Making tracks not only requires the terrain, you also need to create the grass, rocks, and dirt that cover the terrain. That is done with Textures. Textures are key to making your track look good, assists in letting the rider know where to go, and enhances the look of jumps, whoops, bumps, ruts, etc by being rendered with shadows.
Working with textures:
Overview of how to create textures
Overview of how to render textures
Where to get textures
http://www.cgtextures.com/
MX vs ATV Reflex Specific Textures/Masks
When making tracks for previous games you needed to render a texture. This texture was what you saw in the game and shadows were needed to help define the track, make the jumps and subtle terrain changes easier to see. Reflex does textures in an entirely different way and what you see is comprised of several textures. In addition there are several additional images that control other aspects of the game, but are based on your displacement map and textures.
Below is a list of the images that make up your textures and other images that control things like sounds, friction, particles, etc.
- The Topdown Texture - Describes the Top Down Texture and it's alpha channel
- The Mask Map Texture - Describes the Mask Map and it's use of RGB channels and it's alpha channel
- The ChromLum Mask - Describes the Chrome LUM Image and it's alpha channel
- Softness Definition Map Texture - Describes the Softness Definition Map Image and it's alpha channel
- The Shadow Mask - Describes the Shadow Mask
Track Surface Textures:
- The Dirt Textures - Describes the Base Dirt Texture, R, G, and B Channel Textures, their alpha channels and matching Bump Textures
Zone Files:
- The Zone Files - Describes the purpose of the 4 zone files (Friction, Particles, etc.).
Ambient Files:
Reflection map - This is an High Dynamic Range (HDR) image used to add reflections to shiny surfaces. Below is an example taken from Dalton_B track.
Spherical Light Map - Below is an example of a Spherical light map.
Spherical light map from compiler 1.09
