This year, as a member of the University of Alberta's Formula SAE/Formula Student team, we have begun building a racing simulator with an old chassis and a mod for rFactor 2. I am starting this thread as a build log of getting the car in game. Fortunately, we have a very detailed Solidworks model to work from. Unfortunately the model has a crazy level of detail and close to 4 million polys :'( here is a render of the original: Over the past 2 days I have been removing washers, nuts, and bolts which didn't vastly improve the appearance of the car. For some body panels I was able to remove the interior faces as they shouldn't be visible in game: One somewhat painstaking task is converting all of the tubes on the car into cylinders: After completing the above mentioned tasks, I will move onto editing components of the car either so that they line up better (due to removed hardware, errors in original model, etc.) and to reduce the poly count. I have a few midterms coming up but will hopefully be able to post more soon! I am totally new to this so happy to receive suggestions and feedback
Honestly with that polycount I'm not sure it's even worth taking this model. Maybe only as a reference, to buld a game model upon it. Maybe good idea would be baking normal maps from all the engine components and other parts of this model so they can be re-used. Washers, nuts and bolts too could be rendered to the normal map, using the projection modifier, onto the car body mapping of a game model.
Search for zbrush... it has a retopology perfect to re-create a high mesh in lowmesh and then create a normal map from the hi mesh! Another option is topogun!
I've reconstructed and optimized so many parts I may as well be starting over haha. Down to ~300k polys now. I think I read somewhere that 70k is a good number to aim for? I am very new to this lol. I like the idea of the projection map, I'll have to check that out, thanks!
Cool, I might try that then. As much as I would love to be great at modelling and learn all the complex tools, given the amount of time I have, "easy" sounds great haha
This diff hanger and assembly was beautifully modeled but is going to take a ton of reworking to get in game haha (currently 34k polys)