zimluura Wrote: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??"
I like the idea of modeling everything separately. I never am good enough at modeling to do that quickly, but I can do 2D stuff pretty fast, so for instance with the XS I just slapped a texture on to do things like hood, door handles etc.
zimluura Wrote: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?
As long as you don't go super crazy with the detail, it should be fine. And by super crazy I mean, adding extra polys that aren't necessary like lots of people do when they model cars just for looks. I'd say that if the poly count doubled after you model the interior, it wouldn't be so bad. Not that you have to, if you can do it in less, of course.
zimluura Wrote: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).
I for one don't have a Windows machine with a good enough video card to do serious VDrift testing on anymore. We've been looking for a Windows developer for a long time, and some people have shown interest, but nothing ever seems to pan out. There are compilation directions for Windows on our wiki, I bet you could get it working. If you can't, just stop by #vdrift or post your problems here...
zimluura Wrote: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??
If you want to develop this driver further that would be excellent. It would be nice to include a driver that works on every car. This would mean the driver would have to be made up of parts that can be positioned a little differently for each car. Later, we could work towards making the parts move with the motion of the car.
zimluura Wrote: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.
Tell you what, if you set up a car that can be used for testing creation of something like this, someone will probably do it. The tracks are already loaded in this manner. Go ahead and write a mock-up .car file that can be used as well. You could use the TC6 if you want.
zimluura Wrote: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!!).
I'm not quite sure why you have to do this. I haven't been using Blender a lot lately, but I seem to remember not having to re-map things constantly when I made changes to other stuff. How are you going about UV mapping?
The grills look quite nice!
The car is progressing well. Have you worked on a .car at all yet?
