Hi guys, For a private mod I am just lobbying along a bit, just looking what is possible and learn some things. I want to alter the steering wheel lcd and the settings/info on it. To do so, I took the wheel from the Fanatic F1 2017 mod. Due to very little info in the cockpit.config and upgrades (steering wheel I'm working on, is an upgrade) I start to think there is more. I mean, the rpm bar works by this line: CPIT=RPMLED=2RPMBAR There has to be more, right? Now I noticed in the past, that some Motec thing might be working for it? There are Motec .tga's in there, but mainly background (black) and "pit" lights and so on. Now I have a 1001 questions and to much to ask here; the answer would have to be a book about it I searched the internet, but all I could find was Motec as a data logger so you can see what the car does and did. My question; is there a tutorial on how to setup this Motec thing, how I can configure things like that rpm bar. I mean; where it is placed, what .tga's it uses, what side it goes to when higher, what info it takes from the car/game, what values are min and max........all that kind of stuff. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know so I can hobby some more Thanks!
Have you looked at the Car Modding Complete Tutorial v1.0 Dev Corner)?, about page12/13 handles rpm bars etc. As for the rpmbar in cockpitinfo there doesn't need to be much here as the game looks at you redline rpm and divides it up into how many "segments" you have used. Say your max rpm was 7000 and you used 28 segments, for every 250rpm the next part would display (I think it uses the Event animation - 0,1). As for where it's placed? er the actual .gmt(s) can be anywhere you like but if on a steering wheel they would need to be combined with the steeringwheel.gmt I'm guessing or they wont move with it?
@ Nibiru, yes I did, but I came nowhere with that. @ Doogal, no, I did not. Hmm, I thought I needed another kind of tutorial, just for the Motec part. For some reason, I skipped this one. I will look into that, thanks!
Lol I'am assuming by motec you mean the digital displays not the actual software, anyway that tutorial does cover the displays but is not actually quite as simple as it would have you believe - things such as nudging textures about, scaling the font size etc.
Well, I don't know much about the Motec and thats the problem where it all started with I see files with Motec names and I thought there was something that had- or had nothing to do with the data logging....... I had no idea! There are things working and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how......and why. I looked the tut over and have a lot of playing around to do; I will learn.......but can't promise I don't have any additional questions Thanks so far!
Ah, studied and tried a lot and I have to say, for me, I've come a long way. I had an rpm bar going up and -just as test- I tried to let it go down; rpm bar 20 to 31 reversed; done. I wanted it to go out instead of on, swapped the renders 0 and 1; done! I have no 3DS Max and did this with 3DSimed. I do have Blender, but don't understand that much (practically nothing) about it Now I want to add something. According to the tut, I have to: "Add a new sub mat to main body multi sub"........say what?? Is that a thing one can do in 3DSimed? And than; placing it.........does something like that have to be placed like a render on a car body, with things like uv-mapping? In that case I can forget about it; tried that several times but I'm just not smart enough, hehe. I noticed some cars have a light for the pit-limiter but in the tutorial there is no line that. I also would like a light flashing when the limiter is on. Any ideas for that? Suggestions?
Last question first - led's are basically a small square plane object with a material mapped to it named according to what type of led you want (in the case of a pit limiter you would name it ledrl). Like the rpm bar they use 0,1 event but note that not all leds blink some just stay lit. You can use 3dSimEd for this but tbh you mebbe better copying one from another car than creating one from scratch - moving and rotating objects gets tedious very quickly in that program lol As for the other questions what is it you want to add?
Well, as I realise now; its actually the same question I want to add something and that might be the limiter led; I should have been more clear. I am going to play around with borrowing a led from another car and see how that works out. Just have to try things with this kind of stuff, right? Thanks for the pointers!
Well, I had fun playing, but it had no use...... I found a pit limiter: 3 files, one a purple, one black and one with a yellow bar saying "pit limiter". They were all .tga files. So I opened up the wheel, clicked to add a material, set the first .tga (as the others had the same name but "00" or "01" with it; I presume those are the following) and set all as other lights were setup. Render and such. Now the problem is; I don't see the light or any of it; clicking the highlight doesn't make it show either. So I reloaded the wheel; material gone! It's nowhere in the air or something too; I looked Do you have any pointers on this? I'm stuck
You should have the three textures named like led.tga, led_00.tga and led_01.tga, have a look at the pic to see how they're done - you don't need to set render target (that's for mirrors/analogue gauges), but you may need to pick a tick in Glass. If you open up a model in 3dsimed and you can't see it, click on the display tab - then click on Flat Faces, sounds like it has a transparent tex as the primary texture map. Anyway just checked the following still work - ledlf - (low fuel) - blinks ledpsy - (pit stop requested) - stays lit ledfb - (blue flag) - not checked ledfy - (yellow flag) - stays lit ledsl - (overheat) - not checked (couldn't get the engine hot enough lol) ledfr - (black flag/disqualified) - blinking ledrl - (pit limiter/rainlight?) not checked (no limiter, bugger but will check later)
Okay, I followed your lead, but nothing pops up I even hid some materials so I could see everything; its just not there. How I do this might be wrong? I go to the "edit" tab, click "editing materials" and select "new". Just when the steering gmt is open; I havent made a spot for it yet. I name the material, fill in the rest with the .tga set, the tag without the 00 or 01 that is. Nothing........
You're creating a new material but haven't assigned it to anything? ok but bear in mind you may have to re-scale and "nudge" the new material to fit. Start with importing (not import as object), or creating the .gmt your going to use. Do what you did above and create a new material. Ctrl-Click and drag the faces you want to put your new material on - the selected faces should turn yellow. A little box should appear with FACES and a little arrow on it - hover your mouse over this and another menu box will appear At the top shoud be Replace Materials -click this and select you new material, this assigns the material to the faces. If it looks ok (crack out the Champagne it's your lucky day) go ahead and export it. If it looks a bit offset/too big or little or just wrong you will need to use Rescale Tex which I'll explain in another post if need be. Have a look at top of p14 in the tutorial the material names are listed as warning leds, unfortunately it doesn't look like ledrl works tho from what I can see?
Very nice explanation, thanks! Well.....it did work......but the faces are all weird triangles. When I just pick one; it doesn't show up. When I pick a nice square, it seemed to be the space for the gear number; it took it over and gave the limiter picture. That worked, but in the wrong place. But there is no nice place for it to be.......
Awesome! Hehe, it worked. I tried "add rectangle" and was able to assign something to it. I had to work for over half an hour to get it in the right place, but okay Resized it, made the picture a bit different in photoshop and now its there, readable. A bit blurry, but okay; its there! https://www.dropbox.com/s/41txyjviy0yt2es/Naamloos.jpg?dl=0 Edit; now the problem is; how do I write this in the cockpit.ini?
Heh, I noticed it doesn't have to be set in the cockpit.ini However; it doesn't work........tried some settings (compared with other leds) but no use. It doesn't come on and since it work "the opposite" of other leds, I tried swapping the 0,1 for frames, but all that did was set the light on to never go off again........ The game has to do this stuff if I called it "LEDRL" right? In 3DSimed, it is going on and off.......
Soz looks like LEDRL doesn't work in RF2 (did in GTR2 tho) unless someone knows differently? If you car does not use a rainlight there mebbe something you can try with the rlglo but I need to check it doesn't bugger anything else up.
The way I understood this was that "sub mat" is just a material. "Main multi sub" is list of all materials in your scene. So the line of text just asks you to add one new material to the overall list of materials in the scene. It is probably how old 3dsmax handles the materials or some other old 3dsmax specific thing. In blender I'd just put a material on the led mesh (doesn't need to be square plane, can be more complex mesh afaik) and name it and uvmap it (probably needs 2, 3 or 4 uvmaps). Amount of uvmaps depends on what shader you are using. Gjed doesn't have all the shaders but 3dsimed probably does. If it works then you probably have enough uvmaps. I don't really know why you don't just make the geometry, uvmapping and material in blender and the rest in 3dsimed? I have not played with animations that much but led animations can be done with gjed (export fbx from blender). Iirc gjed also has a list of different animation styles that you can try (same as 3dsimed I think) : cycle, one shot, random, pendulum, transient and manual although I have not messed with those other ones. Also if you use leds as graphics drawn on lcd display then you maybe want to turn on "decal" for the mesh in the mesh options so it fixes the z-fighting. The shift light for example can be done as led, a dot on lcd screen or it can be done as a separate shift light bulb and because both things are done little different in 3d they need to configured slightly differently I think. A shift light material needs to be named as LED165, LED170, LED175, or LED182. The number after the led defines at which point the led comes on. The instructions in the rF2_car_modding_complete.pdf do give the basics but take some time mucking around to get to work in gjed. Gjed might crash couple of times when doing it but eventually it will just work. I don't remember if gjed wanted the tga texture in myshiftlight.tga form or in myshiftlight00.tga form. You need to have myshiftlight01.tga in your car folder though. Leds also work as dds files.
Thanks for the explanation guys. For now I can't say much about it other than I am going to try what you said. Might be a day of work, but I get back on it. The reason why I don't use Blender for uv mapping and such is that I just don't understand...... I watched a lot of video's about it, but I can't get the job done.
You can use rlglo as a pit limiter led btw, but there 2 problems - As it relies on the name of the object (rlglo.gmt) and not the material name you can't combine it with the steering wheel, and if it's raining it will stay flashing until it stops lol, other than that it seems to work ok.
