Google Earth to BeamNG using Meshroom and Blender

all right we got google earth here uh i got this display set to 4k uh there's a couple things if you want to use this technique you should do um i turn the magnifier on and i increase the amount until i don't see google anymore and i don't see this bar at the top which i don't know any way to make them disappear other than to increase the magnifier and your accessibilities also i'll turn the i'll go to tools or is it view sidebar and i'll turn off borders places roads and there's a couple settings in here that you should know and the options i of course have high quality terrain uh use 3d imagery anastrophic filterings at high now there is one thing this elevation exaggeration you can exaggerate the elevation of things to give it more you know altitude like it's really great for mountains sometimes they don't look i mean even though this is google earth sometimes they don't look as high as you may want them to so we'll turn the sidebar off now since i'm making this video i can't record video at the same time i mean i can't export this while i'm doing that so i'll take some screenshots so i'm going to just find some mountainous areas and just the way mushroom works is you really don't want a lot of white like i was going to make mount everest for example and the white does not work well things that are blown out to white now i have found that the blender gis plugin works really good and uh for some things and this thing works really good for some things this does not work really well for cities well this is uh flat anyway here but like places where their cities it don't do too good maybe i don't take enough screenshots uh probably gotta take a ridiculous amount of them but as you see as you zoom in it's like loading in and stuff you want to wait until you know everything loads up to the highest level that it's going to load and whatever it is that you want to put in your scene just remember the farther you out or you're out that's the level of detail that when you make this to the right size in the game when you're driving on that it's not going to be looking like this it's going to be looking like this and then blown up so this is great for background stuff if you got you want to put some mountains in your background you know i wouldn't use this for this reason it's white here but like uh if you want to stick some mountains in your background or um i also don't like this dark dark shading i mean it's really good for background stuff you can drive on it but um you just realistically are going to get a texture from google maps that's going to be detailed enough in your game that you're going to be satisfied with i also you don't really want to take pictures from here where it's got to figure out all this background stuff so i tried to [Music] catch it at an angle like so and it is possible to do some far away screenshots but you generally pick a point and you rotate it around it until you get enough photos all the way around that it can calculate it and then if you want to get in closer you can get in closer and take some photos and it'll do even better when it calculates it i haven't decided if i want to make this spot or not let's just i guess we'll just do it spend all day flying around so i'll just take some screenshots and when you take it like with the nvidia card that crap pops up there you can turn that notifications off but it'll sometimes stow your screen off so then you gotta like reposition it so you don't see the google or that bar if that bar is in there it's gonna draw it on the texture but you know there you're gonna start seeing it appear in places and you'll see google or the letter g appear after you take that first screenshot and then you wait on that to disappear or you could turn it off but i guess you can kind of see what i'm doing that might help by seeing it like i move this hand out the way i've seen that hand appear in there too at night really worried about it much what i usually do is i just take a video and i just tell it to record video at 4k and i just pan around but i try to do it so that that's off to the side or you know you don't see it as much and then i just in blender i load the video and then i tell it to export say it's 2000 frames i'll tell it to export every 100th frame of an image and i'll use all those images rather than uh doing it this way and you don't have to take too many i'm not going to go all the way around it uh it's going to take a few and get in a little closer but i ain't really uh certain it really loaded any more detail up close and when it was farther away now there's also google earth on the web but i downloaded the google earth pro that runs on your system not in your browser because for whatever reason and i'd love to know how to fix it somebody knows when i enable hardware acceleration in my browser man my browser just craps all over itself it it locks up artifacts everywhere you think the graphics card is bad and it's nearly impossible to get back into the options to turn it back off uh it also it sucks because it affects my video playback in youtube um but when it's enabled like one or two times it did work great man i have no play playback issues but i i use edge uh but i've also tried chrome and i get the same issue i like looked online and see about you know and saw microsoft's response about it and i know it looks like a rainbow here let's notice it and get a shot from over the top now we'll be we'll be done we gotta have enough photos so oh i can turn this magnifier back off get out of here and i'll increase my dpi so you can see better all right that's probably a relief right there so all these images are saved i gotta find them let's go there in the screenshots desktop there to go so i got these photos i'll load mushroom over here is we're going to drop them all oh yeah minimize that one out of the way and just throw them in there i got 16 images and i'm gonna try to save it first uh you've been having issues with this thing i just call it just like this you know i already called it that i call it uh this i guess damn that's let's give it a different name something i used yet uh the mesh filtering here these nodes these are all the steps that it's got to go through but you don't have to do anything it does all this for you but there is one thing that you do to help the polygon count be more nice for the game where these connect here you just right click on this line and remove it and then you just add a new mesh decimate and we use right click mesh post processing mesh decimate you'll drag mesh into input mesh and you'll drag output mesh into mesh and when you pick a node you got these attribute tab for every one of these but when you pick decimate you got its this is like the inspector and the editor basically is what this is the inspector you slide this down to like 0.2 that will help your mesh also you can change the texture size if you find that your model is making two different textures you can increase it up to 16k uh but if you can get by with 8k just leave it there actually i think that's actually 4k it was 4096 but well maybe it's 8k it's 4096 by 4096 is the size i think but you can change it to jpeg you can leave it as a png you also have over here in the camera initiate next to it and feature extraction this is the amount of detail that it'll gather from the images and it's defaulted normal but it can go up to ultra and you also have the describer quality that can go up to ultra which if i change one of them i'm just changing them both to ultra you know so with that let's get it started and i'm gonna just pay attention to this feature extraction to make sure it doesn't hang more than half of your rams being used by other applications i already know where that's at i got the game running i got the damn jb editor running i got photo editing program running uh my blender's running let me save this i just uh or no i don't need to save that one all right that blender running this is the mod i just made i'll save it clear it out a blender yeah i hadn't forgot to close all those things this is where it helps to have more memory uh 16 gigs of ram just as nowadays you need more than that for doing stuff like this i mean it'll work on 16. keep my eye on this if this don't update i might restart it doesn't realize that about the memory as long as it updates again be all right but it has hung in here before and just stopped there's a couple things in here that takes longer than the other things feature extraction takes a while depth map takes a while i think that map and feature extraction may take the longest amount i think this sucker hung on me yes it's not even let me just reload the bastard i'm not even gonna save the file i don't know if that's what's causing it to hang it's having issues lately for me for whatever reason you can see this again if you need to see it again yeah that's already where it was that eventually i got more free ram but still ain't a lot of memory yeah it's fine now it's going on through but what it does it goes to these images and it basically looks at all these little points it might be hard to see that color change it to paint or another color there you can see that better but it takes all these little points and like at that point there same point you know if it sees it in like three places or four places then it can basically make a polygon out of i guess it triangulates it it basically uses all that information to make the mesh so how is it structured for motion the neck after it finishes this step you'll see a point cloud which is basically like these little dots like little circles it just basically it'll show you uh it's kind of like a crude representation of what the model will be you can also see all the cameras that were in the scene what it figured out where the cameras were based on the photos and once it gets past this i believe is when it'll tell you which one of these pictures if any of them didn't work or it discarded them for whatever reason it'll show like a little red symbol like these are all green but there'll be a red one that'll happen if they're blurry real blurry or they just can't get uh reflections don't work worth the crap so if you're gonna do a car you gotta find one that's very dusty or covered with pollen water doesn't do well either mirrors obviously ain't gonna do well but here you can see these are the cameras and like i said when i did the screenshots i said i didn't go all the way around the thing i just kind of went around it and then i uh i went around it and then i got closer and went around it see it intelligently figured out all those camera positions and like 3d scanners that do like 3d model scanning is basically what they do or they said they use like lasers i guess to trace the objects but it works basically the same way at least that's what i can tell from like watching how they do stuff oh my god i'll sit here and wait i'll play with these controls i'll like make the balls larger smaller make the cameras larger smaller just something just to kill the time but i'll go you can go back to the images and now it adds another layer it's got like the depth form like there are these different color nodes you can see all right it's round in the corner here it's probably depends on your cpu how long it'll take and how many pictures you have and it also depends on the resolution of those images since these images are 4k it's going to take longer than if they're all 1080p which 1080p works too when i export my videos i'll just have blender usually export them at 1080p especially if i'm using like 50 pictures and i've seen it work fine with 1080p um but this is running on an i9 850 k but this program ran just as fine on my older i7 700k it just took a little longer not not a lot longer i mean really [Music] and also i turned off the or i lowered the av instruction set and the bios to minus two because my cpu was getting hot running this it runs a lot better now i mean it ain't faster it's a little slower that i'd rather around a little slower and be cooler it's almost done see it's at the texturing point if any of these turn red there was an error there's a problem you can click on it go to the log and read it it'll tell you what it what was wrong uh if it's yellow it means it's working and with all these as it's going you can look at the log and see what it's doing in the background so now it's finished what we'll do is uh make these smaller we'll double click on texturing we'll turn off this eye for structure for motion that'll get rid of all those little balls and now we can see the model that it made which as you can see is pretty close um you can look at the photograph comparison to what the model compared to the photos look like like i'll show you um which one's the real picture which one's the rendered image it's hard to tell okay that's the rendered image so this is the photo on the left of what um what it figured from the photo what the model looked like and you can do this with real objects it ain't got to be you can even do this with screenshots in a game as long as there's not a hud and it's not pixelated i made some things from cyberpunk uh made something from uh chernobyl light you know like simple objects not like whole cities or anything just simple little things on the ground you just fly around alright so click on the texturing and go to the attributes and here you'll see at the bottom in attributes you'll see where it stuck the mesh i'll just copy that to my clipboard access a temporary folder and then i'll paste it and you see how it makes these crazy directories so that's why i copy and paste it's easier to find it that way and it did only use one texture if you look at these textures yeah it was uh pretty close to running out of room just barely made it if it would have made two textures i would have just uh went back to texturing and i would have uh told it up here at the top to be the next resolution and then it would have fit them all into there so what i'm going to do is copy these into another folder just so that they're easier to find and uh i'll just call it google map like google mountain uh i'll stick them in there i'll go ahead and change this texture name because i know it's going to be uh actually let me do this let me load up my program this is free i suggest you get it unless you have another way to export dds files dds runs more efficient in the game than a png basically the png your cpu has to decam the uh i guess it's uh uh you could decode it before it gets to the gpu where a dds it's just i guess goes straight to the gpu it's a lot faster so as you can see it's 4096 by 4096 all i'm going to simply do is just export it as a dds file in that same folder where it just came from now down here remember it's not save as it is file export as down here click on this file type pick dds uh change the name to something other than this because if you use meshroom it'll name every texture that and then you'll run into problems you have textures overwriting other textures so i'll just call this google mnt export and here's where you gotta tell the compression to be bc one and generate mid maps export it i'll just do one more thing i'll go to filters generic normal map make a like a generic normal map for it then i'll export that in the same folder actually i'm gonna export this one into the folder where i'm gonna put this model ukraine art shapes miscellaneous google mountain underscore n for normal maps you don't have to put that that's just for meter a mental note for me so i know it's a normal map see where it's at levels ukraine arc shapes miscellaneous export this time you will pick compression bc5 and you always generate mipmaps or you have sparkly twinkly noise on your texture now i'll do is load blender and i'll import in that object get rid of this cube get rid of this light this camera and import in this uh wavefront obj go to my desktop where i put that folder google mountain pick textured mesh and import it and it won't have a texture because i changed the texture name just pick viewport shading pick the object go here to material properties base color undo this little thing here and right here open up this new dds file now you can do you don't have to do that you can lo you can just leave it texture 1001.png that's fine you don't have to do all this i just do it to make the game run a little better when dealing with these models uh object this is where you gotta center it because wherever it's at here is exactly how it'll spawn in the game when you go to import it so you want it right side up and you want it in the middle set origin origin the 3d cursor the 3d cursor is this center point which you can move the cursor but you really want to leave it at 0 0 0 which is just simply where the horizontal and the vertical and or the up and down left and right and front to back line all converge that's the zero point so use object set origin origin 3d cursor object set origin geometry to origin and stick it right there in the middle now you're just going to rotate it until you get it right side up you can uh look at these left right front views and you know get it more precise now the next thing to note is like if you're looking at a side view just remember the red line is the ground or if you're looking from the other way the green lines the ground so you don't want all of it underground but you see the green line going through here you can just raise it up and you can lower it once it's in the game but i usually try to get it above the ground that way i know i got the whole model in the scene mostly i know how much i need to alter my terrain to kind of hide this stuff or how much to raise the terrain you know because i'm going to raise my terrain up probably to fix that all right now let's just have it yeah i don't know if you actually have to do this but i just after i finish moving it i just apply all transforms just have it been doing it forever now this is very small it probably fit in the palm of your hand if you could put your hand in the game so you can use this measuring tool here and just draw you a line to get an idea of the meters you know uh you can you know use that or uh what i personally do i just import in the model from the game of the car i just import in a kaleida which i already got a car from the game on my desktop for scale there it is just a hopper i told you it's a small little model and now i'll just uh i'll scale up this with the scale tool and i'll get it to the size that i want it to be in relation to the size of this truck now you can already see uh move this over you can already see like this is about how it's going to look in the game and you're driving on this is what the texture is going to look like but if you're driving over here i mean it looks fine it probably needs to be even larger than that actually sometimes like yeah there's a little road here from the map and just move the car over there man it's hard to see that car ain't it now i just exported uh i mean i just went into the game folder and uh i just unzipped one of their cars in the steam common steam your steam apps beam ng and i think it's the common folder not the comment i mean the uh content folder and then you got levels and vehicles i just go on the vehicles and pick you one and unzip it which i only save like the shell of the car but when you import it in there might be 50 parts in there i just deleted all them but one part and exported it as a dae and renamed it so i got my own little like thing for i can use for scale which works pretty good i i gotta say so i got this where i want it i'll delete it i'll just uh make sure object plow transforms to be on the safe side now if you plan on driving on it you need to make a collision mesh uh but you also have to add in um a couple empties which are basically like folders so you go up to add empty plain axis and you'll do this twice you'll double click on both of them you'll name one of them base 0 0 and you'll name the other one start 0 1. then using your uh you'll select start 0 1 you'll hold shift and you'll left click drag it in the base all right and then you'll do the same thing with this textured mesh you'll select it hold shift and drag it into start zero one now uh we need to check the polygon count so now this whole time i've never left object mode we've been in object mode this entire time and we've been looking at it with this viewport shading enabled if you turn that off you just see the mesh or the wireframe which that ain't too much too bad but because we had the program decimated already but we'll just check it we'll go to this with the object pick we'll go to this wrench add modifier decimate and as well it isn't quite a bit 161 000 faces so we'll just reduce it and get it down to something more manageable which you know the more you reduce it the worse it's gonna look unfortunately let's say 0.25 we're just going to leave it at 100 000. and i hate i hate to really reduce it too much now for the collision mesh i'm going to reduce that quite a bit so i'm going to say here and once i got this number set uh plot and now i'll duplicate this now i'll hide the first one so i can see the second one i'll double click on it and i'll say the name c-o-l-m-e-s-h-1 that'll tell the game that you're colliding with it i'll go to this modifier decimate and i'll reduce this one significantly all right then i'll apply it i'll pick them both and i'll say object shade smooth and now i mean i think that's everything oh yeah the name of the texture let's change the name of the texture by picking one of them and since you copied it you don't have to do this to both of them it'll do it for you but select one open this uh then open this one and you'll see the name of the texture just double click on it now this is the name you gotta name your texture in the in the game before you import this model so just remember what you call it i'll just call this google underscore mnt now let's export it into the game export file export colida uh find your folder for your level that you're going to play it on or put it in which for me it's the levels ukraine art shapes miscellaneous and then i'll just name the what i'm going to call the model i'll call the same thing google underscore mnt now this capital and lowercase this matters too when you're searching for it but it's case sensitive when you're looking for it and it's also case sensitive when you're making your material if you name it lowercase here and you got a uppercase in your material editor it's not going to work so as a habit i just make all my materials lowercase it's easy to remember i didn't capitalize something now it's in the game already we'll just load the game we'll load that level and by default it exported the texture into that folder also we already put our normal map in there from if you did that yeah uh it's already in there because we purposely put it there uh so fine we'll start over here now these are big objects especially when you scale them up really large and that's why i make the material double-sided so if i'm underneath it i can see it i know where it's at [Music] so i hit f11 to get my editor i will uh if you don't have this open already just go up to window material editor [Music] i'll just select the sky so i got anything i know nothing's picked new material now this is where you're naming it the same thing you name them in blender which i said i was calling it google mountain google underscore mnt all lower case create color map you gotta navigate to that folder that you exported the model to which i said was art shapes miscellaneous for me and uh uh name the mob texture the same thing i thought google i named it in texture there it is google mountain des all right open now the normal map select it and then pick that if you did that step pick that normal map and then advanced down here say double-sided perceive shadows animation no not animation lighting properties uh anastrophe filtering if you want to do pvr materials you can do that too but i'm not getting into that you should save current material now you can bring that model into the game if you did not do the texture first the model will be red [Music] if you've forgotten you made you went ahead and brought in the model don't worry you can still make the texture just save it this little save after you make it and then close the game completely reload the level and that'll be fixed granted you named the right thing uh you spelled it correctly you didn't have any typos go up here to window asset browser and then pick all models and then you can start typing in the name that you exported and you should see it pop up google mountain left click and drag it into your level to fly away from it and there we got our model you can pick the model you can hit two to rotate one to move but don't scale it if you scale it you'll screw up the collision map for it for some reason the collision maps don't scale sometimes they do sometimes they don't so just better not fool with it you just have to manually scale it in blender so once you find where you want it got where you want it you want to say you want to drive on it all you got to do is go to edit rebuild collision all right now you can go back out of your editor back to the game and you can fly to a spot and spawn your vehicle which like i said the textures don't look great on very big objects realistically to have a texture for an object this big you probably need something 50 000k i'm not fifty thousand k uh five thousand k or something uh that's why the games textures uh they work so well the way they do because they can do microwaving and all the other stuff and it looks like pbr is coming to it too [Music] i didn't pick the best place to probably make a model but i didn't want to waste your time flying around earth forever um but there are some cool places i thought of trying to make the pyramids and other things [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] that was like i think i took like a hundred pictures to make that thing and i mean just don't look right water's not uh not actually moving so you know kind of look funny i mean from far away it looked good though [Applause] now also [Applause] this isn't an accuracy [Applause] this isn't an actual terrain this is a model but the forest will work on it you can put forest items on it you know the texture isn't great the of the model but you know you can spruce it up there's a tree i made a tutorial how i made that i actually like that little tree stick a few of them on this mountain all right maybe not up that high so yeah the forest works on it you can plant four stuff on it that's no problem uh you can also drive on it obviously uh decals will work on it it may have i don't think maybe if you put the decal maybe if a decal is i don't know there's an over the top function but yeah the decals going under the object but if you put over objects it'll well i thought it would make it on the top over objects yeah it's not over it it's drawing it on whatever's down there part of it's on it there it goes but as you can see it's not perfect yeah that's not going to do well like that oh you can also make mesh roads to you know go up your mountain or whatnot now the only way you can integrate the real ground in here is to have a terrain block under it now if you got a terrain block under it i see like i'm off the other side of the actual map but i do got some of it under the map here so you can use your terrain tools and you can move your terrain down to be just underneath it just under the surface so that you can benefit from the terrain grass what i'll what you what uh what you can do too is you can bring up your terrain to be over it a little bit to kind of blend things in use your terrain paint but you know i don't know what you want to make i'm just saying you know you can you can mix and mesh the objects just like any other any other object in a game you know the terrain works with it you just have to make sure that you know if you're going to do that you basically need to have a terrain uh you know you just need the object to be you know to work with your terrain it's kind of be in it around it like in it this like this so you know you got that ground you can pull up i'd be ill if i'd accidentally save this level after i do this but i'm going to do it anyway all right so you got this uh you got your terrain you can uh drain tools and you can raise the height let's say align the mesh and it'll pull it all the way up to meet the bottom of the mesh all right give me a second here i'll say flatten set height then terrain height picker i'll pick this point all right that's quicker doing it that way lower and this is what i was saying where you you know you got a model that's cut off it's you can kind of start blending your terrain to kind of work with it it reminds me i haven't backed my level up in a while i try to back i try to back it up daily okay so i accidentally screw something up also i export my terrain so if i ever need to i'll do a backup something happened to my ter file i can reimport it i happen one time i've made my first level while my terrain was being saved in a dam this is it actually started as the grid map uh the old one all the information was being saved in the grid map folder yeah you know in the user folder anytime you modify a game level it'll make like a copy in the user folder which i had grid map in there well my terrain file every time i did any work like this it was saving in the grid map folder as its terrain file which i never played a grid map so i didn't know what it was doing uh i had a problem with my textures i told it to re uh when you do verify file integrity and steam and then i uh cleared the cache that's what it was i cleared the cache well when i came back my ukraine map was gone and i saw that damn grid map on here because it fixed grid maps what it did and it restored it so i had all my objects in this level all over the grid map but all my elevation my textures everything was screwed up but luckily i had a backup and uh that wasn't a problem i guess i probably need to make a video on how to back up your level how to restore it something screws up that'd be a good thing to know so you get the idea you can sit here forever and just you know use these models and use the terrain to work with the model and if you got different textures um has several cliffs that i can you know kind of just find something that somewhat matches or close maybe maybe it won't match but now you just have to be creative and figure something out what works for you but yeah that's just basically what i was trying to say you know you just have to mesh them in some way blend them i mean not mess them like blend them together if you ever get this happen or you see this crap where you start seeing like holes in your just i'm not going to save it but rebuild the collision save the level exit the game reload the game and that crap will be fixed i i didn't know how the hell to fix that one time and drove me crazy trying to figure out what was going on so that's how you would get it to work but like i said it's really better for you know just background stuff really and uh stick a lake on it water water block oh if you want your model whatever you make last is going to be near you know near the bottom of your scene tree but you know that stuff works great for like background stuff not really perfect for foreground stuff i mean for stuff you drive on but i think that's about everything i can't really think of nothing else to say about this uh depending on how big the object is you may can have your clouds kind of going over how close i can get the ground not a strong one yeah it seems like no matter how close them get you never really quite get to them they always just seem like they're higher than you are now i don't have my fog enabled uh but i never use that fog we use that we used fog in the 90s to hide performance you know to hide the details so things ran better i just i can't stand the thought of it nowadays which i don't even know how to make the fog back like it's supposed to be i don't moved it i don't even know what the default settings is for it no idea it seems like it's all or nothing so yeah i'll fool with it i don't know how to fool with the fog i'll never fool with it but it's obviously not right now so that's it for this you

Channel: BeamNG - TerryMartinART

Views: 10,021

Keywords: google earth to beamng, meshroom to beamng, blender to beamng

Id: deIzjdwH9hQ

Length: 60min 1sec (3601 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021