Dynamic Paint over a large area

Will have to watch that video - thanks. Ideally I just want a nice smooth slightly glossy ground colour.

I had wondered if I could manually brute force it and do something like below but asking to try and learn what options/methods are available and if there's a clever solution where it'll sub-divide dynamically based on what's required.

Martin. I initially used a curve modifier on the section of tread which is how I got the viewport screenshot. But I then I wasn’t confident of animating this in sync with the wheel. 

I don’t know the build modifier. How does this work with the curve modifier? 

Can I not do it with dynamic paint and adaptive sub division? I’m guessing not as adaptive works based on the camera distance whereas I want it based on collision of 2 objects. 

Depending on how deep and the camera angle you can use dynamic paint, but instead of displacement use it as a bump/height map. I did something similar awhile back. Mine was a robot track thru snow. Yours may be easier. I created the pattern of the track and arrayed it and put it along a curve like you've done. Then put a cube longer then the pattern. The cube is to Boolean the pattern so it doesn't show until it starts moving along the curve. Parent the pattern to the tire or rig if you're like me and prefer to use rigs. In my case I had a plane following the curve going the opposite direction and it's own Boolean. It was parented to the rig also. Plane was the covered the indented part of the snow that the Pattern would fill as the track moved over it. This way you only have to animate the tire and the pattern will move forward with the tire and if you need a cover then it will move forward and disappear. Note: if the end or beginning isn't seen in the camera you won't need the Boolean. 

I think I'd need some screenshots to follow your steps Dwayne.

I was planning to animate each shot of the tyre leaving tracks separately although I still need quite a big ground plane as the angle is so low the vanishing point is very far off - almost infinite. It's only in the last shot that the camera would pull up to reveal the full 'tread' text showing the tyre leaving the underline to the text. So although I don't want to animate the whole thing, the only way I can see to get the final frame of all the text from dynamic paint requires the whole thing to be rendered from frame 1

I don't need any depth to the displacement really... all I need is a clear graphic tread pattern to be left. Dynamic paint sells the effect really nicely cos you don't get a perfect vector shape like you do with tread arrayed along a curve and the sync of tyre roll to pattern being left works perfectly regardless of any easing to the wheel roll. I don't know how to do it as a bump and not displacement. I just followed Kenny's CGC tutorial. 

I'm going to watch some tutorials on the build modifier to try and understand how it works. 

Ahh! This seems promising. I’ll try it out later. Build modifier doesn’t really do anything different in this context that animating an array along a curve does.  

I'm afraid I'm stuck. My output is 100 frames of this. Even the colour of the output makes no sense as it's neither the initial canvas nor the brush colour

Brush Settings (tyre)

Canvas Settings (Ground)

UV

Update.
Dynamic paint modifier wasn't at the top of the stack.

I now how an output of sorts from a bake but it's blurry dogshit. I've tried at 2k and 4k and 4k is arguably even worse.

I also don't understand why the colours are off

I need the output of this visible in the viewport. I don't understand how I'm supposed to use / incorporate this into the render. Do I have to take this bake and then somehow animate this as an alpha of a material? It feels like it's getting too complicated. All I want is the dynamic paint effect but without having to have a massive subdivided plane. There must surely be an easier way

If I use it as a mask I need the proper resolution. So it seems like I’m back to square one as image resolution will need to be enormous to capture the resolution I need. 

Why don’t the colours match?

But I want the texture from the dynamic paint not from the array as that’s too perfect  it also means I have to try and match two separate animations  

It looks like I’m back to manually gridding the ground plane and sub diving those squares to get the coverage I need at the resolution I need without killing the computer. 

I can’t believe there’s not a better solution to this tho. I really should probably give up on trying to solve this as it clearly beyond my skill level and I’m sure any attempt I make is going to be sub par and won’t be able justify the time I’ve sunk into this.