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Last Updated: ? Author: Mike DiPonio rF Track Building Guide The text below is an edited version of JPS's postings giving an
introduction to Track Editing. This tutorial has been extensively edited to rF track editing and was originally made for SCGT and F1C Firstly, you’ll need to be using 3D Studio MAX because Zmodeler won't cut it in this case. Unfortunately 3D Studio is commercial software and is not available to download legally on the net so you'll need to find another, hopefully, inexpensive source. Section 1: Lofting a basic layout To start with, get your units
set to meters in Customize - Unit setup .Getting the scale correct is
pretty much a lot of guesswork unless you know for a fact that, say, the
front straight is exactly 1200m long. Get a good map of the track that is
to correct scale and set it as a diffuse map on a material. Create a flat
plane roughly the size of the track(top view, obviously). It will be used
as a template for tracing the tracks path. Assign the track map material
to the plane and lower it 10 meters down so it’ll be out of the way of
your work. UV map the plane using the “fit” and “bitmap fit” functions to
get it mapped proportionally correct to the plane. Then you can uniform
scale it to whatever size you need, without worrying about messing up
proportions. Start creating a standard line (spline) and set the vertex
type to "smooth". Draw the line down the centre of the pavement. Click to
create a vertex only when necessary, create the minimum number of vertices
you can get away with. Since all the vertices will be of type "smooth"
you'll notice the line will sometimes bulge out as if it wants to go in
another direction--ignore this for now and just keep plotting along down
the center of tarmac. Just to give you some idea, a typical horseshoe
shaped hairpin will typically require only 3 vertices to make (one placed
just before the start of the turn and one just after the exit of the
turn). Again, at this point don't be concerned if the line is bulging out
in places; just make sure your vertices are in the center of the tarmac.
When you end the line click the last vertex on top of the first vertex to
complete the circuit. It then asks you if you want to close the spline,
answer yes. At this point you'll have a pretty roughed-in line following
the center of the pavement. For corners that need to be touched-up you can
change the vertex type from "smooth" to "bezier" or when you're in a
really tough situation choose "bezier-corner". DO NOT USE "corner" type
vertices. I try to set the starting line right at the world center (0,0,0)
that way when I first test, it will be easy to set the aiw up. Move the
vertices around and tug-and-pull on the bezier handles until your line
follows the center of the pavement all the way around the track as
perfectly as you can. In some cases you might have to go back and actually
add some additional vertices in order to achieve the perfect curvature to
follow the center of the tarmac; you do this by clicking the "refine"
button then click where you want the new vertex to be created (make sure
you created the right type of vertex for the situation at hand--either
smooth, bezier or bezier-corner). Be careful to not go overboard and add
too many vertices there should typically be a vertex every 20 meters on
the tight spots and every 80 meters on a long straightaway. Most turns can
be achieved with only 2-3 vertices, and I have never run across a turn so
complicated as to require more than 4 vertices. Use the minimum amount you
can get away with--you'll see why in the lofting step. Now go back and
raise/lower individual vertices on the line to add the elevation changes.
Again, to achieve the correct and smooth elevation changes feel free to
use "refine" to add an additional vertex if you have to. You don't want
any knife-edge elevation changes. Pay close attention to your measurements
here, it's easy to over do it and end up with huge heights or really steep
hills. I’ve noticed that if you rise or lower a point by 1 meter it will
make a gradual hill and 2 meters per point will make a fairly steep hill.
It’s a good idea to make the 2 points at either end of the hill half the
height difference of the rest to make a gradual transition. Don't worry
about getting this line too perfect first-try, you will be able to go back
and adjust this line as much as you need to later. NOTE: do NOT attach
this line to any dummy or to the "hierarchy". It should remain a
free-floating object in the "schematics view". Also, never delete this
line (the "path), it can come in very handy even much later in the track
development process. To keep it from being exported into your .3DS all you
have to do is hide it. I've been asked if the grass and such are also
lofted. Well, you can loft the polygons for the rumble strips and berms
pretty well and also at least have the loft generate the spare polys that
you can then pull on and stretch to form the grass and gravel traps. An
alternative is to just "extrude" the polys for the rumble
strips/berms/grass from the edges of the lofted tarmac when it's finished.
You can push/pull on these new polys to form whatever you need. The good
thing about doing it this way is that it is incredibly easy and fast, the
drawback is that you will have to manually map those polys (if you loft
them they can be automatically mapped to follow the curves and hills--cool
stuff when it works!). With your "path" line selected, over on the command
panel in the "modify" tab you will see a "General" section. In there are
settings for "Interpolation" and a check-box for "Adaptive". I turn on
"Adaptive"; it seems to result in smoother lofts and better polygon
arrangement in some situations. You can turn this setting on/off at will
at any time later if you want to compare how your resulting loft is
affected. Another way is to set Interpolation to “steps” and set it equal
to the number of steps in you’re loft, then it will match up perfectly. OK
then, on to the next step, which unfortunately takes a lot of words to
explain but is remarkably easy and quick. Everything I say here is based
on 3D Studio MAX 3.0, the locations and perhaps even the names of some of
these functions may be different in other versions of MAX and I really
can't help you there. If you've gone through any lofting tutorials then
you understand that lofting is the process of pulling one or more "shapes"
along a "path" to form a 3D object. For example: Hmmmm... that squiggly
line looks kind of like a part of a race track. What if, instead of that
stupid star "shape" we substituted a simple straight line? Pulling that
along the squiggly "path" would probably yield something like a road, eh?
So, somewhere out of harms way create a line (spline) that is perfectly
straight and flat with only two vertices (the start point and the end
point) and make them both "corner" type vertices. What I do is just splash
down a rough line then go into vertex edit mode and snap the vertexes to
the grid, with the grid set to 1 meter (the snap and grid settings are in
Customize – Grid and snap settings) The width of this line will be the
width of the lofted pavement. I find widths between 8m-16m to be good for
racing. Now then, you've got your "shape" and your "path" so you're ready
to loft your track. Select your "path" line (the line that looks like your
track). The "loft" function is rather hard to find in 3D Studio MAX: - in
the command panel go to the "create" tab (the one with the little white
arrow pointer on it). - directly under that select the "geometry" button
(looks like a gray sphere). - in the pull-down list select "Compound
Objects". - in the arrangement of buttons below will appear a button that
says "Loft". (Somewhere in the fancy modeling icons list there is a "loft"
icon that does the same thing, but that's just as hard to find.) Its also
located on the tab panel, in the compounds tab. It’s the snake looking
icon. In the lower part of the command panel will now appear a whole set
of loft settings and functions. In the "Path Parameters" section you will
see selections for Percentage, Distance or Path Steps -- choose "Path
Steps". In the "Creation Method" section make sure "Instance" is selected,
then click the "Get Shape" button. Click on your straight little "shape"
line. As soon as you click the loft will be generated. Now go back and
click the "Get Shape" button again to exit that mode. "Well, ummmm....
Jeeezzz, it created something but it doesn't look too much like a
road...what gives???" It will look a lot better as soon as we apply the
right settings. If the loft is facing upright like a wall, you need to
select the shape line and go to the modify panel find “Line segment mode”
and use the transform type-in window to rotate the line on its Z axis 90
degrees, until its flat like a road, then turn off line segment mode. Take
a look at it in the side and front view ports to make sure its level. Go
all the way down to the bottom of the command panel to the "Skin
Parameters" section (you might have to click it to make it roll-out). Use
the following settings At this point your loft should start looking more
like a drivable road. If you were to apply a tarmac bitmap to it you could
instantly make it look like tarmac. Let's go ahead and do that.... Making
gMotor2 Materials First thing you need is a Multi/Sub-Object material, so
open the material editor and click on a slot., then click on the button
where it says Standard in the top right (this is the material type); pick
Multi/Sub-Object; click yes to the prompt to keep old material; Now you
have 10 material inside to work with, which can be increased to up to 100.
All materials that will be used on the track mesh need to be in the
material, or you’ll run into problems later with material ID assignments.
Click on the first material in the list and name it ROAD(something) Then
click on the material type button (Standard –in the top right) Pick gMotor
Material from the list. The first thing to setup is the shader, so pick
one, most likely T1 for DX7 and Bump Specular Map T1 for DX 8. All shader
levels between DX7 and 9 need to be setup for it to work correctly. If
you’re just lazy then setup DX7 and 8 because the upper levels are auto
generated from the lower if left at default type. Now assign a texture to
it by clicking the first slot in the Texture section. For complex
multi-shaders materials like Bump Specular Map T1, you will need to assign
3 textures, for each shader. So set you’re main road texture to the Color
slot; a specular map (use one from the original tracks, they have a
(ROAD)_S.DDS type name. And set a normal map to the Bump slot (use one
from the original tracks, they have a (ROAD)_B.DDS type name. Bump and
specular maps need to use a different pixel ratio than the main texture.
To set them up; go into the texture level of each of the shaders, in the
Coordinates section set the U and V tiling for specular to 6 and the Bump
to 12. This number is based on track width, with my example being 12 meter
wide. After creating your material, apply it to the loft object Look at t
in the view port you'll notice that the material is probably heavily
stretched along the length of the track (blechhhiieee!!). Let's fix it up
nice and pretty.... The Length Repeat setting is critical to get right in
order to make the tarmac look believable in-game. Length Repeat is exactly
what it sounds like: how many times your road surface bitmap is repeated
along the entire length of the loft. The correct setting depends entirely
upon the length of your track and, frankly, comes down to a sort of
guessing game to find the number that looks best for you. We've started
with 40 and will increase/decrease that number until the road surface
looks good. Set the view port to "Smooth + Highlights" so you can see the
materials in real-time; if your display system is incapable of this you
will just have to resort to rendering it each time. Zoom in to a piece of
the track close enough so you can see what the surface is going to look
like. Using a bitmap that doesn’t tile very well (just for testing
purposes) is the best way to find the right repeat length, its best to
have it a little less than square though or else it’ll look jagged at high
speed. Try making it 2 long. Similarly, Width Repeat is how many times the
bitmap is repeated across the width of the loft. Almost always you want
this set to 1, but there are some rare situations where you would want it
repeated multiple times; this setting allows you to achieve that. Notice
also that you are allowed to specify fractional numbers like 1.5 or 3.25
to get just the effect you might need for those unusual situations. If
the track uses multiple line segments on its shape line, its best to set
width repeat to its number of segments and turn off “normalize” on the
surface parameters. You can the select each line segment and scroll down
the modify panel to the surface parameters and give each segment a unique
material ID. This will be helpful when you convert the loft to a mesh
because each polygon going out from the track will already have a material
ID and will be easy to assign materials to. At this point you should
definitely save your work. Let's switch back to wire frame viewing mode
for this next part. Remember above in the "Skin Parameters" section I
mentioned there would be more about the "Shape Steps" and "Path Steps"?
Well, here you go: Shape Steps is essentially how many times across the
width of your road polygons will be generated. A setting of 0 = 1 quad
across, 1 = 2 quads across, 2 = 3 quads across, etc. Go ahead and play
with that number and you will be see what I mean. You can see how playing
with this number can instantly cause you to have a high-poly track that
could be very FPS- unfriendly for everyone. A setting of 0 works best in
almost all cases. There are some cases where increasing the polycount
across the width of the road is desirable in order to make the road
smoother in areas where the pavement twists or banks to a significant
degree and makes the road too bumpy in-game, but you would really only
want to increase the number of polygons in those specific areas that need
it, not the entire track--that would be a wasteful excess of polys. You
could always loft those troublesome sections with a separate loft using
the same "path" and "shape" as your original track loft, and increase the
Shape Steps for that second loft. Then just use the higher-poly track
parts in the areas that need it and stick with the original loft for the
rest of the track. Note that "Shape Steps" has no effect on the "Width
Repeat" for the bitmap mapping across the width of the track, which is
something totally independent regardless of how many polys you have across
the width of the track. Also note that it does not change the width of the
track, it only increases the polygon density across the width. Path Steps
controls how many polygons are generated down the length of your road.
Finding the best number for this setting comes down to "best feel" and
"what looks best" and it is also greatly effected by how many vertices you
have on your "path" line. You will notice that around curves and where
hills start/end you need to increase the polycount in order to make it
smooth. Each time you change the Path Steps setting it will warn you that
doing so will change the locations of "shapes". This is actually a pretty
important thing to be concerned about and you will see why when we get
into adding additional "shapes" to change the road width, add camber,
banking, etc. Try not to get into the habit of mindlessly just clicking
YES to this warning. For right now, however, we have a very basic loft
with only one shape on it, so go ahead and adjust this number up/down and
look closely at how it affects your track. Notice that if you increase it
too much the track will actually start to fold over itself in tight turns
and this becomes a royal mess to try and fix later. You want your final
settings to yield a track that is smooth around corners and hills/dips but
also very low-poly along straights. It will quickly become clear to you
that this setting alone is not going to give us what we need for F1C. The
other thing that greatly affects the poly density is the placement of the
vertices on your "path" line. Remember plotting out all those "smooth",
"bezier" and "bezier-corner" vertices? Notice how the loft increases the
poly density based on those vertices. Notice also that how much you
pushed/pulled on the bezier handles of those vertices also affects the
ultimate density and arrangement of your track's polys. Let's see this
in-action.... Un-select your loft and select your "path" line -- since it
is underneath your loft it might be easiest to use the select-by-name
feature (Edit - Select By - Name). Go into vertex .edit mode and move a
vertex. Notice how the loft is effected in real-time and adjusts the poly
arrangement accordingly. Notice also how pushing/pulling on the bezier
handles of a bezier vertex has a profound effect on the smoothness of your
loft. Now go ahead and use refine to add a vertex somewhere. Pretty
powerful stuff, eh? Since the whole goal is to end up with a track that is
smooth where it needs to be smooth, it is important to find the right
balance between the "Path Steps" setting and the amount and placement of
vertices. Yet you might not be able to make major changes to the vertices
without changing the shape of your track too much. You also do not want to
end up with sections where the polygons overlap each other. You can also
experiment with changing some vertices from "smooth" to "bezier" or
visa-versa. It shouldn't take too long to strike a good balance. For rF
the poly density is pretty uniform and cant be too low on the
straightaways, or it’ll be noticeable in the specular detailing. For this
reason I try to keep the polys fairly square, and not let them get too
long. For corners you can increase the poly count as much as needed
though, to make a smooth corner. Let's get this thing into the game and
drive on it. What we'll do is cut the track into a couple of giant chunks
and make up some really rough track files just for the sake of testing
what it's like to actually drive on it. After driving on it you will have
a better sense of what changes you should make to your loft to improve the
track. Just a quick-and-dirty test here. Small but important divergence
from the topic: Before we go further, make sure the material you are using
for your road surface is named so it matches up to a valid road entry in
the TERRAIND.tbc file. Road surfaces typically start with the letters;
road, conc, rdcem, rdrd, rdgr. If the name of your material does not match
a valid road terrain type in the TERRAIND.INI file then rename it now so
it does match. Texture names don’t require special naming, and they don’t
need to match the material name. It is important that you understand that
the names of material are critical when it comes to tracks. Any surface
that you intend to drive on, crash into, or scrape against, must use a
material that is named to correspond with a terrain entry defined in the
TERRAIND.INI file. If the material name does not match any type of defined
terrain the game will give it a really horrible default response, which
just so happens to be a surface you cannot drive on. Notice in the
TERRAIND.INI file there are different types of terrain for pavement,
guardrails, tire barriers, concrete walls, rumble strips, etc. Make your
material names match the appropriate entries and your surfaces will give
the correct responses, sounds, sparks, dust, damage levels, etc., in the
game. materials you use on objects that will not constitute terrain (such
as the outfield and outfield buildings and decorations) do not need to
match the terrain file. Select your loft and make a clone of it; you will
do the rest of your editing from this clone, leaving the original loft
untouched and safe so you will be able to call it up again later when you
need to make alterations to it. Hide the original loft, path line and
shape line so they are out of the way and you don't accidentally mess them
up. Let's take a minute to find the co-ordinates of the point on the track
where you will want the car to start in the game. Anywhere on the track
pavement will do; near the start/finish line is great. Find the (x,y,z)
co-ordinates of a point in the middle of the road, and at the same height
as the pavement (z would be the height). Pay careful attention to whether
each number is positive or negative and write them down in (x,y,z) format.
You'll be using these co-ordinates in your waypoint file very soon.
Adjanced lofting (unfinished) This section is for after you have the path
worked out pretty nice and you want to start adding in details alike
curbing, and walls. The Lofts shape spline is the cross section of the
track, so whatever shape it’s in, the loft will follow. Say you twist it
from end to end, the track will tilt sideways. Modeling the spline Select
you’re shape spline and copy it. Now snap the copy to the grid and in
vertex mode; stretch the points so they are 26 meters apart, also make
sure the object center stays centered or the loft will be offset from the
path. Now hot the refine button and make a point 6 meters from each end of
the spline, and then a pint 1 meter from each end. Now move the far end
points 1 meter up and in so they form a wall. Now you have a 12 meter
center section which is the road, twp 6 meter sections which are the grass
sides, and two 1 meter sections which are the walls. Assigning IDs In
segment mode; select the center section and make it material ID 1 (the
material we made earlier. Section 2: Setting up the game files Folders
The first thing you need to do is decide on a track name and make a
folder in the Locations directory of the same. Then make a GMT and MAP
directory inside. If you plan on having multiple layouts, then make a
sub-directory for each of them too. Go to one of the original tracks and
copy the aiw, cam, gdb, and mas, and scn files, paste them into your
track, if you have multiple layouts put them in their sub-directories
instead. Rename them all to your track’s name with exception to the
(track’s name)map.mas, which needs to have that part preserved. For
multiple layouts do the naming distinctly; like TrackLong, and TrackShort
for the sub-directories and file names. The Scene and GDB files All files
in for a track revolve around these 2, so they need to be made carefully.
Open the sample GDB and fill in all the data for it the top entry needs
to be the name of the track in capital letters. Filter Properties needs to
match up with the series or mod you want it to show up in. The track info
section is all pretty self explanatory; just make sure the event name is
the track’s name. Special settings; You can define unique terrain settings
for you’re track by making a TDF. SCORETOWER DATA can wait for later, when
you create a score board. The track lighting section has all the variables
for time of day behavior. Setups should be named to match you’re track.
The scene file is also going to be very simple. What I do is start out
with a copy of a scene file from an original F1C track (I suggest using
the Sample track’s scn, because its setup very simple and organized.
Delete all of the Instances at the bottom of the file. The Instances can
be made in the GMT converter, but for the heard and stuff its easier to
just hand write it if you’re working on more than one project. So copy the
Directory, Mas, View, and Lighting lines from the sample and paste them in
to yours, and then rename the directories and mas sections. Converting
you’re assets to GMT format The tools for rF require a bit of setup to
actually convert a file, don’t worry though, this only needs to be setup
once. First thing to do; on the command panel go to utilities – configure
buttons; scroll down to the bottom, and drag the GMT Converter listing and
drop in on top of a button you don’t plan on using, the click OK. Now
click on the new button and in the firsts section set the mesh Directory;
I set it to C:\Program Files\rFactor\GameData\Locations\SampleTrack\GMT,
so that I can simply hit the button and instantly have the meshes ready to
test. Then select the loft and go down to the instance section and hit
the “Get Selected” button. Check these boxes; Collidable, Hat, Use gMotor
Normals, Smooth, Receiver and Omni. Hit the “Do Mesh” button to make the
GMT file. Now you can go down to the Scene File Output section and set
the Current Scene File to; C:\Program
Files\rFactor\GameData\Locations\SampleTrack\ST_Long\NEW.SCN. The scn file
used for the converter will be written to a temporary file, so that it
wont mess up the header we just wrote. Skip the Fog and Views part, and
only check objects and selected. Paths can also be ignored. Select the
loft, hit the Do Scene bottun and open the new.scn; copy out the instance
lines for the loft out of it and copy it into you’re track’s scn file.
You won’t need MAS files yet, we will be using open folders instead to
make working with files easier. Later, when youre about finished building
the track (if ever), you can make them, and add the line into the scn
file. Now it's time to create an A.I. Waypoint File (.AIW file) for your
track: Leave everything from the old track’s AIW alone except the grid
positions, the pit slots should also be left alone at this point. [GRID]
GridIndex=0 Pos=(-3.865,0.050,-2.316) (X,Z,Y) the values are equal
to 3s max generic units) Ori=(0.000,-1.569,-0.001) pitch, rotatation
(0=south, 11=east, 22=north, 33= west), and roll The Pos= line is where
you put starting the co-ordinates. You can figure this out easily by
plotting a “point” helper in 3DS where you want a starting slot. One thing
though; there's a little conversion you have to do to those numbers
because the co-ordinate system inside rF is different than MAX. If the MAX
co-ordinates you wrote down were (-150,220,2) then the numbers for the Pos
line would need to be changed to (-150,2,220). Notice that Y and Z are
swapped around. You also want to increase the second number in Pos by
perhaps 0.2 meters (make the Y value more positive to go up higher in
elevation). This will make the car start out about 0.2m above the surface
of the pavement, so when rF drops the car onto the track it will probably
land on the tarmac rather than fall through it because of differences in
car heights and centre points.. The second value of the orient determines
which direction the car will be facing when it appears on the track. You
can play around with this number until it’s the right way. In max, X is
facing south. That's all you need for the waypoint file for this test
drive. At the bottom add in the instance definitions for your two track
MTS's. It typically looks like this: Instance=track01 {
MeshFile=track01.mts CollTarget=True HATTarget=True ShadowReceiver=True
Response=VEHICLE,TERRAIN } Make sure you close off the "{}" braces sets
correctly, otherwise wacky stuff can start to happen. Let's see.... You've
got your track converted into MTS's Directories for everything to go into
The MTS's and textures are in their respective folders, The AIW file
exists and is in-place, The SCN file exists and is in-place. The GDB file
exists and is in-place, Sounds like it's time to drive: -go into rF, -set
the opponents to zero (remember there's only one starting grid position),
-turn off flags in the rules section -select your track, -set the game to
"Race" mode (no practice or qualify sessions), -and start the race. If
your car does not start out on the pavement then fix your Pos co-ordinates
in the AIW file. If you car is facing the wrong way then play with the
second value of the Ori line. Ignore any "Wrong Way" or Black Flag
warnings that might pop up; since you don't have a valid waypoint file or
any checkpoint barriers the game has no way of telling if you're going the
right direction or not. Also note that the lap time and lap counter cannot
work yet. What if my car falls into the blue? One thing that you need to
keep in mind when the car starts falling through the ground is the
material names for you’re road, grass, sand etc . Then the HAT file for
the track. It is basically a collision model of the track that is
generated the first time you load it in-game and is used as the collision
model there after. This file causes a problem with track testing because
it retains the same HAT file even if you make modeling changes. Usually it
doesn’t even accept the old HAT and simply acts as if there is no track at
all. I had this error for 2 months with my first F1 2002 track before I
finally pinned down the problem. I noticed that if I put the track into a
bran new installation of the game it would work fine until I made any
further changes, then back to the bottomless pit. The solution is to go
into the LOG/HAT folder and delete the HAT file with you’re track's name
on it - or just delete them all if you like, they'll automatically rebuild
the next time you load them anyways. The second step is to open you're
PLR file and do a word search for; Always Rebuild HAT, then change the
value to "0". This will make the HAT file refresh every time a track is
loaded and save you the task of deleting the HAT file every time. Fine
tuning the loft What you want to look for first is whether the track is
smooth enough to drive on at high speed, with no lethal bumps or sudden
angles in the surface. Also check out the elevation changes, do they seem
realistic? Are the turns relatively round and not choppy and angular? Is
the pavement wide enough or too wide? Try to drive the entire track
surface. Do you run into any polygons where the game will not allow you to
drive? If you need to smooth out the loft or make other changes to it
remember to make those changes to the original loft that you have hidden.
Un-hide it, and make your changes, then clone it. Hide the original again
for safe keeping and convert only the clone into an editable mesh. The
idea is to keep one "master loft" under development -- as opposed to
generating a new loft in each edit session. When it's time to export you
make a clone of it and convert that to editable mesh (which can be
exported). The "master loft" remains as a loft with all the changes
up-to-date as you continue to refine and tweak it. This only goes on for
short time as you will soon reach a point where you are happy with the
loft and declare the road surface is now "good enough". You will then
clone it one last time, convert that clone to an editable mesh and start
doing the next phase of track development directly to those polygons, such
as extruding grass, walls, curbing, etc. Always keep that finalized loft
(and the lines you used to generate it) tucked away somewhere because you
may find yourself in a situation later down the road where you say to
yourself "Damn! I wish I still had that finished version of the loft
because it would come in handy for what I'm trying to do right now." If
the track seems to be too wide, use the "Tape Measure" tool in 3D Studio
Max to measure the width. If the "shape" line measures 12 then the road
width should also have turned out to be 12. If it is not the same then you
may have scaled the path line up to make it the right size for the track.
This creates some serious problems because the resulting loft is further
effected by any scaling you did to the original path line, thus the
pavement will be the wrong size, and even the mapping values will be
thrown off. In fact, all units of measure are now thrown off when you
later try to work with those polygons; for example, try to extrude one 1
meter and it may end up only 0.273 meters in reality, so you have to
figure a "conversion factor" to adjust for the scaling. It can quickly
become very aggravating. This is why it is important to zoom your view
port so that the grid matches up to the scale of the background image
correctly before you even start. I have not found a way to tell 3D Studio
MAX that I want the path line to be considered to be un-scaled without it
shrinking back to its original smaller size. Unfortunately, the easiest
and safest thing to do is to make a new path line, considering the fact
that you probably now have your view port zoomed out to the proper size to
trace the track map. Stay away from scaling anything used in your lofts,
it causes some tricky issues. If you already know the length of the track
you can do a measured lap around your track at 30 Kmh\Mph and divide the
lap time by 2 to find the actual track distance in Km or Miles. You can
then use cross multiplication to find out how much the track needs to be
enlarged or reduced in size. To reduce the size of the loft create a
“measuring tape” helper, go to “move mode” and move the triangle part of
it to be on the west side of the track and the box shaped part is on the
west side. Then go to the modify panel and click the specify length box
and increase the length until the green line reaches the east side of the
track (where the box is). Multiply the measuring tapes length to the
number you got from the measured lap and type in the new length. Then
select the path line in “line segment mode” and reduce\increase its size
to match the measuring tape using uniform scale. You may need to move the
line around a bit to match it up to the measuring tape. Here is and an
example: The track real world length is: 3 miles You take a lap around the
track at approximately 30 Mph and it take 8 minutes. The 8 minutes divided
by 2 = 4 miles The 3 miles divided by 4 = 0.75 The measuring tape length
is 500 meters Multiply the 500 meters by .75 and it = 375 Type this into
the measuring tape length and reduce make the path line match the green
line’s length. |