CarEd Tutorial The Second
Posted: Sun May 20, 2012 12:39 am
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
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.
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'
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.
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.
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,
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,
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.
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..
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.
Now to just finish off the model of the truck.
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.
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,
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,
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,
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,
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