INTRODUCTION

This documentation covers the basics to model and export a car into Rally Trophy, and is supplied with an example car. When making your own car, easiest way is probably by loading the example object and just replacing meshes and assigning existing materials to your own meshes. This is much nicer than assigning everything from scratch, trust me.
The example model has most of it's objects hidden, if you find yourself wondering where the tires etc are.

NOTE: To avoid too big downloads, we didn�t include textures for the car and skybox model in the package. However, you can extract all the textures you need from BZF files using BZF Manager. Alternatively, you can take a screengrab from the UVW mapping window in Max to get yourself a nice template to draw your textures on.

More detailed instructions are coming later, including car physics settings. Copy all the plugins to the plugins directory in your 3DS Max folder, such as C:3DSMAXPLUGINS and you're set.


1. MODELING

1.1 General guidelines to keep the mesh nice and tidy:

• Use 1mm vertex snap
  
• After scaling, rotations, bends etc it's a good idea to use 1mm quantize so the snap stays aligned.
  
• Try to avoid huge differences in polygon sizes where there are large and flat surfaces, such as doors. Environmental mapping will stretch and bugger up if the size differences are huge.
  
• Attempt to keep the polygon rows as smooth and "flowing" as possible to avoid reflection/shading artifacts in the game.
  
• Environment mapping makes things difficult also because it requires a certain vertex/edge order in adjacent polygons to keep the reflections straight. If your car has really strange looking reflection quirks, it probably has too many polygon edges connected to a single vertex. This is often solved by rotating polygon edges on the troublesome spot. Sometimes finding the correct order for edges takes a long while, if you're looking for a perfect reflection. Then again, nobody might care, so you don't have to lose your sleep over it.

• Car body's pivot point is always in the world origo (0,0,0 coordinates). Many aspects of the car physics are dependent this.
  
• Tyres are placed so their road contact point is in level with origo. If they're not, they'll wobble and generally go all ove r
  
• Body_lod's roof is the same as in highpoly body, otherwise interior objects can clip through
  
• Make sure your pivot points are where they should be:
  
• hood and trunk pivot points at their reallife pivot points
  
• tyre pivot points in the exact center of the tyre model
  
• Interior object pivot points at origo, just like the body pivot point
  
• Steering wheel pivot point should be aligned with the steering wheel, i.e. model the steering wheel at 90 degree's angle and center pivot point.
  
• If your car parts are all in the right positions in Max but are messed up (misplaced, rotated, whatever) in the game it means Max has exported them with their old pivot point instead of what it has told and shown you all along, and things need pivot reseting and/or pivot rotating and/or 'Reset XForm' applied. This is a nice feature of Max that has made many modeler's hair fall out, and we're glad someone else gets to experience it now, too. Yay!