The new assets, content and track rework thread

[rubberduck]

coming soon... length: 21,1 km

[CryHam]

Looks cool, like it's close to a real place.

[rubberduck]

yeah, I had one real place in my mind, just search for mossy lava fields, and that combined with some fog and this stone circle
Pictures of that mossy lava fields gave me actually the idea of this track, which has also no real trees, just rocks

[CryHam]

All right, I added particles scale (keys K L) to emitters mode in old SR editor too now.
Latest build should have it in actions: https://github.com/stuntrally/stuntrally/actions
Quite useful and not much trouble. I'm kind of frozen with SR3 water and other issues anyway.

[rubberduck]

and I added new clouds, in total now 45, which includes the alien, crystal and pink ones I made before

[CryHam]

Great.
I'll have add a list with all to Gui, so it'd be easier to pick particles type for an emitter instead of just pressing keys. Same for fluids.

[rubberduck]

I started with skies again, this time I experimented with creating procedural skies. Though these are no final results yet, I am still in the learning process, but at least I improved a lot over time now.

This here was one of my first which is really bad

this one is already better, it has more detail and isn't so bad near the horizon

and this one I focused on even more details, different kinds of clouds and improving the volumetric shading

While I have intended to use mostly hdri's for natural skies, I thought this could be a solution for skies that are more surreal - including sceneries like volcanic or mars, for a fancy sunrise / sunset that is a bit hard to find on a hdri

[CryHam]

Great. The last one looks good for me already and cool.
This is surely one key thing from that topic (i.e. what we'd need to replace for full CC data).
IDK what resolution we should aim at, I'd say 8k x 1k at least, probably blurry for 4K LCDs but yeah if there isn't quality in source textures then it will be blurry too. And it could get big in size IDK.
I also have 2 links in that topic for alien/space skies. While we don't have skyboxes support yet, it could be added. It still has some stretching issues. Just like current sphere maps. I think I'd prefer to have sphere maps only though, less trouble.

[rubberduck]

ok, I think you mean 8k x 2k, as the ratio is 4:1, I am aiming at 8k x 2k anyway, down scaling is always possible if needed.
I have also planned to create like 3 - 5 skies and upload them in small batches or packs, also not at once with time inbetween.

I would stick to sphere maps too. I will look into the stretching issues next, It feels a bit stretched near the horizon, at least where I think it is visible the most, not really strong but visible. For this I have an idea where it comes from and how to solve or at least improve. I also see it kind of stretchy when looking up. The second issue on top I could try with a offset of the clouds, so maybe it isn't that visible, or just editing the image there a bit.

[rubberduck]

the horizon is definitly one of the harder parts to get right, this is a more dense variant of the previus one, and with multiple layers of clouds now, in total 3.

another try before with less clouds

[CryHam]

Looks cool. Yeah less clouds is more blurry and no detail. It's okay too. But I'd say for nature tracks with long view (like MountCaro or HighPeaks) I think very detailed clouds visible far and near horizon too would fit.
If you can't fix the top part then don't worry, it is the least visible part when driving. I think the most important is the horizon since we can see far there and there can be lots of clouds there for no fog and good visibility.
Anyways what software do you use for making these? Blender or something else? Will I be able to play around later and make some other variants too at some point?

[rubberduck]

yes, blender. You can make your own variants then too, I will publish the blend files too when I publish my first ones

It is also completely selfmade from scratch, no addons needed, on the other side because the clouds are volumetric and rendered in cycles a good gpu is required, I had a GTX 1060 recently it took me ages and upgraded to a RTX 4080, I actually wanted to upgrade my gpu for a long time, including for some other reasons too.

[rubberduck]

I am getting closer to a first small sky pack to publish soon, around 3, this one and 2 hdri based.
And I am still learning more, especially how to create more unique cloud types that have more detail too

[CryHam]

Nice.

[rubberduck]

I finished something, while included are only 3 skies, they have 8192 x 2048, 2 from hdri's (edited hdr files are in the sources) and one procedurally created / rendered in blender, including a blend files with some extras.
The final render time can vary from sky to sky, depending on details and resolution. This one was a relative long one with almost 2 hours render time. For preview I stick with 4096x1024 which makes it a lot faster to develop.
I am also feeling that my experience now accelerates the development of new skies too.

https://sebastianplaten.lima-city.de/ot ... ack_01.zip
https://sebastianplaten.lima-city.de/ot ... ources.zip

And finally after a few days break I want to do some more objects, new and improved dynamic ones. Do you know a more modern way to create such bullet files as using the bge? I also haven't tried out the UPBGE version, which has a modern interface, if it works.

Edit: I forgot to say that I already used blender 4.0 alpha, it has new noise options for the voronoi texture, though it should work with blender 3.6 too, only that the new voronoi settings are not saved. At least it opened in blender 3.6 once

[CryHam]

Good skies. So you don't want to continue with them? I thought we would after some (long) time, replace the old ones with these. But yeah that'd mean also making new space skies, seems like a lot to do.

Wow, 2 hours to render is pretty high, when I think about those real-time cloud shaders on shadertoy.
BigCloudySky looks quite good, pretty real looking clouds. Only thing I don't like is that horizon line with different color, not matching the rest of sky above. Would be noticable on most tracks (which don't have very far horizon terrain).
So how long do you wait after you adjust something until you see if it's better or not, is quick render preview okay for that? And would it render longer if we added e.g. 100 more clouds?

As for new dynamic objects, I didn't try anything new in ages, but that old way we described should work.
I did look around sketchfab for new models, and I've gathered (too) many here in list. Obviously we don't need too many barrels, I'm in favor of new types first.
Here is my top 3 pick:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/basurer ... 29938f0c5b
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/garbage ... 2246376ee8 (need to decimate first to reduce triangles somewhat)
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/big-pla ... 95c561f2ef (probably also)

I also have other models lists with SR ToDo https://sketchfab.com/cryham/collections I can't even start with that until I finish SR3.

[rubberduck]

I am going to continue with skies, just take a break
Previewing a change is much faster, a quick preview render is enough, I can even abort the render anytime when I see something bad, except in the first minute because I can't see very much at this point.

And about render time, I think it can still go a bit higher with more clouds, but not that much. And I am sure there is even a bit space for improving / optimizing the render times.

[rubberduck]

it works...

I actually reduced the poly count of the trash bin from 12K to 2,5K tris, the other one has around 700 tris

[CryHam]

Hah, awesome.

[rubberduck]

I also reworked the wooden barrels, made them a bit more detailed and retextured them. but size is the same, even the bullet file I didn't need to change
all these new assets are coming with my next track, which is also about barrels and barrel loops.

[CryHam]

Nice. Good to see there will be a new track too.

[rubberduck]

and here is a sneak peak already..., still very WIP, also the second loop in the background goes into the other direction

[CryHam]

Cool. Aah finally a barrel loop that starts from left, kudos.
I was wondering if we'll ever have those (or when will I do one). And yeah road selection mirror doesn't work in editor.

[rubberduck]

coming soon

including new terrain texture and again more objects (static ones, the ruins...)

[CryHam]

Good.
Ah wanted to say here too, that we got few new objects in SR repo now.
Present on For21-StuntValley, and added on Test8-Objects too, they are fun to hit.
Yeah it's been a long while since any new dynamic objects were added.