WIP Central Asia Countryside & Town 0.1

To download the newest version please use this Gdrive link. Unfortunately no mod has yet got around to update my resource on the repo so this is the only way to distribute the updates.

Greetings forum people. I'm working on a map with the theme of Central Asia. Specifically the Area around Bishkek. My map is based on the Johnson Valley but apart from some materials bears no resemblance anymore. The hightmap was taken from a place called Sel'skaya Srednyaya.

So far I created quite a bit of custom models for this map and mostly got to know the PBR workflow and map editor. Mind you, it's been over 2 years since I last created a personal map based on the Italy map.
Eventually I want to have a Map with mountain trails as well as lush fields and a medium-sized village in typical soviet architecture and central Asian elements.

Spoiler: PointsOfInterest

 

Added a new bus station for the village. Its a fusion of a very typical community building of the ussr. Sometimes cinema or shops, this time bus station.

 

Great job!

 

Today I made the first part of the highway that connects the village to the outside. The idea is to have a large stretch of road for racing and speed.
Modeling this piece wasn't too hard but optimizing all the details was a pain since they are more or less visible from everywhere. It currently has 4 LOD levels and runs smooth with 70FPS on my Vega56.
What becomes very apparent is the lag of a good antialiasing, but I guess we are used to that by now

The bridge is a centerpiece. The rally course connects to street here.




The connection to the village/town is done very quick. I modelled this piece from the highway entrance of the city of Osh in Kirghistan.

 

This actually looks pretty good. Kinda give off Afghanistan vibes if I may say so.

 

Yes, that's the plan. There are some specialties in how the roads are made there that are different to Russia or generally Eastern Europe. I try to incorporate those.

 

I am not current of every town in Afghanistan so please forgive my ignorance. I am curious if the author is going to incorporate any soviet era military hardware? Such as damaged tanks, apc's etc. Would work as a first war torn map in beamng. However given current geopolitical situation this may come off as a bit crass. However keep up what you're, it looks interesting as is.

 

Nice idea, but currently I don't have the time to model these complex structures. Vehicles and especially military equipment would take a considerable amount of time. Some post soviet architecture is very simplistic in comparison. So maybe some time, but first I want to get a decent amount of detail on the map to release a first version.

 

Looks absolutely great. Keep up the good work!

 

Today I made a little shop/cultural place thing. It's really efficient on vertices. Only 5000 for the hero version and 50% less with every of the 4 LODs.





I modelled it again with some fake parallax looking windows. Which give the interior a certain depth. They are just some large textured faces behind the windows. So when driving by they change direction slightly slower then the windowframe.


The next steps will be to make more of those reusable assets to populate the town. Some kiosk and parking spaces as well as garages.

 

New garages added. There are 3 different models. Red, blue and an opened version. All of them have 3 LODs and are very performance friendly. I will use them to scatter a certain degree of randomness in the town.




Side node
I plan to make two all metal garages as well as these that I made are not 100% lore friendly. Usually you would find these metal huts around Bishkek:

 

Street aesthetics
A little venture into street aesthetics.


From what I gathered of the streets of Osh I can see some major marks. Like the Birch trees and street markers. Those are very easy and simple to scatter and scenic at that. I tried this approach with a smaller street outside the town and found it to be looking very nice. Time to place the objects was less than 5min.


Trees
I also bought a tool called TreeIT for 3€. I highly recommend it to any dev/modder as it lets you create nice trees very quickly and even some high quality LODs. Not only that, but I would go as far to say, they look better than the OEM Trees from Beam.NG themselves, but judge for yourself.

 

I'll say it now:

D A M N this map looks good!

 

Hey thanks! But it's only in certain places for now. I will try to get a little consistency in it.

 

Really looking up to this. Also VinsWie makes really good license plate mods go check one of them!

 

This map gives me Northern Mexican vibes, especially the regions of Tijuana and Chihuahua.

 

Greetings! I decided to take my assets and start filling up the larger areas of the map. In this process, I added a Dirt Pit for some light off-roading action.

DirtPit


It can be accessed via the highway. It is very much inspired from the dirt pit on the "industrial" map. Very basic but fun to roam around.


Top view of the pit. Apparently there is an occlusion error when you are below the terrain, in the pit, and the camera does not see the sky. Then the terrain will be culled out which looks off. But can't do anything about it.


Nature
I made an attempt to fill up the large surface area as I'm not going to detail every square meter, frankly that's unrealistic both in terms of time and the real life example.



Top and detail view of the lusher parts of the map, near the large water body.



Also, some more birch tree roads



and more off-roading along the channels.

Conclusion
With the amount of assets from both BeamNG and me, I'm making good progress with a convincing and detailed environment.

 

How good do you want your map to look?

@HansEberhart: Y E S

 

Next update!

I started stuffing the map edges. Mainly a new approach to fields/nature and a steppe base next to the airfield.




The Idea is, that I basically copy some terrain colors from satellite images and make them fit on the base texture. Especially with the riverbed, this made a huge difference in terms of details.


The only big junk left will be filled with a plantation and maybe some industrial area that will double as drift track.



After that, I will probably release a v0.0000000001 version of the map.