Nick M48

Do you use psp or photoshop?

Braintree was my local, what's your dads name, did he race for a team? BTW for those that don't already know, my number comes from the Green teams Craig 'Skippy' Barnett, a rated driver that raced on the Braintree dirt as well as alot of the ORC tracks.

Follow-ins are part and parcel of Banger racing, as long as the car is built right and the drivers at least use some common sense (Jag on Bluey isn't clever!) then they really aren't anymore dangerous than other types of hits. Medically T-bones are more dangerous because in a big hit the two halves of the brain can be stretched apart causing someone to be knocked out fairly easily and sometimes permanant damage. The way I see it though, all the drivers know what they are letting themselves in for, so leave the rules alone.

Hi mate, I assume you are already using an alpha channel for the windows? The layer I use for the alpha channel on a catch fence looks like this... [attachmentid=16082] Once I've created an alpha channel from that, the black bits will be completely see-through and the white bits will be fully textured, you need to make an alpha layer and convert it into an alpha channel using a very dark grey so that the windows are see-through but have a little colour left in them. I've never had to do windows so it'll take a little trial and error for you to get it right.

I must be thinking of making tracks then.

Heat models can only have a single texture on them. The lighter and darker spots will be a smoothing problem. Looks great, well done

These aerial pictures get better and better, makes track making soooo much easier!

Unless you have the 3dmax files you cannot do any conversion, even if you did have the files you'd have to have the original modellers permision and even if you had both of those it is far from easy to do.

Little cars like the G-Wiz scare me just to look at when I think about them being involved in a crash, if you haven't already seen it check out the G-Wiz crash test here.

What are you using to export the model?

By far the easiest way is to import the dummies from an existing car otherwise it can be very difficult to get the scale and orientation right, I've attached a max file with just the dummies in, merge it into your car scene then move the dummies to where you want them. Dummies.zip

EDIT to above post: I've just remembered that you don't need to detach the faces you can use the auto smoothing option from within the 'Edit Mesh' menu, that will only smooth the faces that you have selected.

Just select the faces that make up the front end, detach them to a new object, smooth the new object then re-attach it to the main model, should work ok, any reason why you don't want to re-smooth the whole model?

Top job, well done Ps. you probably already know but it doesn't hurt to say it anyway, if you are using 3d max apply a smoothing modifyer, set to auto, to get rid of the faceted look that it currently has.

Looking really great, well done.

Thats a very weird problem, never had it myself before, the only thing I can think to try is to reset the transform. Create a box anywhere in any viewport, convert it to an editable mesh, with the box selected attach your car to the box, that will reset the transform, in edit mesh delete the faces that make up the box, rename your car and try exporting again. BTW what version of max are you using?

The 6500 includes all of the damage layers, without them the Taxi is about 1800 too I think.

I'm not really sure how to take that, as you said that you aren't getting cocky I'll take it as tongue in cheek lol I personally think that the likes of me, Bozz, Hooty, Dazza, Freddy, FBF etc. have made very good cars using the amount of polys we were allowed, modelling a car is fairly easy but making it look good and realistic with less than 1000 polys (which is roughly what we have before damage modelling) is where skill really comes in. The extra polys that you are using will lead to alot more detail, Dazza for instance modelled a great looking seat and H frame but because of poly limitations he had to stick to the crappy looking ones used in most models. I'm not blowing my own trumpet, there are far better modellers out there than me but I think it's unfair to say that our models aren't as good as we think. Only a couple of years ago we could only run (from memory) 8 ish saloon stock cars per heat due to them having too many polys, which caused warp, I took on the job of making proper LOD's for them and reducing the polys so that we could run the amounts we do now per heat, so we still have to be careful not to use too many polys because even with jolt servers we could stil end up with warp problems.

I've never actually tried finding out the maximum poly count but I feel you are correct Dragon, in that the limit will be with the exporter, when you export an F1 the whole car is just one object isn't it? with Bangers the damage layers are seperate objects so I would guess in theory each one of those could be at the 4200 poly limit that you have hit, I am only guessing that though. Although you say that a car could be as many as 30000 polys not all of those will be being shown at once, most of those will simply be stored in memory. I agree though, models should still be made using as few polys as possible rather than wasting polys just to get to the maximum.

6549 thats a good 3000 more polys than most of the newer Bangers, I suppose it would need to be tested properly 1st but it would certainly mean alot more detailed models, newer games such as rFactor can handle huge amounts of polys, one track that I looked at several months ago had getting on for half a million! the bottle neck we have is the very old graphics engine that Heat uses but if we could make 6500 poly models it'd be great. I've never used the 3dsmod tool so I can't help you there, sorry.

Thats actually very interesting, when I started modelling for uk-dirt the poly count limits were already in place so I just stuck to them (although we've sneaked a few extra hundred in over the years as PC's improved) I guess newer higher poly cars should be tested and new poly limits decided upon. How many polys is the Taxi and were all 23 of the cars in the server Taxis?

I've been really reluctant to comment on this as my constructive comments on your previous model weren't taken in a very good spirit. This model looks great but as before it looks like it has alot of polys for the heat engine, how many is it?

Me neither, their service really went down hill towards the end of last year so ironically I swapped to BT, I must admit since being with BT I do lose my internet connection now and again which I didn't before with Virgin but at least my ping's are ok.

Never mind, hopefully you had lots of fun in it.