Well with the premium cars we do have the quote from Kaz that said 60% of dev time for the entire game went on car modelling, so yes they obviously had data to start with but they still obviously spent a long, long time on them. Too long if you ask me, but that's another topic.
Well, we don't know if that 60% is in terms of actual development time, or just in terms of "man-hours", given the majority of the staff are modelers. The tracks took much longer, on a per-unit basis - it just happens there's a lot fewer of them than there are cars.
Well the way cars are modelled technically hasn't changed, they're still built with polys, it was just much easier to start again because of how they modelled them originally. If the standard cars were the same quality but made up of individual panels I don't know, maybe upgrading them is possible. But tracks aren't the same, they are obviously not one entire 'panel', rather a huge contstruction of polys/shapes etc. You can remove parts/add parts to a track model quite easily.
It's the exact same thing, though: the mesh for the terrain will be too low a resolution, needs replacing - same with the "ribbon" of track surface; the buildings, stands, barriers (if not modeled into the terrain mesh) spectators etc. may well be "modular", but they're still ground-up models in the same way the wheels on a Premium car are ground-up. Sure, there may be a lot of textures that can be re-used at a marginally higher resolution (which may be where a lot of the "recognition" comes from in the original tracks, for instance), but most of the modeling, the actual polygons, will have to be "new".
I agree port is not the best word and I don't think I personally used it, rather pointed out that they wouldn't have started from scratch modelling the track as they do with Spa, or in the future Bathurst.
But would you want them to start from scratch, if so much of the raw data is unchanged; wouldn't that just be a waste of time? It only takes a few days to collect the raw data, though; the modeling (including textures, AI stuff, etc.) is the hard part, and supposedly takes "months" (certainly weeks in "real time").
Suffice it to say, Motegi isn't one of my favourite track(s), and I'm not sure I'll be buying it myself at that price, either. It'll be in GT6 anyway, probably a straight port, mind you...
