Track editing questions/help

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Might be a bit of a stupid question, but how do you move around in map viewer? I've got my map in there but I'm stuck underneath it and can't move around with the mouse... only arrow keys and thats locked to one direction, no height...

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Thanks man, just found it on the wiki too.. hard to find stuff on there!

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Wow so masks are a pain in the ass...

Haven't got photoshop, so using paint.net with plugins trying to make an alpha mask.. Don't really understand it, a .tga is a flat image, so if I leave the background blank, and make a white stencil of my track to use as a grass mask, save it as a tga, surely that would work.. but no.

Can't figure it out, anyone else use something other than photoshop and maybe wanna share your mask secrets?

[GDUBMX]

Wow so masks are a pain in the ass...

Haven't got photoshop, so using paint.net with plugins trying to make an alpha mask.. Don't really understand it, a .tga is a flat image, so if I leave the background blank, and make a white stencil of my track to use as a grass mask, save it as a tga, surely that would work.. but no.

Can't figure it out, anyone else use something other than photoshop and maybe wanna share your mask secrets?

use GIMP mate, i think its nearly as good as Photoshop and its free!

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Thanks Geo, yeh I'm using your tutorials, real good following them got me quite far! but I don't have PS so I'm kinda screwed after that point..

And Gdub, I got gimp, and have tried alpha, but it just keeps loading no grass, your gonna have to walk me through it on steam mate lol

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

OK got it.. don't know why it wasn't working before, but using gimp I seem to have found a way lol

How about scale? how the hell do you know if your track is WFO or tiny until you get it in game?

[Ruubs]

OK got it.. don't know why it wasn't working before, but using gimp I seem to have found a way lol

How about scale? how the hell do you know if your track is WFO or tiny until you get it in game?

i make my tracks in 3ds max and use real metric units. Once i get a track ingame i can see if its too long or something, so then ill change that and use the changes on different tracks too.

[𝖙𝖋𝖈]

Thanks for the tips. Figured I'd just try and get it in game then figure out how much I need to scale it down / up by

[LOGANYZ125]

Hey Sandbiter did you get my PM regarding 3DS?

[bearded4glory]

OK got it.. don't know why it wasn't working before, but using gimp I seem to have found a way lol

How about scale? how the hell do you know if your track is WFO or tiny until you get it in game?

If you know how big you want a jump to be or the width of the track for example you can just measure how many pixels said feature is and do some math to figure out the proper scale.  We of course dont know exactly what scale will ride best but I would think maybe slightly over scaled but that is up to each creator.

[giopanda]

so, my track is progressing pretty good, i have the heightmap done (except ruts and bumps that i'll do after the update of the physics model), centerline, pits, grid and stuff all done.

now i'm stuck at objects placement.
i'm doing the same as geo, but i blender since i got used to that with mx sim.
i had some trouble at the beginning because fbx2edf was reporting an error (supposedly) that couldn't find parents for all of the objects, so of course nothing was showing in mapview or tracked.
now i got that problem solved, sorta.
i parented all of my objects to one of them, and fbx2edf of course shows a problem with missing parent just with the parent object..but now they're visible in tracked, except that they're underground and spread all over.
in blender everything is in the correct scale, and actually in tracked some of them are in scale and in the right position (except a few meters underground) some others have no texture, some have flipped texture, some are super stretched..
and trying to open in mapview crash it.

scene in hmf file is set to x0 y0 z0, all the objects and parent in blender have origin at x0 y0 z0
textures are all tga 1024 or 2048 square, all have correct alpha
anyone does know what did i do wrong?
sorry but for now i have no screeshots to show the issue.

[giopanda]

I had this same issue in sketchup. This is VERY tedious and prob not the right way, but......

Basically just set the terrain as yo did at 0,0,0. Place objects where you want (maybe just do 3 or 4 around the map at first). Then select everything and adjust the scaling of it. Typically downsizing it is needed. Once you get that where the objects are now lined up on the horizontal axis it may still need slight adjustment of vertical axis. Select everything and move up or down as needed. It is weird though, if objects are higher in game, you move it higher, if they are lower in game, then move lower.

Not sure if this will be the same, but here is some basic math that gets me close right off the bat (for sketchup at least):

- After importing the terrain in meters, scale it ALL DOWN by .0012401 per meter (desired meter used in HMF file you set for scaling). Example: HMF meter 254 x .0012401 = .3149
NOTE: This is basically a percentage. The original file imported is = to 1.00 (100% basically). This is down scaling the terrain to 31.49% or .3149

- Once that is set you may need to select everything and move up or down to get vertical axis correct. This highly depends on the height used in EarthSculptor when made. If the height was a value of 100 then after setting this up at 0,0,0 lower the terrain by .35 meters. If the EarthSculptor height was 300, then you need to move the terrain UP by 20.48 meters.

I know this is a little confusing and not sure if it works for blender, but this is what worked for me. Now that I have some basic calculations it is very easy to set quickly and proceed with objects.

uhm i might try it but doesn't it sound totally random?
i mean, everything i did is perfectly scaled, heightmap in blender is correct, i used the same terrain x and y size as the game, same height, same everything..don't understand why should be over or under sized..
i probably didn't explain the situation correctly: all the objects in tracked seems sitting on the geometric ground, let's say they're all on 0 on the z axis, so i guess they didn't get the z axis data from blender.
as for the x and y axis, some are correct, some are not.
this is why i don't know what to look at, because something is 2/3 correct, something else is less..
total confusion..

[Snappe]

all the objects in tracked seems sitting on the geometric ground, let's say they're all on 0 on the z axis, so i guess they didn't get the z axis data from blender.
as for the x and y axis, some are correct, some are not.

If you import the FBX back into blender, does everything look ok?

[bearded4glory]

I assume you brought the objects in from another blender file?  If that file was not in real world units and your new one is then that may be causing some strange things to happen.  I would save a 2nd copy of the "assets file" with real world units and rescale all your items to be the size you want them and then bring that back into your track.

Alternatively if you can somehow reset the scale etc of the objects that may work.  Unfortunately I use 3ds Max where we have reset XForm modifier that does this and I don't know what it would be called or where it is located in Blender.

[giopanda]

aaand it's done!

i knew it was something so simple.. 'apply rotation and scale' is what i forgot, thank you bearded, i completely forgot about that last passage before exporting!
once i did it, everything was perfectly scaled..except waaay too small! 

so i thought it was because i had my terrain in blender in the same size in meters as the .hmf file, so i tried to divide the .raw file size (2049px) by the size in meters (624.5) and up scaled the objects by 3.281, sure of the imminent success.

but nope, they're now too big..
i started fiddling with any setting available in blender till i found i little one, 'scale' set to 0.0254, used when converting from blender units..scaled my object by 2.54 and voila'!

i finally got it right!

now i just have to make the alphas work correctly, (as you can see far objects looks closer than the closest) i see there's a lot of documentation about it on the wiki, as of now i'll add all the objects first.

i'm around 20% of all the trees i need, other 600/700 left
every tree is 6 polys, so absolutely no impact on the frame rate for now, and if i remember correctly piboso said objects have almost no impact on frame rates at all..let's wait and see.

thanx for the help guys!