Aerial track maps - finally figured out a decent way to do them.

[Cue-Ball]

I know that a lot of people were wanting maps that would show an aerial view of the tracks along with the details, brake markers, etc. I think I finally figured out a way to do it. This took me a few hours of experimentation, but I think I finally have it nailed down. I've only done one track so far - South City Sprint Track 2, since it's one of the shortest tracks, yet still very complex with lots of scenery. I'm going to give some of the other tracks a go. Let me know what you guys think.

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a332/Cue-Ball/SouthCity-SprintTrack2.jpg

[Zoltuger]

nicely done, you have way more patience than i do
i tried to use the "overhead screenshot" method to make my own once, but promptly gave up...

[Cue-Ball]

Well, it took me a while to get the method down, but now that I've figured it out I think I can crank out the smaller tracks in under an hour each. I just started Fern Bay Club (1.0 miles). We'll see how long it takes...

[KiDCoDEa]

http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a332/Cue-Ball/SouthCity-SprintTrack2.jpg

what i really want, is a blimp realtime aerial view exactly like that.

greets for ya patience.

[Cue-Ball]

what i really want, is a blimp realtime aerial view exactly like that.

greets for ya patience.

I'd like to have a blimp view as well, but I don't think that's something we'll see for a very long time. I can imagine it would be very memory intensive and would require some serious LOD tweaking.

[ColeusRattus]

I'd like to have a blimp view as well, but I don't think that's something we'll see for a very long time. I can imagine it would be very memory intensive and would require some serious LOD tweaking.

Doesn't have to be. You could use a 2d-texture as map and small sprites as blibs, and voilá, you'd have a overhead view with blimps.

[KiDCoDEa]

I'd like to have a blimp view as well, but I don't think that's something we'll see for a very long time. I can imagine it would be very memory intensive and would require some serious LOD tweaking.

its not that hard believe me ;)
in fact i....

btw n2003 has that ;)

[GP4Flo]

Wow, that looks cool, great work! I'd like to add such maps to the LFSWiki (http://lfs-old.4players.de:1043/lfswiki/) ;)

[bobvanvliet]

One small remark (other than that, great work!):

You seem to have forgotten to turn off screen info on a series of shots, makes for some mildly disturbing white dot thingies on your map.

[Takumi_Project.d]

Sir i think there is a slightly easier way! you just used the overhead camera which turns with the car am i right?.

instead switch to Shift-U custom cam, press V to go into overhead, and adjust the height up and the FOV. this camera will maintain a constant angle relative to the world, with the car turning and heading in other directions depending on where it is.. if you know what i mean. therefor all the pics would line up squarely

[TheJAG]

Sir i think there is a slightly easier way! you just used the overhead camera which turns with the car am i right?.

instead switch to Shift-U custom cam, press V to go into overhead, and adjust the height up and the FOV. this camera will maintain a constant angle relative to the world, with the car turning and heading in other directions depending on where it is.. if you know what i mean. therefor all the pics would line up squarely
exactly, that's what I was thinking! I've much respect for your patience for this, very cool track maps! :D

[bobvanvliet]

Well, there is of course an even easier way of getting a good top-down view of a track with the lines and braking points...

a replay analyser... (http://www.liveforspeed.net/?page=analysers)

But that doesn't produce pictures as pretty as yours, Cue-Ball. :thumb:

[Cue-Ball]

Sir i think there is a slightly easier way! you just used the overhead camera which turns with the car am i right?.

instead switch to Shift-U custom cam, press V to go into overhead, and adjust the height up and the FOV. this camera will maintain a constant angle relative to the world, with the car turning and heading in other directions depending on where it is.. if you know what i mean. therefor all the pics would line up squarely

That's an excellent idea! I'll give that a shot when I do the next map.

I'm also going to turn off all the track info and try to make the car and driver as invisible as possible. I started work on the second track last night but had a few problems so I didn't get it finished. I had two program malfunctions and ran out of memory twice. Hopefully today I'll be able to finish up the 2nd map and make the car a little less visible. It looks like I'm going to have to do the tracks in sections though. Doing the whole track at once takes up too much memory.

[Gunn]

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of your efforts, looking good so far. ;)

[overkiller]

Man, thats amazing, nice work! its gonna help me:D

[(SaM)]

I already thought he used the overhead User-camera, thought that'd be the most logical.
But eh you manually connected all the screenshots? Wow!

[mrodgers]

Google search for a screencapture program. I have one I got from a flight simulator site, but it captures in bmp format. But instead of "print screen" button copying to the clipboard, it saves the capture as a bmp file in the programs directory. I'm pretty sure there is a program that captures and saves as a jpg file.But I attached the program I have for you. It's real small, only 26kb. Just unzip it to a folder, it doesn't need installing. Just run it from the exe in the folder. Really cool to have running in the background and be able to fire off screenshots while you're racing since you don't have to open up a graphics program to paste from the clipboard. It will work with LFS in full screen also so you don't get the annoying windows task bar in the bottom of the screenshot.

[tpa]

Would it be possible to use images like that as a base for smx files? That would definatly look a lot nicer than what the replay analyzers and LFS Spectator use currently.

[Cue-Ball]

Well, I've been working on Blackwood (I don't have a registered copy here at work) ALL DAY and can't get the damn thing to work. Every time I try the program that compiles the files crashes on me. I didn't have this many problems at home, so I'll just have to try again once I get off work.

If anyone wants to try to replicate my results, here's how I'm doing it...

You'll need LFS, Fraps, IrfanView, and Autostitch. All of these can be downloaded for free off the web (with the exception of LFS full needing to be registered if you want to do anything other than Blackwood).

Open Fraps and go to the Screenshots tab. Change the key used to something like NumLock (F10 will interfere with LFS). Set it to record a new snapshot every 1 second.
Open LFS and pick the track you want to use. Start a single player race and join. Immediately go to the pits. This will get your car off the track so that there's no "ghost car" like there was in my first picture in the original post.
Hit Shift-F to turn off all the extra displays. Hit Shift-U to change to free camera mode. Hit V to change to overhead view. Hold Ctl+Up Arrow to get the camera as high as possible (it doesn't go anywhere near as high as I would like).
Position your camera near the start line of the track and press NumLock to start taking screenshots. Move your camera across the track, back and forth from edge to edge. Try to overlap each screenshot (1 second interval) with the last one by about one third. This has to be done for the pictures to successfully stitch. You want to move back and forth across the track for two reasons: 1) to make sure the pictures stitch properly 2) to make sure you get the whole track, not just the center of the driving line.
Cover as much area as you can in three minutes, then hit NumLock to stop the screen capture and exit LFS.
You'll have to use a program like IrfanView to batch edit all the .bmp files. You want to change them into .jpg files and decrease them in size to about 400x300.
Once you have all the files converted and resized, fire up AutoStitch. The default settings work pretty well, so there's no need to adjust them. Just select all the jpgs you want to stitch using the File menu and it will do most of the work. Note that it has a 200 image limitation. You'll probably hit a memory wall before you get 200 images to work unless you have more than 512MB of RAM. If everything works successfully, you'll have a file called pano.jpg in your screenshots directory. You'll probably have to capture and stitch small parts of the track at a time, then stitch all of those together at the end. I suggest working with 50 screenshots at a time or less. It really sucks to get 90% of the way done, then run out of memory and have to start over.

So, this is how I've been doing it. It works pretty well as long as you don't push your luck. Feel free to give this a shot and post your results if you try it.

[GeForz]

lol looks pretty weird ;)

[Cue-Ball]

lol looks pretty weird ;)

Try turning off autostraighten in AutoStitch.

[GeForz]

oh right, much better

[Cue-Ball]

Much better! Now do the rest of the track. ;)

If you overlap your images a bit more you might avoid the glitches like you have at the very bottom of your image. I still find that the replay footage gives the most accurate results, but then the car is in every frame. :(

[GeForz]

Much better! Now do the rest of the track. ;)

If you overlap your images a bit more you might avoid the glitches like you have at the very bottom of your image. I still find that the replay footage gives the most accurate results, but then the car is in every frame. :(
i did a bit more... ok i tried ;)

But the program doesn't seem to work pretty good with pitlanes ;)

[Cue-Ball]

If you mess with some of the options in AutoStitch you might get better results. Overlapping seems to be the most important, but other than that you can increase the Alpha and Beta values and the SIFT image size values. It takes some tweaking to get good results, and each time seems to be different.

Like I said, I still get the best results from screenshotting a replay, but then you have the car in all the shots and you miss the edges of the track. I wish there were some way to just hack the camera height of the free-roam camera. That would take care of the whole problem right there.

[cannonfodder]

the replay footage gives the most accurate results, but then the car is in every frame.
But then you get a nice diagram of the racing line to go with the map! :D

[Tweaker]

The only problem is that when you use such a high camera view, the FOV messes up each frame, so it won't connect properly between pictures. That is why you can see in the first picture, many of the 'straightaways' are bent. Not entirely accurate, but still quite cool :)

[KiDCoDEa]

u can load the blackwood cmx but the textures are gone ;)

[5th Earth]

I imagine that a narrow field of view is better than a wide one, right? You won't see as much of the track in each shot, but there will be less distortion due to perspective, and the objects on the edges of the shots will line up better.

[Cue-Ball]

I think you're probably right about that. The smaller the screen, the less distortion there will be from one frame to the next. The problem is that you have to take SO MANY screencaps. I took oaver 160 screens and didn't even get the whole Blackwood pit area.

[sdether]

Just a question on how you set up the camera. When i tried this a while back, the camera wouldn't set up vertically, but always with just a nudge of an angle and large FOV gave way too much distortion.

If i could get around that, i think i can automate the capturing using InSim and some win32 programming. basically programatically move the shift-U camera along the drive line and snap pics, so it would become a lot easier to do.

Of course getting a non-perspective view camera would be nice. It's easy enough in D3D, but has to be done by the devs (i think).

[inCogNito]

we just need an SMX viewer ;)

[andylec]

Would the attached be large enough?

[CrazyICE]

Would the attached be large enough?
wow....looks very coOL :)
nice work!

[andylec]

One for Aston, although things are starting to get a little small on a large location like this:

[5th Earth]

One for Aston, although things are starting to get a little small on a large location like this:

That's not a stiched screencap. Did you figure out how to hack the camera?

(good work btw!)

[andylec]

I bought myself a trip to the ISS and grabbed these shots while I was there ;)

Westhill:

[andylec]

Kyoto, Fern & South City:

[inCogNito]

would you like to share with us how you did this?

kyoto is nice, looks totally different from above :)

[andylec]

I bought myself a trip to the ISS and grabbed these shots while I was there ;)
Although they did get rather concerned when I wanted to lean out of the window to get a better shot with my trusty Box Brownie :D

[GP4Flo]

Great shots, but the image quality could be better. You should try to disable the track LOD reduction, because most textures aren't shown. Enabling anit aliasing would also help to improve the quality.

[inCogNito]

Although they did get rather concerned when I wanted to lean out of the window to get a better shot with my trusty Box Brownie :D

i guess that's a no?

:(

[Gunn]

Great work, as always, Andylec. :)

[KiDCoDEa]

heres a quickie. maybe ill do bigger later

http://pwp.netcabo.pt/kidcodea/westhill.jpg

[RudiTurbo]

That's beautiful Kid :)
Now if We could have some car models running on them we could have one pretty looking S2 Live viewing application :D

[KiDCoDEa]

of course u can. u can view live races from there ;)
all i could post here was a jpg though :)

[sinbad]

Nice picture, makes me wish there was another, shorter Westhill config using that road which comes off the back straight :)

Can you actually watch races from there? If so, how? :)

[AndroidXP]

Nice work there! :up: When you just race on those track you never realise the possibilities of other track combinations (Aston being the best example).

[ajp71]

Nice picture, makes me wish there was another, shorter Westhill config using that road which comes off the back straight :)

Can you actually watch races from there? If so, how? :)

Maybe a longer track coming off the back straight at that point then rejoining straight on at the next corner (one of the worst in LFS IMO)

[Cue-Ball]

Great work, guys! Those pics are excellent, andylec. You just saved me a ton of work! :)

[MyBoss]

sweet.

So, how do you do this?

[andylec]

Aerial shots for each config at Blackwood, Fern Bay and South City (feel free to edit):

[andylec]

Aerial shots for each config at Aston, Kyoto and Westhill (feel free to edit):

[L(Oo)ney]

Anyone gonna tell us how it's done? :really:

[rediske]

That's beautiful Kid :)
Now if We could have some car models running on them we could have one pretty looking S2 Live viewing application :D
indeed! hoping for a new dimension of lfs-spectator! :thumb:

[tristancliffe]

Anyone gonna tell us how it's done? :really:

No!



Muhahahahahahahahahahahaha

[GP4Flo]

Another small suggestion, andylec. You could paint the black holes with the same color as the textures beside, like I did with Fern Bay Green.

[L(Oo)ney]

No!



Muhahahahahahahahahahahaha

Its a memory hack, that allows you to go out of the values LFS sets.

Smart arse. :trampolin :D

[felplacerad]

I managed to "hack" (tss) the camera height by using the lfsmm.

[ruckus37]

of course u can. u can view live races from there ;)
all i could post here was a jpg though :)

Come again?

[XCNuse]

sure is amazing how different things look like from above.. that first turn on aston (in GP nat.. etc.) that long one.. makes that turn seem so much longer than it seems .. hmm

neat stuff!

[Bob Smith]

Another small suggestion, andylec. You could paint the black holes with the same color as the textures beside, like I did with Fern Bay Green.
Nice, but if you turn on anti-aliasing and increase the tolerance it'll look better still (I'm assuming you're using something more advanced than paint here).

[Cue-Ball]

Or you could pretty easily clone the grass texture into those spots instead. That should look even better than a solid color fill.

[Bob Smith]

Smartass. :p

Draw the outline of fish in the sea and you've a winner. ;)

[pab_ATR16]

All we need now is for someone with some influence at Google to slip these images into some empty spots in the Google Maps database, and all of a sudden we won't be racing on fictitious tracks any more.

:)

[xapexcivicx]

You can take out the town of Nutley, NJ, USA. It's worthless anyway. OMG Another girl cheated on her boyfriend! I need a sandwhich


Anyway. I think the grass would do lol.

[Vendetta]

Awesome stuff guys!

[L(Oo)ney]

All we need now is for someone with some influence at Google to slip these images into some empty spots in the Google Maps database, and all of a sudden we won't be racing on fictitious tracks any more.

:)

Well, i pulled a few strings here and there, and so far i've got them to put Fernbay on.. :thumb:

Hopefully they will get the rest on there soon. :trampolin

http://www.dpostill.karoo.net/pics/Onthemap.jpg

[Hallen]

Dude, that's a lake, not a bay. It ain't Fern Lake yaknow...:razz:

[Tweaker]

First you need to find Jamaica :)

[xapexcivicx]

South of Florida?? That was hard :)

[JJ72]

Are there anyways to adjust the parameters of the Shift U cam? like maximum height, minimum FOV etc?

[GP4Flo]

Or you could pretty easily clone the grass texture into those spots instead. That should look even better than a solid color fill.Yep, that would probably look even better. My image was only an example of how you could do it. I hope that someone who is more talented in photoshopping will give it a try.

[Pasci]

Aerial shots for each config at Aston, Kyoto and Westhill (feel free to edit):

Thanks for your work - I will use the pictures for my lfs cd :)

[minimax]

Are there any for Aston North & Grand Touring

[Tweaker]

If GT and North were made, they would be of almost the same size as the Grand Prix screenshot... so I would just use that and crop it to be honest.... Only the North hairpin curbs wouldn't be visible... but that's ok.

Andylec is somewhere far far away, dunno if he could make em :(

[Yaamboo]

Or you can use haXorZ p0w4hZ!!!1

[imthebestracerthereis]

Very sorry to bump but does someone have a south city zip? The one is invalid. :shrug:

[AndroidXP]

No it's not :really:

I just downloaded and opened it fine...

[Stew2000]

No it's not :really:

I just downloaded and opened it fine...
I second that.

[Davo]

Thirded

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=10964#post10964

[imthebestracerthereis]

Forthed :shrug: