Rally Trophy Facts :

Developer: Bugbear Ent. Publisher: Jowood Simulated Series: Rally Article Author: Bugbear Ent. User's Article Rating: 6.09 Number of votes: 65 Users's Comments / Reviews: 1 Date posted: 20-12-2002

Car Editing Guide

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 didnít 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. 1.2 Things to remember: 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! 1.3 Required filenames and object names model.bmf collision.bmf wiper01.bmf wiper02.bmf (not needed if the car has only one wiper, like Stratos has just wiper01.bmf) rain.bmf ## model.bmf consists of following subobjects: body - self-explanatory. body_lod - lowpolygon level of detail model body_crash - damage morph target for body collision - collision object for the car. keep this AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE, otherwise it'll cause a performance hit hood - self-explanatory hood_crash - damage model for the above trunk - self-explanatory trunk_crash - damage model for the above interior_hi - interior model that shows in interior view interior_lo - interior model that's visible through car windows when viewed from outside tire_fr tire_fl tire_rr tire_rl - naming format for the tires. fr = front right, fl = front left, rr = rear right, rl = rear left tire_fr_lod tire_fl_lod tire_rr_lod tire_rl_lod - lowpolygon level of detail models shadow_tire_fr shadow_tire_fl shadow_tire_rr shadow_tire_rl - shadowmodels that get projected to the road steering_wheel_hi - interior view steering wheel steering_wheel_lo - lowpolygon steering wheel when viewed from outside indicator_rpm - indicator needle for the engine RPM indicator_speed - indicator needle for speed wipers - wiper animation object, look at the example car provided for reference ext_pipe01-02 - exhaust smoke emitter dummies (tells the engine which point to push smoke from, place at the tip of exhaust pipe) light_front_right01-03 light_front_left01-03 light_brake_right light_brake_left light_rear_left light_rear_right light_reverse01-02 - Light flare dummies (these tell the engine where to place the light flares) ## rain_drop.bmf subobjects rain_window rain_body rain_hood rain_trunk - These are highly subdivided sections of body, each vertex of these objects marks a spot where the raindrop effect occurs. ## wipers.bmf subobjects frame00 frame01 frame02 etc - Windshield wiper animations 1.4 Materials Look at the example object to see how the surfaces are sectioned. Brief guidelines on this: Parts of the car body that always stay shiny are assigned as body, and car parts that get dusted are body_dust. Remember, windows can't get dusted up so it might be a good idea to keep the roof etc shiny, limiting dust materials beneath the windows. Material names should be kept the same as in reference object. All materials must be assigned as bugbear material! All materials have ambient/diffuse color as white and black specular color. Specular level, glossiness and soften are set to 0. All materials have alpha source as 'none' (opaque) and alpha maps as 'mono channel output: alpha' Assign 'no z-write' to windows in the bugbear material tab. car exterior material id's: 1 body 2 body dust (texture morph on) 3 none 4 none 5 window front 6 window leftside 7 window rightside 8 window back 9 headlight_left 10 headlight_right 11 rearlight_left 12 rearlight_right 13 sparelight car interior material id's: 1 cockpit 2 windows 3 steering wheel 4 meters (self illumination 50%) 5 window front 6 window leftside 7 window rightside 8 window back 9 interior_roof 10 interior_lo 11 indicators (self illumination 50% tires: tire (alphatest, disabled) tire_alpha (alphatest, forced)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 Notice that you have to export the collision object separate as it's in it's own collision.bmf file. When exporting collision mesh, hide all other objects, choose export mode 'Generic Collision' and uncheck 'hidden objects'. Debug Info is useful if (when) you're exporting stuff that makes RT hiccup and die or doesn't show in the game. It creates a debug text file in the same folder as exported object with bucketfuls of info.

Comments :
Author: Krane	21-12-2002
Let's give a big hand to Bugbear for their christmas present!! :)

published at : bhmotorsports.com © copyright 1999 - 2002