I won't be using this example for any game engine like unity or UE, unless something drastically changes with finances.
I have given myself the task of recreating in 3D, my home speedway track I have been to a lot. I have made most of the basic assets to go on it, but my biggest "bugbear" is how to approach the terrain.
Now while I can work from birds eye view maps on a flat plane in theory, I'd like to possibly use sculpting (like Zbrush, probably the free version, Sculptris or another good equivalent) to add detail to the mesh which I can then project onto a low poly mesh for the finished article. Unsure if I can use a map to trace on with these programs. 3dsmax push and pull doesn't really have the fidelity I want. With this method can I start from a low poly guide and soften and add details to certain areas?
Quixel will be used for textures... how, I haven't got into depth on just yet though.
Does anyone have a good workflow they have followed which kinds of gets the result I'm after?
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We mostly cover real-time issues in our wiki, not pre-rendered. But the approaches can be adapted to rendered work too...
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Landscape
Can you show any shots of what you have so far? Reference photos would be helpful too.
I will have a look at the wiki, thank you.
This is what I am working from (I need to make sure I get the best reference and as undistorted as possible.
This won't be for rendered scenes, it will be for realtime so I can walk the circuit at eye level.
I haven't placed all my assets around yet, but they are there. I want to get the landscape sculpting/modelling and quixel mapping sorted first then I can place my to scale assets vary easily.
One of my racing sims which doesn't run on widely available engines like Unity or UE.
The tech specs of how to do your modeling and texturing then will depend heavily on the capabilities of that engine.
What 3d tools can you export from? Do you have the right exporter? Have you tried importing assets yet? Does it have any docs on what's supported vs. not? Can you blend textures together, and how? etc.
One option is Assetto Corsa which uses DX11, supporting normals.
Another is rFactor 2 using the Gmotor engine supporting normals to.
The gmotor engine uses it's own shaders (plugins with 3dsmax) and will take most maps you throw at it!
The Assetto Corsa engine will pretty much take any export from max and again uses it's own editor to tweak inbuilt shaders or certain objects, plugging in maps needed.
I believe have have the option to vertex paint with both. I will have a look through the wiki to see some of the methods used and perhaps do some nite size chunks of the terrain to test.