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Fox89
09-16-2010, 06:28 PM
Hi everyone! I feel a bit bad starting a thread to ask for help with my very first post, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to what else to do.

I'm working on a 3D Animation based on Formula One. Just as something fun for me! I'm relatively new to 3DS Max but am reading through books to improve and I can build a pretty decent F1 car. The trouble I'm having is with the circuit. Basically, I'm not sure how to integrate the track itself with the surrounding environment.

The track I'm doing is the Circuit Gilles Villeuneve (http://www.allf1.info/tracks/montreal02.jpg). My method at the moment is to draw a spline in the shape of the track and then loft it, which gives me a piece of track that is about the right size and shape. Now comes the bit where I try to integrate with the surrounding grass, lakes, etc.

At the moment I'm just using a flat plain which I will texture, not worrying about heightmaps and such as I'm rather inexperienced with them. If I simply put the lofted track on top of the plain I get clipping, as I expected. So I used the track shape to cut a hole in the plain, and then lowered the track into this hole. The problem I get now is that there are a large number of gaps between the track itself and the plain where my pit garages, grandstands and everything else are.

I knew this would probably happen before I started, but I couldn't figure out any better way to do it. The rest of the internet has yielded no useful results so I thought I'd try posting on here! If you look at this picture you can see the problem, there is a blue seam between the track of the turn and the grass. (PS. I know it all looks pretty bad in that pic ^^. I'm going to re-do everything once I know how to fix this.)

http://i56.tinypic.com/3148r5y.jpg

Thanks very much for any help!
Dare-o
09-17-2010, 12:41 AM
edit: oops didnt see the 3ds max.

anyway, so your using nurbs for the track itself? have you tried converting it to polygons, then extruding outwards to make up the other spaces? If your extruding polygons it will make 1 continuous mesh with 0 geomtry seams.
Fox89
09-17-2010, 01:46 AM
edit: oops didnt see the 3ds max.

anyway, so your using nurbs for the track itself? have you tried converting it to polygons, then extruding outwards to make up the other spaces? If your extruding polygons it will make 1 continuous mesh with 0 geomtry seams.

Hey Dare-o, thanks for the reply! Yes, that's how I'm doing the track itself. I have tried something similar involving creating a spline from the edge of the circuit, scaling that up (or down) and then joining the vertices between the scaled spline and the edge of the circuit. This just created a horrible mess!

But I gave your solution a go and that's much more manageable. There is still a problem of the edges of, say, the inside of a hairpin bend overlapping as I extrude, but deleting a few faces and doing a bit of welding should fix that. Unless you know of an easier way?

Thanks very much, I should be able to get rid of those horrible seams now :)
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09-17-2010, 01:46 AM
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