Strathmore Motorsports Park Sim Track Project

[Fubar686]

Hello everyone!

The few I've met and chatted with at the Rookie School know me as Eric, I'm looking forward to meeting everyone face to face at the track, come say hi and give me a free pointer I'll need it (just look for the clueless guy )

I'm new to the club this year, "discovered" CKRC looking for AutoX events and realized where the REAL seat time was at.

However learning about CKRC while snow was still on the ground was both a blessing and a curse, lots of time for reading and doing my homework, but also time for Alberta to do it's "thing" and bait us one week and kick us the next so I was a little disappointed when I learned there was no Sim track available as a tool to study the layout, know where the marshal stations are, the pixel lights and get a general feel for the track prior to showing up as a green horn.

So I'd like to attempt to create that

Some of you familiar with iRacing might also be with LiDAR or laser scanning tracks down to the millimeter, unfortunately I personally don't have access to any of this equipment so the technique I'll attempt for the scope of this project to start is entirely within Photogrammetry (the use of photography in surveying and mapping to measure distances between objects). The biggest drawback to photogrammetry is the road surface will not be matched to the mm on the Z axis (depth), unfortunately only to around ~3-4+/- cm and road feel though FFB (force feedback) in the Sim would have to be manually tuned in but eventually adequate though community feedback, but this will be exponentially more accurate than any free available topography mappings. The good news is if LiDAR data is collected at a future date it can be combined with the photogrammetry for best of both worlds, mm accurate roads and accurate visuals.

My first goal is to get out to the track with a drone and a fist full of memory cards to take purposeful drone aerial's and terrestrial photos walking the track in both directions with all curb angles. (The shots from Michael Decnodder's video for proof of concept below were useful but not before a lot of post processing the keyframes to mask out the sky, drone shots for this type of recreation need high overlap and a more direct angle to the ground, no sky seen, the output is very dependent on the source)

I do want to preface that although I'm a "jack of all trades" IT professional day in day out I mainly deal with hardware and 3D modeling is purely from a hobbyist standpoint, no one has paid me to do any of this kind of work... nor should they That being said if you do have some skills you'd like to contribute, I would love to collaborate with all who would like to help!


I have left a couple proof of concepts below if you're interested or want to help with development and I look forward to hearing any and all feedback!

Eric M





Started with just slapping a repeating cross section surface down on a grainy satellite image imported the sparse google elevation data in the area. Road width, camber, grade are all wrong but functional in Assetto Corsa and sorta lap-able, I didn't want to waste time optimizing anything so you'll find the last 4-5 corners really slapped together, no sense going further with this workflow/development, more just to ensure I can modify material properties and collision and actually get something to load.

Video - https://imgur.com/a/BjZO6gA - (Assetto Corsa Download link below)

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https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing



This model (below) was projected using these 3 images all shot from the same perspective moving forward a few feet between (with a cellphone camera at night). Total capture to render time ~10 min

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This one was "extracted" from ~150 keyframes from the first 18s of Michael DeCnodder video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZebYGEokQE and required lots of masking to the source images. The holes in the first pictures mesh is due to only having one flight direction and not purposefully taken photos with a sharper downward angle, the camera looks across the horizon and in recreation this also leads to skewing of the alignment making holes.

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After I masked out the sky and horizon portions of the source images I was able to reduce the skew from the single flight angle substantially

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[Pawel2002]

Hi Eric! Great to see another member join the club. Now this is a awesome project! Being a karter who's finding there footing, this will be a big help for starters and people who haven't had experience yet and want to see how the track is, This would be also really good for people who coming from other places for example north of 49. We could even have a sim track lap guide for try a kart members. Definitely a lot of us racers would be willing to help give feedback on where bumps are on the track and how the curbs are and just how overall the track is. Love to see projects like this happen!!!

[John Kwong]

Cool project! We did a trade with a fellow that did Lidar drone flying when we built the track. He needed a place to synchronize/test his equipment and we needed track images. I haven't spoken with him for several years but might have a contact for that. What you have done so far is pretty impressive.

John K

[Fubar686]

Oh wow... I wonder if those point clouds are still kicking around somewhere on a backup drive

[jash]

This is a super cool project, I don't have anything to add but would be very interested in loading up the track in kart kraft / iracing to have a go at driving our sim rig around!

[Fubar686]

I would love to import to iRacing due to it's popularity but unfortunately they don't allow modded tracks and will only add tracks they've personally scanned themselves.

Kartkraft with it's new developer Motorsports Games who took over last year and the 'full release' being only a couple months ago don't yet have mod support. It is a possibility in the future as they've stated their intent to eventually add in mods, and I'm fairly confident they're using a heavy mix of photogrammetry with mixed LiDAR data for their own development. Something about the textures look baked from an orthomosaic. So strong potential there.

Initially I'll just be focusing on the sim that's been the friendliest modding experience since the rest of the techniques are new to me, Assetto Corsa.

Eric M

[BradWalker72]

This is awesome!

[sanguinetti]

There is a company on the East coast that brought a kart simulator to Mosport for nationals last year. They had a version of Kart Sim Pro with all the tracks from Eastern Canada. I spoke with him and he was very excited to tell me that they were currently working on getting all major kart racing tracks across Canada including ours.

I mention this because it might be worth looking into Kart Sim Pro instead of Assetto. It runs on the Rfactor engine and is a dedicated kart racing title that has been known to have the most realistic kart physics.

Either way, very cool project. I'm excited to see what you come up with.

[Fred]

Just as a point of fact however ,,, We are not Northstar Raceway any more Just Strathmore Motorsport Park (SMP)

[Fubar686]

Thanks Fred, forsure still don't know enough to know what I don't yet I updated the header so I'll remember

I'll have a peak into Kart Sim Pro but I don't want to bury my head to far learning a different engine. Tracks aren't as simple as change the file type to have them load in another sim unfortunately . But even if they plan to come scan the track this year or next I'll still want to try making my own to flush out another toolset on the belt

*edit* Doesn't actually look too bad to move it over to rFactor
*edit2* The further down the rabbit hole I get, the more I think I'll leave the rFactor implementation to the KartSim team if they have intent to scan western Canada's tracks. The scope of work required taking the 3D model generated from photogrammetry into the game's engine is a bit more daunting that initially anticipated. The conventions for preparing the model are quite a bit different, rFactor2 is suited to using LiDAR point cloud data and that only contains the color of the points, not the texture or colors in between, textures have to be made and applied manually and that's where most of the "look" comes from. Photogrammetry you can think of like a less accurate liDAR point cloud it too contains the point colors, but it also has the picture data to fill in all the in between and generate photorealistic textures that I'd never be capable of recreating.

In Assetto Corsa on properly made tracks the roads you see visually have no collision and are not what you're actually driving on, they are a low polygon mesh with high detailed textures. Less polygons rendered directly relates to framerate performance. What you are actually driving on is an invisible copy of the physical road with a very high polygon count and that is where the force feed back detail is derived from.

rFactor2 the road you visually see is the one you drive on. From a photogrammetry standpoint rFactor2's workflow complicates modifying the road, adding bumps, or tweaking FFB by manipulating visual and physical at the same time.

*https://www.racedepartment.com/threads/ ... st-2256505
*https://docs.studio-397.com/developers- ... ng-mapping

Assetto Corsa - Visual mesh

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Assetto Corsa - 'Phyiscal' or driving mesh

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rFactor2 Single Visual&Physical mesh

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