CreateTrackRealism

Speed Dreams Documentation Wiki

Adding realism to car skins using Blender Texture Baking

Step 1: Preparation

• Import the track via the builtin AC3D *.ac importer or the Speed Dreams *.acc importer
• Change the view to "Top View" and create a camera in the center of the track
• Change the camera to "Orthographic" and setup "Scale" by 1000
• Move the camera along z-axis until any part of the track is inside the camera view
• Open the xml file of the track in a text editor and search for the light (light position)
• Create at the position described in the xml file of the track a "Sun" light
• setup the light with white color, Ernergy 1.25, Dist 5000 and "Ray Shadow"
• Adjust the light by rotation as needed to get nice shadows
• Sometimes it is usefull to connect all loose partys of the ground and smooth it via "Set Smooth" and the "SubSurf?" modifier

Step 2: Rendering

• Make sure Ambient Occlusion is disabled
• Setup the render output to PNG, width 3200 and height 2400
• Setup OSA to 5
• Activate "Premul" and RGBA
• Press the render button and save the rendering

Step 3: Editing and Finish

• Open the image in GIMP
• Select the transpareny of the lay and crop the image
• Adjust Levels and Brightness contrast
• Fix some rendering bugs
• scale the image unproportional to 2048px * 2048px
• save it as "shadow.jpg" with 90% quality for the track shadows
• fill over any place that isn't driveable with white (to save file space)
• scale the image to 1024px * 1024px
• save it as "shadow.png" for car shadows

Now you have a nice shadow map that is automatically used when your track is a .acc file. When you track is just a normal AC3D .ac file you have to convert it with the command line utility accc to use teh shadow map.