Mod F1 1982 for rFactor

A different exhaust layout on this car.

So you're telling me that one of the BT49Ds had this "typical"-ish exhaust design. I don't think I'll put that in, though. I mean, look, I absolutely love the help I'm getting here with all the information and all the data and visuals to help me build the car, but at some point I gotta draw the line. For now I'll build the car with the center exhausts and the fitting engine cover and that'll be it. Otherwise I'd have to ask around and somehow find out which BT49 chassis used the other exhaust system and when that exact chassis was entered at what event for whom. I am a definite perfectionist when it comes to that, but at some point, enough is enough.
I'm having good progress with the engine cover now, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to do it for me would be editing one side of the engine cover first, and then, since the thing is symmetrical, copying it over and mirroring the faces on the X-axis, which would then save me a good lot of time. And then I'm going to work on the exhaust, and then I'll finally get to finishing the liveries, and then I'll start with the cockpit interior so I can finally get the thing into rFactor for visual testing.


As I'm writing this, I tried out the whole mirroring stuff, and I've noticed one more thing. The engine block is wider on the left of the X-axis than on the right and therefore clips through the engine cover just a tiny little bit. So I'll have to work on the engine block, too!   

Code:

Extents are (-0.322,0.218,0.032) (0.327,1.816,0.590)

And yes, these 0.005 in x-extend difference is enough for it to clip through. I've edited the side-wall triangles so that the engine (at least now on the right side) JUST doesn't clip through, as it looks like the engine cover was a bit narrower in the first place. But I can't just take another engine block now, I fear. Especially not the one from the BT49C since that engine block alone has over 240,000 faces, albeit that that engine block is incredibly detailed, better than I could ever do it.

Progress is being made. I've basically finished the engine cover now, as in, i'm re-using parts of the old engine cover, namely the side parts that cover the back of the side pods, as those are perfectly adjusted to fit onto the pods and barge boards. Furthermore, I've adjusted said few polygons to fit on the edge of the "new" engine cover. I've also eliminated the many many many many polygons that were unnecessary as those literally made up the blue stripes, and as can be seen here, I can simply do the same trick with texturing. I've only edited one half of the engine cover so far, as I can simply copy and mirror it to the left side. I'll save the left half as a separate model, as that'll need a separate UV mapping. After that, I'll also have to do the underside of the engine cover, AKA the "Steel" material, but that's going to be child's play anyway. Now I'm currently working on getting the two big triangles of the side-wall coordinated so that the texture fits with the cockpit texture, and my goal is to make it in a way that it's going to be close-to-impossible to tell that the engine cover isn't actually from the original BT49 model. Furthermore, I've edited the engine block as to prevent the engine from clipping through the side-wall. Imagine my relief when I found out that the evil party was literally a single little triangle whose Z-coordinates on two of the three points was 0.004 too high. Yeah, that's precision.
Anyway, that's all for now. Maybe I can find some way to really align the texture mapping of the engine cover to that of the rest of the car, as the really important part is just the blue stripes. The rest, as it's all white, doesn't really matter so I sort of just put the texture mapping of, say, the area around the exhaust ends somewhere next to the nose-cone. I mean, I know some people here would probably love to get their hands dirty to create custom skins and I'm sure my weird texture mapping wouldn't be of much help, but believe me. It just works.

And it looks the part, too. But anyway, when I'm done with all of it, I may create a PSD template, too, for skinning, but that's on the priority list around the area of "make a trackpack".

I'm slowly getting there.. 
But when I saw this, I swear to God if I have to completely re-skin the cockpit now.. But I'm very slowly getting there, you see!
By the way, is there a way to edit the lighting in ZModeler? My engine cover sort of gets really dark in all views when I turn the camera to a certain angle if I try to check the texture and how it fits. It's really annoying.

The darkness on the engine cover could be due to the normals being set wrong. Try Surface-Normals-Calculate. You may need to smooth the normals afterwards.

Is that an absolute must-do or would it just improve the visibility? I'm not sure how that sort of stuff works and since it all looks good now (I'm working on the livery now, on the right half, the side-walls have their proper mapping now so I don't want to change anything there) I don't want to do something that might change or ruin something.
I mean, in the worst case, I can still deal with a little disturbed visibility. I can just as well export it every time and then look at it in 3dsimed, that's not a problem for me at least.

Normals determine how light reflects off the body, you can see that the engine cover is not reflecting light the same as the cockpit side. This will also be be the same in the sim.
When you mirror the part you may have to calculate the normals on the mirrored part also.

If you are not sure save a back up before mirroring but I think that its a must do.

Ahh.. I see. Well I did that now, and it's reflecting properly now. I mean, except for one or two polygons but either way, I need some help here with the engine cover. 
To make it short, I can't make the stripes fit to the transition into the bend to the rear.
To make it long, I've tried this so far and it just looks like crap. But I don't know what else to try. I could maybe try to get the rear wall to go a little more downward but I don't know how that's going to play out, but generally the blue stripes around the car seem to be too big, but I also don't want to try and completely re-texture the whole car.

This whole stuff is more difficult than I thought, honestly.. 

Stripes on cars can be a nightmare.
I would probably try and edit the skin to have the lower stripe end slightly higher up.

Well, the problem is that the bigger, upper stripe by itself is already as wide as the whole area at the back where both stripes would go.. So I can really only hope to be somehow able to make that area bigger so that the wider stripes somehow fit on the back end but I can imagine that that would, in the end, look like absolute shit.

While I see that on the BT49C model, the stripes do get a little smaller as the livery goes towards the back, it looks way more smooth than anything I could probably ever do; most likely because the creator of that model made the stripes by creating triangles that follow the proper flow and literally painting those triangles blue. But if I kept that design, the poly-count would rise through the roof. As of now, the engine cover as a whole would have only about 75 polys more than the original engine cover, mostly due to the shapes being more complicated than on the original one; and I already did the work to eliminate those, I'll guess, fifty-plus polygons for the stripes from the right half alone, especially because they wouldn't fit with the original cockpit as far as the shape and colour of the stripes go (even though that could be somewhat easily fixed).

TL;DR? It's a shit show and there's a long way to go to get out of said brown.

I mean, this one looks like it's gonna fit, but what the hell does this look like? It looks like it's just being squeezed in there for the heck of it.. And there seems to also be like a kink going on the line between the two triangles, too and I can't make out why that is. It just looks..bad.


I don't quite know what else to really do. The model is there, and it fits. Technically, I could put the pieces together, put the filter on top of the engine cover and the thing would be ready to run, just with a blank white engine cover. But as soon as I tried to get the mapping to work for this thing, the whole trouble brews up again. Or should I try to make a separate texture map for the engine cover and call the material WCENGINECOVER or something? At the moment, I'm not really happy with the result, even if the texture mapping isn't even halfway done yet.

So..the engine cover is finished? It looks finished. It looks better than I expected, too! Even though..believe me, once you see the UV mapping in Blender or ZModeler, y'all are going to burn me on a stake!! 
But.. as I said before, it just works!






There are still some edges, as you can see, that I don't know how to smooth..but the one on the top left, with the big triangle, that one can't be fixed either way, because if I was to change the X-value of the top-left point, that'd screw the whole model up. Also, stripes! 
Again..make sure you're calm if you ever dare to look at the mapping..but it works, I swear!



True to form (or rather..the way the rest of the BT49 is built), I added a layer of sheet steel underneath the engine cover with ye olde material "STEEL" - good enough, I suppose?


And here it is, with the flat covers of the side-pods glued to the rest, and put on top of the rest of the car, here's the "final" result. Now, all I have to do, is make an exhaust. Anyway, what does it look like from a quality standpoint? Quality control? Dave? Alberto? Help?
On one hand, I'm impressed by how I managed to get it to look that way, on the other hand..the side-walls just look so..boxy.


Anyway..time to update the developer diary! 

Quote :

but the one on the top left, with the big triangle, that one can't be fixed either way

Create objects ---> Select the vertice ---> unify into a single point. Then recalculate the normals.

Where and how do I do that? I mean, not only can't I really select the vertex in question, AKA the upper left that belongs to the big triangle (if I click that upper left one, it selects one that connects to part of the upper cover plate??) and I have no idea where or what option comes down to "unify to a single point". Neither in ZModeler nor in 3DSimed nor..anywhere, really.

But what I meant earlier, is that the difference in X-values in the other triangle is bigger than in the upper left one. That is because the lower right one's right-side points needed to fit to the cockpit, right? But if I were to edit the upper left x-point so that it's smooth and without this kink, then..it'd look like this in the end:



The difference between x-values should be 0.133105 in the end for the edge between the two triangles to be butter-smooth, but what you see there is the result if I force that difference into the upper left triangle.
I mean, there's surely a way to make it smooth using some more triangles and more polygons, but..well the engine cover currently has ~600 polygons and I don't like going any higher really.

In zmodeller 

Alberto Ibañez wrote:

In zmodeller 

Yes but where? 

1.- Toggle vertices selection
2.- Toggle area/group selection and pick the vertices you want to unite
3.- In the right side menu, go to create-->objects---->Uniteselect



Left click on the selected group and all will be unified into a single point with a single normal. Now recalculate normals in the right side menu.

If you want smooth curves you need to have a single point where several faces met. But if you want a sharp angle in the light effect, distinctly differentiating both surfaces, select the edge and use "break", so that each face has its own vertice with its own normal.

Looks like I'll have to download 1.07b then because I can't find your number 2 and 3 in my Zmodeler 2.2.6..
Anyway, until I have that ready to be done, I'll work on the engine and exhaust. That won't take so long though, since I have the exhausts already; I just have to sort the polygons out, since I don't want an exhaust system with 45,000 polys.

In zmodeler2 use


then use

Surface-Normals-Calculate

Surface-Normals-Smooth

.

Regardless of the engine cover issues, I think there's a bigger one right here.

The car does show up in-game now. It just...disappears after a second.
I'm not joking either! The trace file doesn't show any errors (except for the material errors as far as the textures go, but I'm doing the very same approach as with the 179D, and that car didn't disappear, did it?) so I'm really..not sure what the problem could be.



Literally 1 second later:

David, I'd honestly pay you every time I screw some 3d model up and you fix it in such a quick and precise way! The engine cover looks absolutely great, so buttersmooth! I did re-do the mapping of the stripes and stuff like that with how you edited the skin, so it doesn't conflict with the cockpit, but it looks amazing now!



Now..I just need to manage to make the car not disappear in the spinner. I wonder what it could be. The LOD values are all correct since I used the BT50's spinner gen and adjusted all names (and commented those out that didn't exist yet), but now I'm trying the Alfa 179D's spinner gen. Maybe that works, even though there's no real difference between the two. Could it be shaders? If so, then that'd be weird too, since my BT49D (at least the WCCARBODY and WCWING materials use the very same shaders as the other 82 cars (1982DX9CARPAINT), and even with shaders set to either T1 Diffuse or the GPC79's shaders (BUMPCMAPSPECMAPADDALPHAREFLECTT0), the car just disappears. I'll see if it'll work with the 179D's spinner gen. As I said, the game doesn't throw any sort of errors, so it knows all used shaders, all used files, etc.
I thought it could also be because the exhaust I put in used a material that had no texture and only used RGB mapping, but I put a texture map on it, and re-skinned it (the exhaust looks awesome now) but it disappears still.

EDIT: Okay, it does show up and the car does NOT disappear anymore, but.. I think there's some issue with transparency? Well..I guess trial-and-error does bring up more error.

Welcome to the "Class of '82", Brabham BT49D. She's alive, the engine runs, and the wheels turn. Now..all that's needed is a driver to put into the cockpit. 
Thank God I didn't delete any of the PM's with the physics discussions, otherwise I would've had to deal with saggy suspension again.
Oh, by the way, would anyone be so kind to help me with either explaining or helping out directly with making a proper spec map for the rear wing material? Currently it uses the normal BT49D_s texture, but that screws with the reflections, I suppose. Also, there seem to be some weird little graphical glitches with the model sometimes jerking back a tiny bit, plus when I had a crash earlier and the engine cover flew off, the steel underside clipped and glitched through when I re-spawned the car. Help?

Okay, as always, some things are goofed up a little, and this time, it's got to do with the new cars. Ashar Firdaus brought this one up, so credits to him.
Honestly, I hadn't expected anyone to not install the vast majority of cars, so I hadn't actually thought that this would even happen, but as they say "never say never".

Anyway.

IMPORTANT: Currently, some cars use a shared physics set, as those don't have their own set yet. That means that the Lotus 91 physics are in use by the Osella FA1C, Theodore TY02, March 821 and Fittipaldi F9. The Toleman TG183 uses physics from the Brabham BT50 as of now. It is absolutely required that if you want to try out and use those cars, you must have the Lotus 91 and Brabham BT50 installed as well, or else the game won't find the respective HDV files and therefore exclude the cars from the game!