Defining the Appearance of a Track

Owned by DEVOPS
Oct 05, 2021

Unlike rigid tracks which use a graphic asset to represent the track itself, flexible tracks need to move and bend like a flat cable running over a variable number of road wheels.

For this reason, flexible tracks have a special set of Graphics parameters which allow you to customize the look of the track that gets generated at runtime.

  1. From the Explorer, expand the vehicle preset and click on a Track Graphics property (for example, Left Track Graphics).

    The properties now appear in the Properties Panel.
    editor_cs_gfx_props.png

  2. Navigate to the Parameters section, where a number of settings can be changed.

  3. You can change the dimension, shape and color by modifying the following:

    • Number of Sides: Number of sides when the extrusion technique is by cylinder.
    • Radius: represents the width of the track (the default is 0.1 which quite thin for a track).
    • Roundness: Roundness ratio (using 1.0 produces equal size all around)
    • Color: Color used for the cable
    • Graphic Material: Choose the graphics material used for rendering the track (for example, CableStrappingSolid).

  4. You can customize how the track shape is drawn by modifying the following:

    • Technique: Kind of shape to extrude along the sections of the cable (for example, Strap).
    • Interpolation: Turn on interpolation, and then use Subdivision per section to smooth the cable between cable sections, thereby producing better curves.

  5. You can control the quality of the renderer:

    • Renderer Type: Whether to use GPU (geometry shaders) or CPU (fail safe) renderer.
    • Texture Repeat Length: Number of times the texture is repeated along the length of the track.
    • Texture Repeat Width: Number of times the texture is repeated along the width of the track.