Vortex Props

 I'm the assistant director of a competitive indoor percussion ensemble called Vortex Percussion. This year we decided to have a 6' tall, 24' long ramp on the floor for our 2022 production "Cult of Personality".

RBR Kemmelberg 0.1

I have begun creating a 7km stage from the Ypres Rally Belgium titled "Kemmelberg". I currently have the road mesh created and textured. Sector 1 also has detailed ground textures (preparation for release 0.2)

This project was started so I could learn more stage modelling techniques, and ultimately return to Serraglio to complete it. Unfortunately I once again need to take a break from stage modelling to focus of school. I fully intend to return to, and finish, both of these projects, They may however take a bit longer than I initially expected.

That being said, please learn about Kemmelberg Below!

Infinite Monkey Machine 1-20-22

The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that "A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times." (Wikipedia)

This was tested in 2002 and it was discovered that this theory is in fact false. "Monkeys are not random generators. They're more complex than that. They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there." (Wired)

Even mathematically speaking, if there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the universe, there is still miniscule chance of actually typing a coherent document. I'm not going to reiterate what is said on the Wikipedia page because they've already explained it so well. I'll just leave you with this quote:

"For a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10,360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys."

That being said, with the advent of the computer we don't have to worry about the animal rights violations associated with forcing countless trillions of monkeys to do our bidding. I've written a small python program that will randomly generate words based on the frequencies of a character occurring in the complete works of Shakespeare, (see chart below).

I'm working on a small website that displays the results, I will link the website in the future.

You can view the code yourself here 

RBR Rally Monza: Serraglio Update

 I have decided to officially put this project on hold.

Making this was great fun and helped me get through some semesters of engineering school. That being said, I need to put my efforts elsewhere for now.

As I was going into this project completely blind I made a number of mistakes from the beginning that have really hampered progress in the latter half of the project. I would like to take what I've learned here and put that to use in creating another stage. And later on return to Monza with the knowledge I've gained.

I don't want to produce anything that isn't of high quality, and as it stands right now I can't pursue developing Monza with my current knowledge.

It has been a great process, and I would like to return in the future.

Idea: Procedural Stage Generator

Introduction:

Rather than making an individual stage, I model a large area and procedurally connect random start and finish points to make stages.

The end goal is to have a large library of RBR stages that can be pulled up at random.

E.g. A tournament is using my stage "HEUVELLAND". The members competing have no idea what the actual route will look like, it is chosen at random from the library of various stages made with procedural routes. This lightens the competitive nature of the game and allows for casual and serious players to compete on a slightly more level playing field.

This may be an idea that deserves implementation BEYOND rbr. Perhaps my own game?

I'm not nearly experienced enough as a developer to take on a task like that right now, however. I will continue forward making the RBR arena stage. I need to come up with a better name than that.

Below are some days of testing this idea:

RBR: Rally Monza Serraglio V0.5

Big update, literally. V0.5 marks the completion of the large buildings on the Monza campus.

 The definition came through Open Street Maps. Anything that the GIS plugin would classify as a "building" I modelled and textured.

The GIS plugin adds the approximate shape of each building with a nominal height. 

This is what the top-down view looked like after adding all of my buildings.

The process was a little tricky at first, but luckily Monza is well documented on google images, youtube, google earth, and in almost every racing game. So I had plenty of resources to get reference images or photos from. My goal is to model the whole Monza campus, not just the parts used in the Serraglio stage, this way the grounds can be used for other stages, or just as a free-roam.

Below is a closer look at some of the buildings I created:

After booting up the stage in RBR things don't look terrible either. I can't say they look particularly stunning, but my hope is to do a ground & building texture overhaul in V0.9. To be fair, in the picture below there are now shadows or vertex colors. I also noticed my alpha textures didn't show up how I expected them to, but again, I'm not too concerned about it. I'm waiting to do most of my serious texture work when the RBR-Blender plugin is released. 

My plans for V0.6

I will be adding all of the smaller details along the stage that really bring it to life, I've broken them up into 3 categories:

• Rally Objects: Anything specific objects only there for the rally, and impact how you drive the stage:
• Haybales 
• Arrows
• Barriers
• Timing Gates
• Signs and Advertisement
• Road signs
• Placards
• Billboards
• Roadside Objects 
• Fences
• Vehicles
• Spectators / Marshalls
• Light posts
• Small Buildings

As this is a pretty big task, I hoped breaking it up into these smaller segments would help it seem more achievable.

That's all for now, until next time,

Shane

RBR: Rally Monza Serraglio V0.4

 A bit of a different update this time around, the last couple weeks have been mostly experimentation. My original plan was to do all of the vegetation surrounding the track, but one I realized how resource-intensive that would be I decided to same that for the end of the project. Additionally I spent a couple days learning to use Wallaby so I could test the track.

While I will be doing my official vegetation near the end, I'd still like to share some of what I've worked on.

To start, I made a list of all of the vegetation native to the Po Valley in Lombardy (where the city of Monza is). I also recorded the min and max height of each plant too. Here's what the list ended up like:

This is just the list for trees, I also have a list of small trees, bushes, and grasses. 

From there I found the best way to find pictures of the plants was to search for their scientific name on google images (e.g. Salix Alba instead of White Willow). This was useful because it usually yielded a picture of the tree in question alone, and with the whole plant in frame. This makes it very easy to edit into a texture for use in Blender.

From here I edited out the surroundings in gimp, saved it as a .dds file and put the tree in blender using the "images as planes" import tool.

Next was a long rabbit-hole looking into geometry nodes of distribution of vegetation and such, here are the results of my experimentation:

The real track would have far fewer trees, I just wanted to see if I could quickly distribute trees across the track. This of course makes blender run very slowly, and is what guided my decision to do vegetation at a later date.

I wasn't planning on stopping here and calling it "V0.4" as there isn't really much that has changed. My plan was to add all of the large buildings around the track and that would be "V0.4", but I ran into an issue...

When measuring the length of the pits in google earth and comparing to the GIS plugin data, I noticed a discrepancy.

Length of starting grid is about 310 meters, but on my GIS in blender, the length of the grid is 445 m! Much longer!

After driving the stage in RBR when doing some testing and driving the official track in Assetto Corsa, I thought something seemed off, but I thought it was just because I didn't have any buildings in yet. Now that I've scaled everything by 70% it matches up very nicely. With this big change I decided to cut my losses and start to work on another version.

Next update will have more progress! Goal is to get all of the major buildings around the Monza-campus modelled and textured!

That's all for now,

Shane