Thanks for the comments
The wheel textures are indeed sweet, I baked the normal map into the diffuse one, turned out good.
Such a hipoly model is indeed the opposite of what I usualy preach :B
But I like to bring some eye-candy now and then, like the General Lee. Such a hipoly model also allows me to play with higher specular values on some materials without resulting in faceted artefacts (in the shading).
Matt: About the smoothing groups, Econobrick almost always used them I think but he baked shading into his textures anyway. Nowadays, people like Harm and Pip tend to setup the SGs as well. New tools make it easier too. However with such material setups, the SHELL model is very important for the eye-candy as it suppresses the hard edges at the uvw map seams and anyway the point of the SHELL is to have a less severed model so that shades/highlights can run flawlessly on the whole model.
Env map + SGs makes it difficult to maintain details on the bodypaint though, must rely on floating geo or decals to add them afterward, and god knows how much C2 doesn't like decals.
C2S: I'm pretty sure you already tried every possible way
Setting LOD numbers to anything higher than 1 makes the game crash. And I guess going with stuff like MAINMODEL.2, MAINMODEL.3 etc doesn't help either...
C1 didn't even 'offer' to set the number of LOD models. It was just the three view modes. I guess C2 just ditched the cockpit view and kept the unique LOD simple model. They probably wanted to have more but it was scraped during developpement like the rest of their good ideas.
Next: Super smooth ski track :)
