Some inspiration

[zimluura]

thanks! glad you like my obsession!
been rethinking a few things about how to design these meshes.

with the gaps it's easier to select chunks of a single object in blender with the ctrl+L (select linked) key. so that way i could easily split the car into it's components later.

and after thinking about that for a little while i threw in some low-poly placeholder meshes for the engine, intercooler, turbo, exhaust, driveshaft, rear differential, axles, fuel cell, and radiator.

the last two things i can really think to do is the window and hood molding. then afterwards all of this will be joined together for a single interior.joe file which will be a very drawn out process to texture. since i'm more of a modeler than a texture-er i always find myself saying "why am i fussing with this in a texture?? why not add more detail to the mesh??"

questions
1. i'm currently on a athlon64x2 @ 2.2ghz, 2gb ram, geforce 7900gt. built some ~18 months ago. i've been getting carried away with the polycount (to say the least) cause i'm at ~12500 polys. but my framerate (with the old engine) never drops from 85 (which is the refresh on the monitor). so i'm guessing this is all still good. am i right?

2. does anyone have a windows exe for a recent build that can run stable for like 5 minutes or so?? it would really help. the last release still defaults your keys everytime you restart, so when i do an ingame look around i have to remap everything first. also tempted to add more polygons to even out the lighting. but this might be useless with a specular map (don't know for sure, haven't worked with those much, but per-pixel specular sounds like it could do the trick).

3. i started throwing together a driver mesh. right now he looks like a goon, but is a driver mesh part of the plan? as in seperate from the car, can be plugged into any car??

now a requst:
not to sound like a broken mp3, but i think it would make the art generation easier if cars could be split into lots of different .joe files (have a model list in each .car file). doesn't have much impact on mesh making, but it would help texturing a whole bunch. 'cause then i could get the radiator looking nice, and map all it's uv coords. then move to the next thing. this is an extreme case (cause i've modeled tons of internals for when you see through the grills on front and top) but my actual interior looks weak, and will need lots of little tweaks to make it look nice. but as it stands now, when i add polygons to the seat then i'll have to redo the uv coords on my exhaust pipe (yay!!).

grill work