Dear returning Carmageddon fans Image

These last years, the CWA Board assimilated what was archived from many old Carmageddon forums, including the whole of the Official Carmageddon.com Forums.
If you wish to merge any previous account you might have had with your new or existing CWA account, don't hesitate to reach out to us !

CarEd Tutorial The Second

The greatest unfinished sequel ever!
Post Reply
User avatar
Mad_Maxine
Pink
Posts: 3232
Joined: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:24 pm
Contact:

CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Mad_Maxine »

Image

The first one died.. So..

Cared Tutorial The second!,

This time I have signed up created a name at Imagshack so the pictures should not dissapear this time,

So ok I may not be the best care maker in the world, But I do enjoy using cared Just like we used to over a decade ago, In this tutorial Ill make simple easy to folow steps

explaning how to make a car from the very start, Right up untill you have it in the game, It will include lots of pictures to show whats happening at all time, I myself have a

hard time folowing walls of text, so to have images to show where you are and whats going on I hope will help some people and solve all the 'how do you do this bit' questions,

In this tutorial we will learn to make a car with working doors, moving suspension detatchable parts and smashable textures.

[Disclamer]
//Im not saying this is the only way to make things, or the best way, But this is the way I do things and im sharing that with you//

Lets load up cared then, Im sure most people know what things to But. Here Is a quick rundown

Image

To the left the component window. and to the right the view of your model with 4 windows.

In the component window,
In red the componenets box. where you create your objects and name them, select wich direction the textures map from, and what texture that particular object uses,

In green is the textures box, you use this to load and name textures, The name is important for identifying things later, such as smashable textures, brake lights, etc,

In blue the points box. here you can select from individual points delete points, or choose to select points from Any object rather than just the one that is selected in the

components box. Ill cover Transform, and Iterate later.

In the pink, the triangles box. Here you can select from any triangle of your componenet, create, delete and invert triangles.

And now onto the viewer on the right.

You will see the larger window with 4 boxes, one labled Left, Front, Top, and a plain blue box wich is the 3D view, Beow that is a Refresh button, this will be neaded to refresh

the 3D view if it for some reson goes all funky, as it dose from time to time, Or to be used if some fetures stop working, such as creating triangles etc wich ill get to..

So lets start! you can create whatever you want however you want But usually Ill like to get a picture of what im making and use it as a rough guid, My imagination fails at

times so This helps me to visulise what I want to make, For this car Ill be making a toony form of a hotrod truck, So Ill just google up images of something simler to what I

want to do.

Image

So there it is, I found some images on googles of the kind of shape I would like to make so lets start with the actual modling.

Go over to the component window and click the + sign in the Components box, that was marked in red before. This will create an object called.. NewObject. to rename it click on

the box below that and change the name to what we want to do, First im making a door, The left door, so Ill name that 'DoorL'

Image

And now your object is named. By clicking the x button wich is red, This will delete the object.. so dont press that now.

Back over to the model viewing window. first we want to make points, To make a point hold down Alt, and left click, This will create a point, wich will be a small x. When

selected the small x has a circle around it, To DeSelect all points right click anywhere in that window. And to select points, Hold down Ctrl, Left click, and drag. any points

you have selected can be moved by holding down left click and draging while pressing no keys.

So lets make the outline of our Door.

Image

So now we have that, we need to fill it in with triangles, To do that select 3 points and eaither press the Define Triangle button over in the component window, Or for speed

Press the D key. If pressing D dose nothing click the Refresh button at the bottom right of the window and now it should work, Select any 3 points and press D, you have a

triangle.. so now I will fill in the door leaving a hole for the window.

Image

There Filled in the door left the window blank and strightend the lines up.
As you may see when you move the 3D object around in the blue box in the bottom right, Only one side of the object we created is visable, this can be changed by inverting the

triangles. Wich can take time but theres allways faster ways to do things wich I will explain later.
For now lets position the door where we want it, Its the left door so lets move it over to the left, I do this by going to the box marked TOP. and selecting all the points in

the door and draging it over to the left,

Image

Now that looks about the right distance, Lets coppy that and make the right door,
But before we do that this seems like a good time to explain how Transform, And Iterate work, (the ones under the Component box)

Both of these buttons opens up a new window,

Image

Both of wich look very simler,

The Translate box moves the object around, X being side to sdie, Y up and down, Z being forword and back, Scale, ofcorse scales the object to whatever size you want, And rotate

changes.. Well the rotation of the object, Origin. I never use so you will have to ask one of the ral Oldskool modders what that does, Ive never needed it so far tho.

The diffrence betwene Transform and Iterate being, Transform will move the object you have selected in the components box, Where as Iterate will leave that object alone and make

the changes to a coppy of that object, Wich is how we will create that Right door,

Open the Iterate box and type -1 In the X of the scale box, This will mirror the image to the side. and create the other door.

Image
Image

As you can see this has mirror the object and created a coppy. Now all we need to do is rename that copy.. so 'DoorR' it is then.
Now lets skip ahead a little undill we have a basic model. Rember that every part that you want to be a detatchable needs to be seprate. Also any part that has diffrent textures

will need to be modeld sepratly.. Dont worrie you can groupe them later. As components can only have one texture in cared, and that texture can only be projected to one

direction. Keep that in mind while creating here.

Coming along..

Image

Now theres something important I need to say now were at this stage. The wheels of the car need to be named, FLWHEEL, FRWHEEL, RLWHEEL, RRWHEEL, clearly meaning Front left, rear

right, etc. if named corectly like this when the car is finished cared will automatically set them up as working wheels. rear driving and front steering.

Image

Now to just finish off the model of the truck.

Image

Well. looks like thats done, Now its time texture, Texturing for me is fun, Its where things come alive and finally look how you imagine ( some of the time atleast ) so..

Creating textures, You can do this however you like, Drawing them in your favroite graphics program, Using photos from the internet and editing them as textures, For this were

going to do some carmageddon style textures, all you need to know is textures need to be Tif files. and they need to be in your cars Tiffrgb folder. They can be.. 16x16, 32x32,

64x64, 128x128, 256x256, Or any combination.. Like 32x64.

To create a texture, Just click the + sign this time in the textures box.

Image

As you can see it creates a new texture just like it did with the new object, tho this time insted of naming it, just leave it the way it is, it will be automatically named when you load a texture.. and talking of textures Heres a quick little way I sometimes work,
Now usualy Ill use photo textures, I do that a lot, Some other times Ill do drawn ones in a cartoony style, for this tutorial I will make textures i nthe orignal carmageddon style, so Ill be editing some orignal textures, using some old ones, and creating some, that will include chrome and the likes,

Image

So here Is my door texture, simple looking huh, Now that we have a texture, So all you do is save it click the ... button on the textures box and youll get a window opening up and you should see all of the textures in the tiffrgb folder, and then you load the one you want,

Image
Image

Tu-Duh!, derp, Now you can see that the texture is loaded and all you do now is add it to your model by going and selecting wich part you want to apply the texture to, Once you have that part highlighted you look below it and see where it says Textures : None, We click that and see a list of our textures, select the one you want and click that, The mapping below that tells wich way the texture is projected from, so top will be top, bottom left, right front back, so we will need to set this one to Left, ad there we have it A door maped from the left o nthe model,

Image

Now do this untill everythings textured!, carmageddon has some good textures to use for beginners, theres allways google and the internet, and theres stuff like the texture pack I made with some basic stuff in there, So Lets finish this bit,

Image

Hooray, Fully textured, As you can see ive just stuck a chrome texture onto the chrome bits and Ill show you how to do that later, For now we need to finish the model, Looks like most of the actual modling is done so stay tuned!, Ill post another part of this tutorial shortly, Making it as I go along, Next time Ill add the basic carmageddon drive to the car, check the scale, set the components, and compile the car, Stay tuned

End of Part 1
Last edited by Mad_Maxine on Sun Aug 04, 2013 8:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Tags:
User avatar
Mad_Maxine
Pink
Posts: 3232
Joined: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:24 pm
Contact:

Re: Tutorial The Second

Post by Mad_Maxine »

Part 2

So now we have Our model we need to set up the components, Components are parts of the car. so you can have the door made from many parts rathe than just one solid part in

cared,
So click the component tab and then Group Components

Image

There a window will apear,

Image

As with everything before to create a new component you just press the + button and then type the name in the space below,

Image

So now add parts to your compnenet by using the arrows wich will move them from the list of parts you have, Also on the first part tick the 'Is Master Group' box, As this will

make this the Master component, wich will act as the main chassis of the car, And will cast the shaddow, wich will apear at the widest points of any object in this group.
So there we go thats what my component looks like after adding those parts,

Image

After that, repeat with all other parts you want to be one object,

Image

There looks neater now too.
Rember Components can be made of parts with the same name, However there can not be two components with the same name, Or the car wont compile... Wich its time to do now..

Wait a second there, There is one point I Allmost totaly forgot to mention, And that is the car must be above the purple bottom line in cared, This shows where the ground in the

game is so sit the car so the wheels are just touching it, like so,


Image

The last thing to do before compiling is checking the scale, Usually Ill do this by importing the Driverbod that comes with cared and matching it up, since that is the same size

as a game ped it will give you the scale of things.

Image

There we go, Wow, were way off, So ill delete that drive model and resize using the transform window, Its quite large so ill set the scale to just under half 0.45 scale all

round making sure you click the apply to all visable components box too.

Image

Time to re-import that driver.

Image

Now Ill delete that drive again and compile the car.

Go to the File tab and click that go down to compile model,

Image

This will compile the car and create other files in its folder to make it into a working carmagedon car

Image

So lets try this out, Assuming you have a standurd carmageddon game, just coppy the folder with the name of your car to, Carmageddon/data/cars
Then add Carname to the oponent.txt in place of the eagle, just dont forget to put it back to normal after you are done testing.

Image

Now let us load the game!

Image

Ok good that seemd to work well, One thing you might spot is one of the textures will be messed up, In this case the door. its only showing the dark green, wich is the top half

of the door, and it will change as you drive, Thats because its the first texture we added, so its wrote down as a light in the txt file, so lets fix that now, Just because it

anoys me to see it, takes away from the car, Ok so my brake light texture is called 'TutBrake.TIF'

Image

Now theres two ways to do this, One is to have a simple On, Off, brake light that uses two textures, or have it all in one with reverse lights, Wich I will use

This is how the brake light, wich currently uses the door texture, is set up in the car txt

Image

For some reson It makes two of them, This seems to stop the brake light smashing sometiems in my past experiance with smashable textures so we will get rid of one, and also

change the 'TuteDoor' To ''TutBrake' And we will end up with this,

Image

Now thats set up all we have to do is edit the texture, First thing is to coppy it 4 times into its self, so you have a block of 4 identical textures in the brake light texture

file.. as such.

Image

Now what those 4 are for. Is, the normal light with nothing on, the brake, reverse, and braking while in reverse. Heh and to think this was 1998, grand turismo dident even have

reverse lights,

Image

Image

And now look, Back in game all the lights work,

Image

Well again thats all for now, Join me next time when we work on the car cosmetics In plaything, That program is really not as bad as you may think, Ill show you how to do double

sided textures, Chrome effect, And mabye even a little Specular highlight type shading.

End of part 2
Last edited by Mad_Maxine on Sun Aug 04, 2013 8:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
coffeycup
Genesis
Posts: 4848
Joined: Sun Sep 27, 1998 6:00 pm
Contact:

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by coffeycup »

This is great Maxine. Even more detailed than the first tutorial. (which I am deleting since it's pretty useless at the moment)

The only thing I saw worth moving was the list of

CarEd Hot Keys:
Delete - Cut selected points
Ctrl-x - Cut selected points
Ctrl-c - Copy selected points
Ctrl-v - Paste points
Ctrl-z - Undo
Alt-Bksp - Undo
TAB - Cycle through translate locks
i - invert selected triangle face
2 - previous triangle face
w - next triangle face
1 - previous vertex
q - next vertex
d - define triangle
x - align X
y - align Y
z - align Z
Alt-1 - load ZY Trace Image
Alt-2 - load XY Trace Image
Alt-3 - load XZ Trace Image
Edit window Mouse actions:
left click - de-select all points
left drag - translate the view
Alt-click - add a point
Alt-drag - scale the view
Ctrl-drag - select points
Shift-drag - de-select points
right drag - translate selected points
User avatar
Mad_Maxine
Pink
Posts: 3232
Joined: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:24 pm
Contact:

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Mad_Maxine »

Well thanks coffey, I forgot about the hotkeys from the old tutorla.. I only really use the creating points one anyway..

Onto the third,

Part 3

Plaything time,

Yup its that time many people who start out modding dread, and thats the time to start using Plaything2, but once

you get used to it its really not that bad, You dont even need to move any parts if you dont want to (however for

this I will)

So lets open Plaything,

Image

What we have here is a simler 4 boxes as cared, as you can see these ones are labled, tho the 3d window Is not as

free moving as in cared, Lets just ignore most of the tools for now And do the basic stuff we came here to do,

Chrome textures, So open up your car click File, Import Brender ACT file, and locate your cars folder and load

whatever your car is caled, In this case, TUTORIALCAR.ACT

Image

Aft er this you will be asked to open the mat file, for this TUTORIALCAR.MAT, After this, if all textures are in

place and nothing is missing, wich It wont be if you have done this so far, It will load your car into plaything,

Image

As you may spot any Pure black textures with RGB of all 0 will apear transparent here, back from the old days of

carmageddon, nothing to worrie about most people ignore it, However if this does for some reson bother you and your

only making c2 cars, you can go
to Edit, Prefrences, (Or press shift+P) there you can edit the color of the background, and set eaither black to

transparent Or replace with solid color as shown here.

Image

Now you see your car, and all the textures that come with it, LETS MAKE CHROME!, Go to the texture you want to be

'shiney' and double click on it, this will open a new window

Image

Go to the Flags button, and when thats open tick the Env mapped (inf) or the one below it, I havent really learnd

what the diffrence is but they look simler ingame to me, You can play with this and ecperiment if you want,

Image

Now that is done youll see the material change, the texture will be reflected all around it rather than just being

projected from one side, Now that is done go to any textures that will be seen from both sides in game, (in this

case the hood, and the doos) and go to the flags button again in the material editor and click 'Two-sided' as it

says this will make the texture show on both sides..
Note: Any textures with an alpha chanel (as in transparent) will automatically be two sided.

After this we SAVE. wich ofcorse means clicking File, Save, Pressing F2, Or clicking the small floppy disk icon at

the top left Image Theres a picture incase you kids dont

rember floppy disks

This will Bring up a window to save as any program does, But the car will be named Object.sdf for now...

Image

Change the name to the same as your car.. Make sure, the name is exactly the same, so this is tutorialcar.sdf At

this time upper and lower case dont matter

Now let us return to the grand world of carmageddon to test this!

Image

Yep those bits are shiney now, And you can see the other side of the door too, But lets tr another effect while were

here just to show you,
Im going to edit my texture for the chrome part to make it brighter and plainer.

Image

As so, you can see the old texture at the top there and the new one below it,

Now Ill reload Plaything, Go back into the material editor for that texture, and go to the Color button now,
Just a small note when reloading a car you dont have to open the Act file every time, Just go to File, Open SDF, and

open the SDF file that plaything created.

Image

It opens on Color so no need to go find it, Here you will see the texture, and a whie box where it says 'True Color'

What im going to do is click on 'Select' below the white, Wich will open up a color pallet as shown here,

Image

Now im going to select a Gray that is very simler to what the texture used to be.. Mabye a bit darker,

Image

The True Color box changes but as you can see your texture wont, Dont think its not working here, The changes will

only show up ingame, You cant see colors in Plaything while a texture is aplied.

SO now thats done lets go across to the other button that says Lighting,

Image

Here you will see some slider bars and numbers, The only way I learnt how to use this was by testing it in game But

hers a typical type of settig I like to use,

Image

After setting that up we go to one last butto nwich is Flags again, Go here and tick the 'Smooth' box, otherwise the

changes we just made to make a shine will only apear on flat triangles rather than acting as a smooth object,

Image

Now we can Click apply, and save the car again, Now lets go check what happend in game!



There we go, little shaded looking too, Tho mabye I made the texture too washed out now.. well I will fix that later

Now for the last bit of plaything for me adding my driver, You may want to make your drive in cared, Or use the

premade driver that comes with it But when making old style carmageddon cars I now like to use a ped Its easy to

skin and dosent have that one texture droped over the body that looks terrible in my opinion, So I import a ped and

position the arms and legs untill It looks like its in a sitting position.. Once you have done this once. all you

need to do is import that ped From this car Into other cars. First you need a ped. You can Untwt an orignal

carmageddon ped and use that OR just do things the easy, and aparently welsh way. At......
Image
See we gont some Product placement in here too, Ok now Look around find the orignal carmageddon ped templates and

download one, Thers not that much vairations really other than skins so What there is..
Man,
Fat Man,
Man with baseball cap,
Man with hard hat,
Man with cowboy hat,
Man with rocketlaungher on back,
Woman,
Fat Woman,
Woman with hard hat,

Or if your too lazy to look heres a link
http://www.toxic-ragers.co.uk/files/car ... ates/peds/

What that means is the people with baseball caps have a small peak above there head, The ones in hardhats have a

shorter one tho this does not matter since we can pull these points around, So what I want to make is a lady with a

hat, So the only option here really is the woman with the hard hat. Here we go.

Image

So now that we have our ped and ahve put it somewhere sensible lets import it, We go to file, Import Brender DAT

file, find the ped and open The DAT, then the MAT,

Image

Now we have a ped, But shes facing the wrong way, is in a standing position, and has a stupidly long name, Fixing

time, First we will.

First thing we want to do is drag this new object into out car, its currently going to clash with it, if you save

now it will make one of the Main parts dissapear.. so yol have eaither the car, or the ped left, so click the name

of the ped.. wich is right at the bottom, and drag it up to wherever you want, Put it somwhere it wont move, like

the main body, Or if you have a seprate component for interior. In the next picture I have draged it right up to the

top where the main component is, making it apear at the bottom of the list, Notice how its mover across and is now

no longer sat as a seprate object

Image

Now to move the driver into position!, but wait a moment, You need to check something in the settings firs, You may

find if you try rotate anything with Plaything it seems to suddenly crash and close. wich is very anoying.
Go to Edit, Prefrences, Then go to Interface and make sure Rolling ball is selectd as shown,

Image

Now we are free to move and rotate our driver and he limbs as we please
Short list of controls

Image

Alsu useing the Z Y X buttons below that will make the objects or points you have selected Only move in cirten

directions, this is helpfull for not having your object roll allover the place wile trying to rotate.

Image

As you can see, I put some of the parts inside eachother, so I could for example move both legs as one insted of

trying to line them up, I also extended the bil of the hard hat to later turn it into a baseball cap by selecting

the points,

Now to rename that part, simple Click the name of the part you want to rename, in this case the driver.
Click Object, Change object name, Rename actor

Image

This, ofrcorse will open a new window, and its pretty clear where you need to type, Just type the name of what you

want the part to change to in the blank box and click OK

Image

As you can see I simply named it Drivergirl, and it seemed to also move to the top of the components list,

Image

Last part before we finish off here is to mention that te texture that the driver uses clearly is not in the folder

of the car we have here, Its still using the ped texture wich is way over in a diffrent folder, so if we save this

and go in game we will see that the driver apears un-textured, so before we continue lets go over and grab that

texture, edit it, and reload it, under a diffrent name ofcorse.

So lets go to the peds tiffrgb folder,

Image

Yup thats the one we want, coppy it, paste it in your car tiffrgb folder, and rename it to something that wont clash

with anything else so ill use... 'Tutgirldriv.tif'

There we have it

Image

Now go into plaything and go to the texture of the driver, or ped as it used to be and open up your edited renamed

texture, wich will replace the ped texture,

Image

Now you need to rename the texture Itentifier, to most likly the same as what your texture is

Image

Now to retest in game to see how this all turned out. make sure you get rid of the Shell file from the car folder as

this will hide any changes in cared untill the car is damaged so for this its, 'TUTORIALCARSHELL.DAT'
Then test,

Image

I have to admit I did need to tweek the drivers arms position again, But thats all part of modding you see a problem you sort it out, satisfaction.

Join me next time :P When I cover making the txt file, so that will be car suspension, grip, speed, and genral handling pluss a bounding box.

End of part 3
Last edited by Mad_Maxine on Sun Aug 04, 2013 8:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
Razor
Stomping-on-Kittens
Posts: 3427
Joined: Sat Dec 01, 2007 6:38 pm
Location: Beaver City
Contact:

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Razor »

Max, you could always use the CarEd driver model I made available here: http://www.carmajunkies.com/downloads/i ... iew&id=872

For importing directly into CarEd, it includes a texture map too.
[ Razor @ Carmageddon Webmasters Alliance Network ] [ My Downloads ] [ My Carma Items ] [ Conversion lists ]
To download the BETA Mod and more information on my other work, visit me @ https://razor.cwaboard.co.uk
User avatar
Toshiba-3
BRender Actor
Posts: 5511
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 12:14 am
Location: MagnaChem Data Unit
Contact:

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Toshiba-3 »

That's one insane tutorial there Maxine. :thumbsup:
I'm making a backup of it, just in case.
Image / carmageddon add-ons at road reaction
User avatar
Deep_Blue
Road Puppy
Posts: 4554
Joined: Wed Jan 10, 2001 12:00 pm
Location: In the Wind

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Deep_Blue »

Very nice tut, Maxy!
I finally got to read it in it's entirety and think I am now inspired to go screw up a couple models re-learning how to use Plaything.

:grin:
***When I die may I be surrounded by scattered chrome and burning gasoline***
User avatar
Mad_Maxine
Pink
Posts: 3232
Joined: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:24 pm
Contact:

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Mad_Maxine »

//Sunday August 4th, 1:15PM\\

Image

Starting to do.. some kinda maintinace on this I guess.
For some reosn.. I cant think of any reson other than Lets fuck up max's images, Image shack has alterd the adress of about 40% of my images, making them dissapear from forums, as that image no longr exists under that name,

So im re-adding every single one, Just because the site has to be a dick, Should be back to normal soon, I understand it might look confusing to some newcomers at the moment so Figured Id tell ya,

//Sunday August 4th, 1:50PM\\
Image
2 munit drawing but im still buged by how I seem to lack the ability to draw anything today.. hm
Ya...

Anyway! Its all done ant working (as fat as I can tell) Now you have no excuse on not knowing how to make cars!
User avatar
Alex Self A 9
hit n run
Posts: 115
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2014 2:46 pm
Location: Hamadian base

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by Alex Self A 9 »

Nice drawing! I really dig it! How did u post an image up at your message? I'm a really good drawer, god enough to where I could storm up a reincarnation idea INSTANTLY and with a little thought.
CARMAGEDDON 1 ALL DA WAY!

YEEEEE-HAAAAAAWWWW
User avatar
drunkenmastamanne666
hit n run
Posts: 128
Joined: Thu Oct 27, 2011 3:29 pm

Re: CarEd Tutorial The Second

Post by drunkenmastamanne666 »

Good tutorial!

:thumbsup:
Post Reply

Check who’s online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 235 guests