2. TEXTURES

Look at the example car's materials to see the filenames. Alpha channel in the body.tga is used to control the strength of environment mapping. White in alpha channel means no reflection, and black stands for full reflection. It's a good idea to keep the body as a moderately light gray and headlight's / chrome bits quite dark so they reflect the surroundings more strongly.

Alpha channel in the window texture is for opacity/transparency. If you want tinted windows, just color it in the RGB channels and adjust the amount of tint via alpha channel. Black (RGB values 0,0,0) means 100% transparent, white (255,255,255) 100% opaque.

Tire textures have the holes in the rims by alpha channel unless you model your own rims completely with polygons.

Rest of the textures should be pretty self-explanatory when checked out in Photoshop or whatever that understands them and using the above as a guideline.

REMEMBER: If you're using Photoshop 7, it mucks up the alpha channels from all TGA files it saves. I'm not sure if this has been fixed in the patch.


3. EXPORTING

Make sure you have all the plugins in the Max plugins directory such as c:3dsmax4plugins or where ever you have your Max installed. In file -> export menu you should see a file type .BMF which is used to export cars and other objects into Rally Trophy. When you have typed the filename and hit Save button, you'll be greeted with a BMF Exporter window. For basic car mesh exporting, you'll need following settings:

• Choose export mode 'generic' from the dropmenu.
  
• Checked options 'Meshes' and 'Hidden objects'. Cars don't have lights (as such), cameras nor vertex colors.
  
• Vertex cache optimize checked under Preprocessing