Anyway... recent progress shot- still some things left to do before release; I've decided to include more textures now than originally planned, especially grass textures (which there are actually quite a few of for Aston), still have to do the pits, gotta redo the old bridge, meh.. other stuff. Boring.
few progress shots of Aston bridges. Unseen and I have been busy, but the work feels painfully slow. Having said that, the Aston update should be ready any day now
very nice update.I didnt see the textures live yet but hopefully with my experience I can tell that the track texture looks very plastic especially on this picture.I mean it doesnt looks much like road/track surface.
Just one comment regarding the road: while it may look very road-like, it still lacks some "wear". Cracks, faint tyre marks and creases and so on. If that were added, it would be perfect.
Only thing that is bad with these asphalt textures is that i need to crank up AA and AF but i can't give it more than 2X on my graphic card.. It looks crapy with 2X AA and AF... at least that Westhill first version, i know that you made an update to that but i haven't tried it yet..
With the current texture mapping it's quite simply impossible to make the wear of the surface look realistic, and also the aligning of these things is a bitch, because the tiling amount varies too much, being more tiled in the corners and less on the straights, i guess the mapping is currently face mapped. I hope Scavier will do a better solution for texture mapping in near future, because atm It's kinda dull looking. Well i actually can't criticize their work simply because i don't know how to make it better. But i do know that just adding normal/bump/specular maps will only make the poor texture mapping less visible but it will still look basically the same. I wish we could edit the textures in a sort of straight-to-track way, i mean a little app. which would load up the entire map/track without textures and from there we could load up the different textures and place, align, resize the textures by hand for the entire track, i know it would be even more time consuming than now, but the end product would look MUCH better. yes, i like to dream-a-lot
That looks better but there is still missing something thought.I dont think you can do much about that because of the screwed mapping of textures in LFS.I think some pixel shaders effect(some not requireing a lot of GPU power)would definately help to loose the plastic effect.I hope you know what I mean.
To be honest I am very much suprised by your progress with these textures you made so far.Nice jump from the day we started talking about it and made 1st things.
I wish I had some time again to contribute as well but unfortunatelly I dont have any right now.
Axus- I looked at that screen before when Boris mentioned iRacing (why do all these titles have the capital letters around the wrong way?) and I immediately thought the same thing. You can tell that the iRacing road is lower res, but it looks more interesting because of the wear and cracks- definitely that is the thing missing with my road textures. The problem is I'm just too hesitant to get into that stuff (for now atleast) because it's enough of a pain just getting a simpler repeating texture looking decent. One funny spot or mark can send everything off, and anyone who delves into LFS texturing would know it's just so hard to edit these little things away until they look good, by going in and out of the game all the time. It just takes forever.
Devil007
I think I know what you mean. I would say that the new road works better than the first attempt for Aston, but it's a constant challenge- trying to get something to look realistic inside a computer...
Haha I guess I'm sort of over it for now- I just can't understand why everything was so slow this time around. Seemed like anything that could go wrong did... I really need a break from this texture work for a bit..
(but I'm sure the bug will bite again soon enough).
Taavi-
Hehe... I like to imagine a future LFS using some kindof John Carmackian non-repeating megatexture for the whole track. It would take an age to paint but the end result could be stunning.
AutoX/Skidpad/Drag is still happening, slowly. I`m just doing it inbetween other things. The road surfaces, main building, sign and adverts are done. The rest, all the really annoying little textures, I`m working on when I have the spare time. It certainly hasn`t been forgotten about.
I think we`re also going to wait to see what this upcoming official update to SO looks like before doing anything more with it. It just seems a bit silly to put in a load of extra work when it could all be changed sometime soon.