It's been a few weeks since I started to learn about rFactor modding. Since then I've created my first car in Max, that went all pretty smooth. And it's a lot of fun ! Think I might have catched the 3d bug And I really want to move forward in 3D/car modeling and actually race them at some point But now that I'm ready to get it into rFactor I'm lost. I have watched, read, tried loads of tutorials and docs (rFactor&rFactor2) about unwrapping, texture mapping, materials etc .. but I can't seem to find the answers I'm looking for, all very general but not really towards rFactor. Unwrapping, texture mapping When I use Unwrap UVW in MAX all I get is a huge puzzle of pieces somehow this seems a bit ..mm, inefficient. I don't really understand why you get all these tiny fragmented pieces. For instance, the door (all car body parts really) of my car get's split up in a few pieces although it totally faces one direction. - How do you keep the pieces to a minimum when unwrapping ? Can't you somehow 'tell' the unwrapper to leave some pieces as a whole ? a sort of 'unwrapping threshold' ? Basically; how do I simplify the body parts and get from my 3d model to something elegant like the rFactor skinning template ? - Do you guys use certain unwrapping plugins in MAX, because with the standard Unwrap UV, there are no such options. - When I created my first car I gave the body panels some thickness. Now I'm trying to map it, this seems like a bad choice. How do you make sure the unwrapper only maps the outer polygons ? Or shouldn't you give the parts of 3d model car for a game any thickness in the first place ? (to many polygons that you don't see anyway? ) Material layers There's a basic explanation of materials in the documentation. (also checked the original rFactor docs) But there is no real practical info on what the different layers exactly do or how do you make them. For instance how do you create all these maps in the first place ? Like a damage map etc .. ? If there is some essential, must read info in these topics, tutorials, mod groups (forums) perhaps, video's, ... really focused towards rFactor out there, I'd love to know about it. Thanks ! (Maybe a sticky post in the every mod sub forum, with a list of what the experienced modders/modelers think are essential to know could be handy for guys like me who are still very new to all of this ) (for Tim; any tutorial/doc updates soon ? I know you guys must be working your butts off, but it would be much appreciated, thanks)
I found this unwrapping tutorial which might help you out. Even it is in Italian (?), you can pretty much just see what he does. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hpO1atGXZ0 Basic idea is that you select the faces of the model which you want to unwrap into a single piece, instead having a massive shattered mess. One way to learn about the maps, is to unpack (with MAS tools) some of the ISI cars and take a look to its textures. There are general tutorials on the internet what specular, bump and cube maps are for. Same principles apply to rF2 as well. Also this tutorial might come in handy (applies to rF2 as well): http://www.mbdevteam.com/download/Tutorials/Virtua_LM_Tutorials/materialsbases/frmtutorial.html And we can help you out as well
Yeah I've seen that, and while it explains uv mapping very well, it's really simple (good for getting the basic idea, true) But I'd love to see a more realistic car that has curves and more complex shapes. Because that's really my problem, getting the number of pieces in my UV map reduced (which is a mess) to some more basic shapes, it's all so fragmented. Just seems weird my door or the fender or somthin to be split up in so many parts. good tip, I'll do that. thanks !
Here is a good tutorial that explains a bit about UV mapping and how to lay it out. http://www.scribd.com/doc/36256891/Low-Poly-Modeling-Tutorial-Nismo As for getting started with the uv's, I recommend to use normal unwrap. Once you open the UV Editor, do the sides first. Select all poly's on the car and drag it out of the square to keep the mapping area clear of any unmapped poly's. Then (with all still selected) in the viewport, look top down and de-select the poly's facing front/ back and up/down (roof, hood, trunk, bottom, tops of front guards etc) then do a Normal Unwrap left right (depending on your models orientation, you might have to use front/back), You should see the side of the car mapped out. Then in the UVW editor, select all the poly's you dragged out of the square and back in the viewport, deselect all the poly's facing front/back, then do a normal unwrap top/bottom. Then select the remaining poly's and do a front/back. From here on, you need to clean up and re-arrange the uv's. You will need to separate some parts, join other parts together, use relax (in tools menu) and set up the checker pattern to look for stretching. Look up unwrap tools, it has some handy tools for easy unwrapping. There is also LSCM Unwrapper which is another fine tool. *It's easiest to unwrap the car by doing only half of the car as you do when you model it. Then when you have finished unwrapping, go back to edit poly and mirror the model > unwrap uvw and back in the uv editor, select the half you mirrored, drag it out to the side, select each section and flip horizontal/vertical and so on. Use snap to align things.
if you use render to texture it in my tutorial it will unwrap most all of the car in a way that you are used to seeing. some little bits will need to be manually placed. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...a-Quadrified-Smoothed-Textured-GMT?highlight= as for damages, these are really the same textures you made for the tire in the first place, only they are part of the animation and will only be used after a certain amount of time of certain things happen to the tire. so no need to remap, just work over your original textures.
Texturing has moved on quite a lot over the last few years, I've tried using BodyPaint 3D for track building, pit buildings, objects and even the track mesh but it will also be perfect for cars as you will see in the video below. This is part 2 of 3, with an example of flames being painted on a new Mini, check out the other two videos as they show off more features. This is a very powerful texturing application, think PhotoShop crossed with 3dsMax. Happy painting.
Fantastic guyz !! Some really helpful information/tutorials ! Especially the Nismo tutorial, there's a lot of questions answered. Think I can move forward quite a bit now. About BodyPaint3D, it looks amazing, I was just thinking the other day .. why isn't there a program where you can paint directly on your model ... well, seems there is ;-) right ... I've got some reading to do ;-) thanks all !!!
Colour me excited indeed. @soledad I can't see this App replacing the UVW modifiers and PhotoShop entirely, so you still need to have a basic understanding of how to texture, but it is a great accompaniment. Seems Autodesk also have something very similar, might have to check this one out as well, looks good.
ok, can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong here ? ;-) View attachment 1682 How do I reduce these pieces, or keep them all together ? Because a lot of tiny polygons are mapped separately although they belong to a big body part, like a door or fender. I just attached the body panels from my car model, put the Unwrap UVW modifier on it, selected faces => select all =>edit => flatten mapping. Some tiny polygons get mapped separately. When I manually select the outer faces (as in that Italian vid) I get a messed up map also. View attachment 1683 I tried a demo of Headus UVLayout, I really like that approach, you select the body parts as you have modeled them and drop them onto the map, it just goes wrong when I try to flatten them (it looks like the thickness of the body parts is the problem here) Flat objects like the windshield are flattened perfectly. So, looking at al of this, is there something wrong with my model to begin with, or am I doing something wrong with the uv mapping ? somthing else, is it possible to render or overlay the material onto the uv map ? So the body parts already have a basic, color .. texture to start with before you finish it in PS ?
http://www.mbdevteam.com/download/Tutorials/Virtua_LM_Tutorials/autoshading/index.html http://www.mbdevteam.com/download/Tutorials/index.html
yeah, I'm looking into that tutorial mianiak, it really is a very good one thanx. I just need to learn some more basics as some concepts or terms are still a bit unclear to me. Things as "I use an ambient occlusion map as base texture", normal maps, material id's, etc ... ;-) I need to learn a bit more about these things first. At the moment I'm working on a separate "skin" version of my 3d model, just for the body texture. (I'm keeping parts like the mirror, grill, exhaust, etc .. separate for now) Because while it's great for a hi-res render it's just to detailed and has a shell thickness that makes UV mapping to difficult I find. I just want to keep the outer skin. It already produces a much cleaner UV map. (not sure if this is the best approach, but it seems to make things a bit easier and manageable)
Ambient Occlusion map is a shadow render aka 'render to texture'. After the model is mapped out, you can make one. This will help you http://www.mbdevteam.com/download/Tutorials/Virtua_LM_Tutorials/autoshading/index.html
thanx mianiak & anthing for the link, tried it and altho my map isn't a 100% as it should be yet (gettin there), I have a better understanding of how it works now, very handy indeed.
