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Hi:
I did it again: I started a new project without finishing first the old
ones... well, at least this time I had the decency to finish one of them
before going further (the Eagle3D tutorial).
Years ago, when I found The Open Racing Car Simulator (www.torcs.org), I
was looking for an open source racing game which will let me export the
tracks to POV-Ray, so I could render some realistic road traffic scenes.
TORCS looked like a very good candidate, and indeed it was possible to
export the geometry to POV-Ray via Blender, but I didn't find any automatic
way to get a spline for the track path (so that I could place the cars and
camera). I then abandoned the project and started to get addicted to racing
with TORCS... it's really fun!
But recently I figured out a way to get the track spline into POV-Ray,
via Wings3D. The method is bit convoluted, but consists basically in
reducing the track to a single face with hundreds (or thousands) of
vertices, which once exported can be transformed easily into an array, and
then into a spline.
I still have some problems, but the results are starting to look good:
http://www.ignorancia.org/en/index.php?page=torcs2pov
And there is still a lot of room for improvement: I think I can replace
the terrain mesh with an isosurface of the same shape, and the fake trees
with "POV-Trees".
Regards,
--
Jaime
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download 'alpine-2-10.jpg' (80 KB)
Preview of image 'alpine-2-10.jpg'
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Jaime Vives Piqueres <jai### [at] ignorancia org> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I did it again: I started a new project without finishing first the old
> ones... well, at least this time I had the decency to finish one of them
> before going further (the Eagle3D tutorial).
>
> Years ago, when I found The Open Racing Car Simulator (www.torcs.org), I
> was looking for an open source racing game which will let me export the
> tracks to POV-Ray, so I could render some realistic road traffic scenes.
>
> TORCS looked like a very good candidate, and indeed it was possible to
> export the geometry to POV-Ray via Blender, but I didn't find any automatic
> way to get a spline for the track path (so that I could place the cars and
> camera). I then abandoned the project and started to get addicted to racing
> with TORCS... it's really fun!
>
> But recently I figured out a way to get the track spline into POV-Ray,
> via Wings3D. The method is bit convoluted, but consists basically in
> reducing the track to a single face with hundreds (or thousands) of
> vertices, which once exported can be transformed easily into an array, and
> then into a spline.
>
> I still have some problems, but the results are starting to look good:
>
> http://www.ignorancia.org/en/index.php?page=torcs2pov
>
> And there is still a lot of room for improvement: I think I can replace
> the terrain mesh with an isosurface of the same shape, and the fake trees
> with "POV-Trees".
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Jaime
Very promising, though I imagine that in this scene you're not looking for
photorealism.(?)
(I say this after having seen, of course, your *autobahn*).
:-)
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Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> TORCS looked like a very good candidate, and indeed it was possible to
> export the geometry to POV-Ray via Blender, but I didn't find any automatic
> way to get a spline for the track path (so that I could place the cars and
> camera). I then abandoned the project and started to get addicted to racing
> with TORCS... it's really fun!
racing manually
or coding ai to race?
> But recently I figured out a way to get the track spline into POV-Ray,
> via Wings3D. The method is bit convoluted, but consists basically in
> reducing the track to a single face with hundreds (or thousands) of
> vertices, which once exported can be transformed easily into an array, and
> then into a spline.
I've some old code where I was using povray to visualise my (very)
primitive ai's idea of the racing line.
Each time the ai was started it would generate an include file
containing the geometry of the track and a couple of iteration's of the
generated racing line.
It's amusing to see such different uses for pov with Torcs.
Your images are as usual stunning - what's the render time like - would
video clips of races be possible?
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Sorry, Jaime, I can't help but comparing this
http://www.ignorancia.org/uploads/torcs2pov/wips/e-track-6-09.jpg
to this:
http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/gaming/Forza3.jpg
http://i26.tinypic.com/241nu60.jpg
and think how far videogames have come in their fake but fast tech. You
know there's something wrong with the world when fake scanline actually
looks better than raytracing... and at 60 FPS!
Of course, it doesn't help that TORCS models seem pretty low-poly when
compared to a top-notch modern game tech...
Post a reply to this message
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> Very promising, though I imagine that in this scene you're not looking
> for photorealism.(?) (I say this after having seen, of course, your
> *autobahn*). :-)
Well, the idea is to finally get something as realistic as the autobahn
scene...
--
Jaime
Post a reply to this message
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> racing manually or coding ai to race?
Manually: making racing robots should be very fun, but I don't have the
skills at all...
> I've some old code where I was using povray to visualise my (very)
> primitive ai's idea of the racing line.
>
> Each time the ai was started it would generate an include file containing
> the geometry of the track and a couple of iteration's of the generated
> racing line.
That's very interesting... I will kill for a TORCS robot that would
generate POV-Ray splines: is this what you did?
> Your images are as usual stunning - what's the render time like - would
> video clips of races be possible?
It renders decently fast if you don't trow focal blur and area light at
once... in the end, everything are meshes. Let's say from 15 to 30 min for
most the images. But what is stopping me from making an animation is not the
render speed, but the lack of telemetry data to control speed, acceleration,
braking, etc... and of course, the skills to manage it all and translate it
to SDL... to not talk about the free time needed. :(
--
Jaime
Post a reply to this message
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> and think how far videogames have come in their fake but fast tech. You
> know there's something wrong with the world when fake scanline actually
> looks better than raytracing... and at 60 FPS!
Yes, specially racing games are highly realistic these days... but I think
most of the work to get that realism is not done "on the fly", but it's
baked into the textures.
> Of course, it doesn't help that TORCS models seem pretty low-poly when
> compared to a top-notch modern game tech...
Indeed... and I used some of the best tracks of the game! ...but TORCS is
not really about realism on the graphics, but on the racing experience. And
at that it seems very good to me... although I didn't play any recent
commercial game to compare with.
--
jaime
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Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> But what is stopping me from making an animation is not the
> render speed, but the lack of telemetry data to control speed,
> acceleration, braking, etc...
I don't know torcs but I had a quick look at the site and
it seems the data is available via the robot API. So if I read
this correctly you'd just need to get the source code for some
AI which drives like you want it to and add some "fprintf"
calls to write the required data to a file.
Post a reply to this message
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Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
>> racing manually or coding ai to race?
>
> Manually: making racing robots should be very fun, but I don't have the
> skills at all...
>
>> I've some old code where I was using povray to visualise my (very)
>> primitive ai's idea of the racing line.
>>
>> Each time the ai was started it would generate an include file containing
>> the geometry of the track and a couple of iteration's of the generated
>> racing line.
>
> That's very interesting... I will kill for a TORCS robot that would
> generate POV-Ray splines: is this what you did?
More or less yes, it generated a 2d polygon track segment by segment
obviously you'd want a 3d spline... I've found my code (very primitive)
but I've not yet got it working in MS Visual Studio 2008 express - it
worked in VS 2005 but I've no longer got a license... I'll try but don't
hold your breath - real life gets in the way frequently :-(
>> Your images are as usual stunning - what's the render time like -
>> would video clips of races be possible?
>
> It renders decently fast if you don't trow focal blur and area light at
> once... in the end, everything are meshes. Let's say from 15 to 30 min for
> most the images. But what is stopping me from making an animation is not
> the
> render speed, but the lack of telemetry data to control speed,
> acceleration,
> braking, etc... and of course, the skills to manage it all and translate it
> to SDL... to not talk about the free time needed. :(
As Christian mentioned - the robot AIs are freely available and the
print statements can be added to them to print out the appropriate data.
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On 10/14/2009 6:11 AM, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> Years ago, when I found The Open Racing Car Simulator (www.torcs.org), I
> was looking for an open source racing game which will let me export the
> tracks to POV-Ray, so I could render some realistic road traffic scenes.
Hmmm... I've always wanted to have a crack at *creating* racetracks from
scratch.
Also, slightly OT, but I created a street generator over at the Object
Collection.
http://lib.povray.org/searchcollection/index2.php?objectName=LegoRoad&version=2.5.5&contributorTag=SharkD
Mike
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