Hello fellow modders. I posted over on WRS forums, but haven't got much for answers. Hoping ya'll over here at MXB that have been working with the height maps for a little longer may have some ideas.
First Issue is with my track objects. As can be seen in the following pictures, I got the heigtmap in the viewer and seems to be working. I set up the track in max by creating a plane, and using the heightmap as a displace modifier with the scale being the same number as my amount in max. I placed 12 or so tires around the track in max so they are perfectly adjusted to the ground as can be seen in the first pic. I exported the tires to an FBX file, then used the FBX2EDF converter. I put the edf in the hmf and ran the map.bat. When I loaded the map file in the viewer, the tires were about 5 meters too low. So, I looked at one of the tires and aligned them. I noticed once I got one of the tires in the center of the track aligned perfectly with the offset, the ones that are located further up the banking of the track are too high. What seems to be happening is that Max is giving me a different output from the heightmap than the map.bat file is.
Any ideas or ways to fix this. I just can't see having to create a edf for every object in my scene and then guess and checking on the "offset" for each. This would take a rediculous amount of time.
Second, I'm having a wierd shading/normals issue with the tires objects. On the "shaded" or non-sun side of the tires, I get these weird looking normals. They are all one smoothing group, and certainly don't look like that in max renders.
Thank in advance for any help or suggestions.
Can't really help I'm afraid, haven't done any track editing using Max myself.
Is your heightmap origin correct in Max? Should be the bottom left corner on the origin. I'd imagine if you had a dirt oval, depending on how symmetrical the heightmap is if the origin was on the top left say it would be rotated 90* which would account for some tyeres not lining up properly.
I have no idea how to scale my mesh (exported from L3DT) in SketchUp to get it the right size, I've just been guessing, adding a cube on the opposite corner to the origin and checking it in Mapview, resizing until it matches. Luckily the height aspect is always 100% spot on.
You may want to check that your units in max are actually set to meters. As for the weird shading, in the fbx to edf converter, use recalculate with angle of 0... that might solve your problem.
I can only speculate as I haven't had any success with objects thus far.
Try setting a tire with it's bottom at the lowest height value and one with it's bottom at the highest height-value, based on the height scale value.
This should make it easier to determine what's happening.
One theory is it doesn't take into account for height scale, so all height values of objects need to be multiplied by the scale value.
I know in MXS if you didn't specifically have a point on the map that was at the lowest and highest value it would automatically stretch the map so it was: maybe that's a possible reason too.
Thanks for all the replies. I will try some things and report back.
FYI. I built the track with the bottom left at 0,0 so there is no rotation of my height map. And the tires all line up perfectly and are scaled perfectly on the x,y plane. The only thing that is off is the height in the viewer. Which makes me believe that the height map is scaling slightly differently than it is in max. I'm gonna do the object at 0 and object at highest point test and see what happens
I just ran into this problem myself and found the solution. Max defaults to using the images gamma but it seems like MXB is expecting a gamma of 1.0 rather than 2.2 that Max expects.
How to fix it:
- drag your height map into the material editor
- in the bitmap options set the gamma to 1.0 from automatic
- drag this into the map slot of the displace modifier instead of the bitmap slot
Let me know if you need a screenshot, not at home at the moment but I think it will make sense if you are looking at it.