 (only swapped seat fabric texture, of the same size).

In pursuit of the IRL inspo car, I started with Avante Garde F140 wheels, I then got my preferred wheel size, and then started the slow, tedious process of pulling the fenders, adding a few extra triangles for smoothness (in game pic with the SSRs is the bad shading version before I fixed it). I finally settled on XXR 527's which miraculously hit the triangle limit on.

Parts made in the editor:
Side skirts, little divider in center console + cubby space, orange indicator lights, and grill.

Rest of the mods/custom parts made in Blender:
High poly shift boot, OEM handbrake, audio deck, intercooler, seats, vintage style fogs, license plate holder, and steering wheel.

I'm hoping to get a front lip figured out. Tried a couple of times and wasn't happy with it. Other than that I think the car is just about done.

Why is the standard RAC in editor 270bhp instead of 245 in game? is this a future "remap" for it not released yet?

Editor Patch E6:

Much faster "reduce detail" function
Command /rtex can be used to reload textures
Editor unlock no longer affects LFS unlocks
(S3 number of unlocks now matches S1/S2)

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/106792

Currently, there is an issue that allows players to easily access and steal mods by navigating through the LFS folder on their computer. Though, to my knowledge, there is no way to export the meshes from the editor it still bothers me that there is a lack of security to the mods uploaded.

I suggest adding encryption to the mods, similar to that found in other games, making unauthorised access much harder. The implementation of encryption for mods uploaded would protect and safeguard the the property of the mod creators preserving their work and creativity as it would prevent other users to manipulate the content without permission.

I believe the implementation of this would build a bigger trust in the LFS community giving the confidence for users to upload knowing their content is safeguarded.

https://world.city-driving.co.uk/?page=stats&type=money

You know this connection. The first place and second place person are in the game 24/7. I don't understand who and why is playing so many games, but everything can be understood from this list.

I really don't understand either. I am a new player, but I do not enter the TC server and earn money. I just ride and get out. Apparently there are people who sold the game money and need real money or need a new S3 license. Why wouldn't they... You play games and they pay you ahahahah

I said it was my last post but this is the last one for sure
Now, I think these issues should be closed and LFS should continue to be developed. We are waiting for new test patches. (editor patches are of no use to me I don't understand vehicle mods )

Hello Mod Creators!

Here is a new video about rim profiles, different types of wheel and how to recreate realistic wheel rims in the LFS Editor.

Narrated by me, photos taken by Leo at Haynes Motor Museum.

A Czech low budget car from 90s...

I started to work on this car solely on purpose to improve my Blender skills and to learn the LFS vehicle editor.

It is my first attempt to create a mod so I actually don't know if I finish it or not.

I will try tho.

Quote from kipieslim :

While trying 7E5, I've noticed that a mod that is out of limits is being reported in chat once, but subsequent pit leaves won't show the message again, I'm wondering if that's correct.

See the note for E4:

"Prevents frequent excess reports for the same mod"

It soon becomes annoying and there is no reason to see the same message every time the same mod leaves the pits.

Quote from kipieslim :

I've also noticed some mods that are published this week, that have both LOD2 and wheel warnings.

Maybe they were first submitted before Editor E5 was compulsory. Anyway, their creators (or should I say hackers) will soon receive a message that their mod (or should I say BMW) needs to be updated.

This is truly amazing, you are not alone with photogrammetry and creating a track with a height map, I have already tried to create my own version of the Chimay track. I have a few questions, I'm really interested in how you can get the scale correct with the height map. I know how to distort my mesh, but the scale is not correct relative to Z. You can recreate a Google Earth Pro copy from a photo or with Blender's GIS plugin. But with this method the route of the road is not correctly adjusted either ^^ The south of Belgium is entirely scanned by lidar, so I can create the Mariembourg Karting track, the Chimay & Mettet "Jules Tacheny" track . I'm thinking of 3 or 5 hill climbs near my house. I've had my project in mind for 5 years, it's crazy how connected we are all

What the drone do you have? I've shared BeamNG screenshot, Terrain editor is funny to use

This can be useful : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_spiral that's how some road is created... Covadis for autocad can be usefull to understand how ingeneer create roads.

Last edited by NENE87, Wed 14 Feb 2024, 22:36.

By the way, calculating normals on the CPU for flexible object is also the reason why the LFS driver objects (the human in the car) use a lot of CPU time and mod creators should switch on "Concealed driver" for any normal car, where you can't see the driver's body from far away. The helmet is drawn anyway (it's not flexible) and this setting is really important for CPU saving. Just don't set it for bikes and karts or FSAE (when you can see the driver's body even as you move away from the car).


EDIT: Talking about polygon people, and going way OT, but as I mentioned Hind, you can see a few pictures of the polygon people that I coded for the Hind simulator: (I didn't make the objects, but did the code and editor to animate them. EDIT2: and I did the animations too )
https://www.mobygames.com/game/620/hind/screenshots/dos/272951/

Last edited by Scawen, Mon 12 Feb 2024, 17:46.

OK, I'll describe that but first I will mention that saving is only in the graphical render code, not the physics.

The thing about tyres is as they are flexible objects, their vertices cannot simply reside on the graphics card memory. They must be calculated every frame and the vertices are sent from the CPU to the GPU each time. I had thought before the main cost was actually transferring the vertices to the graphics card, and calculating the normals of each vertex. But what I found was the worst part was calculating the colour of each vertex (according to its lighting condition and the sun highlight). This used a lot of integer maths and I found the CPU use was way less when I bypassed this function, returning a simple grey colour. So I set about converting it to floating point maths.

The general idea is that integer maths is good for adding and subtracting, but floating point is better when there is a lot of multiplying involved. There's some leftover integer maths in LFS left over from earlier times. Considering some of its code goes back around 30 years, when we had 486 processors, I worked at Digital Integration on the Hind Helicopter Simulator, Pentium was the latest super CPU and there were no 3D cards.

By converting to floating point I found it was instantly faster, so I changed the code some more so that the normals were calculated in floating point, actually borrowing some code from the development version, where this was done already.

In the development version, the tyre lighting is actually done on the GPU, based on material properties, but the vertex normals are still sent to the graphics card each frame. You can see it in the LFS Editor.

The older code (before Friday) had a lot of complicated stuff to avoid sending vertices if they were not needed. This was done by checking if a triangle faced the user's view before drawing it, then calculating vertices as needed. But that is way complicated. It's better, if possible to just calculate all the vertices then send them all, without jumping around between triangle and vertex code. But for quite a while the "avoid sending unnecessary vertices" was still winning. But eventually I got the vertex normal and lighting calculations fast enough that it was better to do it the simpler way and I saw best results in the profiler that way.

Unfortunately that work, that took most of a day, doesn't benefit the development version because it was already done in that version. In the D3D11 version with shadow maps, all triangles must be sent every time as they may be seen in a shadow map (drawn from sun direction viewpoint). So it was impossible in that version to avoid drawing the away-facing triangles. But in the development version there is code to only send one object's triangles to the GPU once each frame, even if it will be used in multiple shadow maps, main view, mirrors and stereoscopic images in that single frame.

But although it doesn't help the development version, we still have the current public version for some months ongoing, so I'm happy if it helps people racing on full grids and the helps the quality of broadcasts by saving a few percent of CPU each frame.

Last edited by Scawen, Sun 11 Feb 2024, 21:05.

WIP in LFS EDITOR

Quote from Scawen :

Are you sure you are using the correct version?

Does it show 0.7E on the entry screen when you start the editor?

Hello, it gives me the same error message, but my editor is on the latest version 0.7E, what can i do?

Maybe increase number of objects in autocross editor eg things like static vehicles, pit crew, ability to draw custom layouts like in blender

Sqlyzy, you can use LFS editor to add parts to the car and paint it. Find a sponsor, then you'll get S3 for free.

Yes, I agree a reduction in the limit shouldn't be done without public discussion and fair warning. And maybe shouldn't be done at all. Maybe 8192 isn't so bad. It's just something I want to think about a bit more.

I'm interested to understand more about the difficulties in creating a good LOD2. I imagine some different approaches, mainly based on either:

1) Reducing a copy of LOD1, or:

2) Building a low polygon model from scratch based on the points and mappings of LOD1.

I don't know if any simple editor tools might help a lot with the process.

Quote from gumis0517 :

As far as I know, it's not possible to put different engines into configurations, if I overlooked something, I'm sorry

Nope.
Just would be nice to have that feature in editor...