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A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

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Fuel
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A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Hello guys and gals! I've just been teaching myself how to use CarEd with the aim of making a few cars (duh!) for C2. This is what I've got so far:

Image

This has taken about 6 days, on and off, to get this much done so don't expect anything anytime soon. This may not even end up being anything at all as it is just a test based on a few sketches I made.

Anyways, I'm trying to make a wheel now but every time I try it ends up looking all wonky and, well, not circular. The various tutorials posted here and linked on Road Reaction have been quite helpful so far, however the making of a wheel is eluding me.. Any tips on this or anything else really would be much appreciated!

Bear in mind I am COMPLETELY new to any kind of 3d modelling at all - never even tried before in the 30 years I've been on this planet. I have recently tried 3d Studio Max and Zmodeler but I'm not having much luck getting to grips with them so I'm just sticking with CarEd for the time being.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Razor »

Nice curves you got there, I never had this much patience when I used to use CarEd, probably why most of my early vehicles are blocky pieces of crap.
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coffeycup
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

Yes nice curves.

You can use Random Monkeys tutorial on making a sphere.
Just follow the first couple of steps to get your round shape for the tire.


You Iterate and Rotate points to get a circle
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Aha! Completely missed that one, thanks Coffey :thumbsup:
Thanks for the comments too guys, I'll keep working on those curves :wink:
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fireman »

What a gay topic.

Two men making compliments about a man's curves.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

If that was am attempt at humor it failed. We don't care what anyone's sexual orientation is here. And you shouldn't either.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by random_monkey »

Heh, that tutorial is pretty horrible, to be honest.
It gets the basic idea across though I suppose, but you look like you're on the right track already with smooth parts.

I think one thing to remember is just to experiment with joining up your points differently. Sometimes you'll create a couple of polies in a diamond and it'll end up with a cross section like \/ with a fold in the middle. So just wiggle your model around and watch the shine on the red. If there's anything that looks out of place, try moving the 'fold' to be across the other direction (if that makes sense) and it might look a bit better ^_^
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Toshiba-3 »

Triangulation :)

D-B's little article illustrates that:
http://thesprayshop.net/content/making- ... ore-smooth

The lower the tricount, the more important triangulation is :swheel:
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Thanks for the tips guys it's all coming in handy!
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Quick update - ditched the original model in my first post, I realised I'd only been making one half of the car and wasn't really working with intention of adding a cockpit or doors or much of anything else really - it all went horribly wrong and got a bit too complicated for me.

So, I've started again going a bit more basic. Different design, loosely basing it on a Ford GT (finally figured out how to get blueprint pics into cared :rockon: ) I'm paying less attention to high polycounts and have made the basic body so far with doors, roof and windshield as separate components. No real problems so far and all the info/resources you guys have given me has helped immensely.

I can't find anything documented about this particular 'problem' I'm having - I'm making the exhaust pipes at the moment and I've made one basic cylinder shape with a 16 sided circle. I would like to have 2 of these 'welded' together in one component, without having to define a billion triangles again. Is there any way of copying and pasting said cylinder within the same component? Pic included to hopefully explain a bit better what I'm getting at (apologies for poor use of memes, internet oversaturation ahoy!).

Image

I've tried iterating the pipe component but that just creates another component separate to the original. I can iterate the points within the component but I'd rather jump in front of a truck before defining all those triangles again.. From what I understand grouping components wouldn't do what I'm looking to do either, would it?
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

It's been a while since I've used CarEd but I don't think there is a way to merge components. Why not just group them. That's what people do when making wheels, grouping the wheel front, back and tread into a single grouped object.

If you really, really need to merge then all I can think of is compile your car so you create a .DAT file. Import the .DAT into PT2. Delete everything except the exhaust pipes. Flatten heirachy. SaveAS a different name. Go back to your car in CarEd and import the merged exhaust pipe.

This is why a lot of us have moved away from using CarEd, it's just so painful to do anything.
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Ok, no worries, I'll just group the 2 components then. Weirdly I haven't found CarEd too bad until now. Might just be because it's fairly basic so my brain can cope with it :oops: Might give another program a shot once I'm done with this car..
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

OK, small update. Things are going slowly. Should be finished with this one by the time Reincarnation is out :tongue: Seriously though, it's not going to be anywhere near done for a while. I spend a lot of my time just tweaking the model here and there mostly to put off the texturing.. Not looking forward to that.
May have bitten off more than I can chew. I've completely redone the front twice now, either due to bad model structure or I just didn't like it.
I got really frustrated with how things were going so tried out zmodeler, google sketchup and that just wasn't happening either. Mental block I guess. So I took a break for a couple of weeks. Got back into it this weekend and this is what I've got so far:

Image

Any ideas or suggestions for both design or how I'm doing things will be welcome.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Toshiba-3 »

I think you're progressing well Fuel :swink:
It's a good thing that you take your time and go slowly, even redoing parts etc.
That's how you'll get a good grasp of the whole process, things will seem much simpler afterward.

Just don't go too far into complexity setup-wise maybe?
Try to get done with the model, explore texturing possibilities, discover the paperwork to bring it ingame :)
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

Yeah! That looks great. I agree with Tosh, don't try to do everything with the first car.
Hell, my first cars were just a rolling brick with wheels. :tongue:

I'd just add a simple engine compartment with motor and maybe a basic interior and then get on to texturing.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Pip the pest »

Yep, Great so far, and totally agree with Tosh and Coffey :smile:
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Thanks guys, I was thinking along the same lines. Just starting to close off the open parts of the model as best I can and also added a rear mounted engine now. Going to try putting it in game as is just to see how it's looking so far.
One question I do have - at the moment the doors I've modelled as a whole with the windows. I guess I'll need to split the model for texturing purposes? You know, so I can have smashable and see through windows?
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

Yeah, in CarEd only one texture per object so you'll need to have the windows as separate parts.

Note: you might want to use separate textures for each window. Just make four copies of your glass texture ( i.e. front_window, left_window, right_window and back_window) otherwise all the windows will smash at the same time.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Righto, will do. Thanks for the tip :beer:
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Deep_Blue »

Nice ta know I'm not the only one that's confussed by stuff 'other-than-CarEd.'

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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

Just so there's no confusion.
You make 4 'textures' in CarEd but they all can point to a single 'glass.tif'
You don't need 4 separate tifs.

(What you're really doing is creating Materials that use texture images. )

Image
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Model is pretty much done except for a driver model. Can't decide whether to use the low poly template or the Earl one :smile:

Thanks for the clarification on textures and materials there Coffey, I'm just now starting to attempt texturing. I'm going to have to use PT2 to do some I think. Mostly because I haven't split the main chassis up enough. From what I understand I can use PT2 to select specific areas of one component to texture. I don't know really, I'm just going by the small amount of resource I've found on the matter.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

I don't know much about texturing using PT2. But here's a tutorial:
http://coffey.polygonized.com/TrackMaki ... jects.html
This is from a track making tutorial but techniques are the same..

Or you could just split your model up into more pieces and stick with CarEd
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

I'm not dead! Anyways, took a looong ol' break there thanks to various things going on. Got a couple weeks off work now though so I aim to get this finished or close to finished.
I do have a question or two though about grouping in CarEd. Does every component need to be grouped? Is it meant for defining detachables and whatnot later once it's in PT2? Is it just a convenience thing? I'm just trying to get my head around the idea of grouping in general.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Deep_Blue »

Grouping is for detachables. Like the example in a CarEd generated .wam file:

A fender with a taillight on it-the fender and taillight get grouped as one component (rrfender), that way when the (right rear) fender comes off, the taillight comes with it, otherwise the light would just hang there in space looking silly.

The hood of my MM2 towtruck has four driving lights on it. The hood, the inner hood and all four driving lights and four lenses are grouped as "hood."

Same idea with door skins/ inner panels with windows..so they act as one unit-except with lights and windows you define smashables on the glass parts as well.

Looks like some nice work there, Fuel. :rockon:
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Thanks DB, I thought it might be something like that. Got it all grouped up now I think. Now on to properly texture it. Not looking forward to that. I do have the basic wireframe textures (texture mapped? is that the right term?) to work from now and I have ideas I'm just no good with actually executing them :confused:
This one is not an artist - a crash course in photoshop might be in order this week :oops:
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Deep_Blue »

Heh. I c'n dig it.

There's usually a lotta trimming, moving sections and getting stuff to stick the right way. Thankfully CarEd only gives ya so many ways to do that.

Then there's the trimming and adjusting.

Here's an example of photo textures applied without any adjustments. They pretty much fit because I used the same pictures to make the model from:
Frank
Frank
FrankenUte.jpg (16.33 KiB) Viewed 8654 times
However, ya can see places like where I'm gonna hafta adjust the fender arches because they're a bit aft of where they're s'posed to be. The dark part on the front fenders is not a glitch...That's a shadow from the headers that're not there yet. :smile:


I always use photo textures. If I build my model exactly like the reference pic, chances are the textures I pick are gonna stick just right. Sometimes I have to copy/paste a fenderwell or something a couple times and redo where it was to get it to line up with the component, but it's usually no big deal in CarEd. CarEd is limited as to what it can do with textures-Some of the guys here can tell ya how to get all kinds of cool effects.....Unfortunately I'm not one of them! :lol:

I'm old-skool, and CarEd is my proggy. (Thinking of playing around with Sketchup lately, tho....
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Quick update:

Image

Really rough placeholder textures but it's a start. Not having a lot of time to work on it at the moment.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Pip the pest »

That's coming along nicely, give yourself a pat on the back. :smile:
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

Yeah, that's coming along. Don't forget you can use photos of headlights and grilles pasted into your skins for those added details.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

I am DONE with texturing. Hate it. :supermad: Don't really want to do anymore. Got everything placeholdered now, pretty much as you see it above with a few minor changes and it doesn't look toooo bad in game. I'll have to come back to it later or just put it up as is and let people skin it how they want. Anyhoo..

I'm now on to setting up the car. First question, is there any particular order to set the car up in? I've setup the main detachable body parts which was fairly simple. I'm just thinking that I haven't setup lights, smashables, the bounding box, simple model or anything else yet and wondered if any of that has an effect on what i've already done or if any of it could affect anything else later down the line. Also does PT2 really NEED to be used to set up anything? From most of the tutorials and guides it seems like it's mostly just text file editing.
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by coffeycup »

No, there's no particular order.
No, you don't NEED to use PT2
if you're making this car with CarEd.

Have you got it in game yet? CarEd already generates a BBox when you compile it.
It can go into the game without the detachables, smashables etc. for test driving.
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Fuel
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Re: A complete newbies early WIP - help appreciated

Post by Fuel »

Thanks for the clarification. I've got it in game now, mostly working. Just need to make a simple model, do the smashables and get the rear lights working which don't seem to want to at the moment.

Calmed down a bit on the whole texturing thing now so I'll try to put a bit more effort into that too.
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