Importing to rFactor 2

Once I had exported everything from max all I had to do now was modify the code. I did this using Notepad ++. Here's one of the .gen files I modified. As you can see this is the file that you say what models go where. You can also setup the LOD's in here but I wont be making any lod's at the moment.

Now all the models and textures are in the game dev mode. I had a little bit of a problem with the position of the wheels and figured out I needed to adjust the suspension. I had a look round on the forums to find out what piece of code I needed to modify and found someone had made a suspension editor for the first rfactor which also works with rfactor 2 so I had a play round with that. It took me a while again to find out what did what but i managed to get the wheels in the correct position after some trial and error. Here's some of the code I modified. 

I also had to change the camera position of the cockpit camera which was pretty easy to do, just z,y and x values in the code. One other problem I had was the steering wheel would rotate around an irregular axis. So again I did some searching on the forums and found a piece of code. I needed to get the angle of the steering wheel from max and calculate the COS and SIN to get the correct values for the engine. Here's a little piece of code that I used and now the steering wheel rotates perfectly.

And here are a couple of pics of my car working in engine.

Exporting from 3DsMax

I actually started doing this a while ago so this blog post is a little late. I followed the Complete Vehicle modding tutorial pdf that is on the rfactor 2 website and imported the car they provided. I did that in the first few weeks of my project to get familiar with the workflow. I used this as a base for importing my own car. It was really just a matter of changing file names in the code.

All the material setup is done in Max with a plugin they provided. The only problem is this plugin only works with max 2012 so I had to download the student version of that just to do the exporting. My supervisor advised for me to get the car in the engine before I finish off all the texture work. So the only objects I had textured were the wheels and steering wheel. Its Pretty easy to setup the materials in max once you get used to it. I just had to change my wheels textures as the tyres need their own texture sheet. This is because the tyres have an animated texture that blurs when its spinning.

Here are a few pics of the material setups. Its pretty much the same setup for everything accept for things with alpha channels. cube maps or animated materials. 

Then I just needed to apply the textures to each object. The tyres, rims, brake disks, interior etc all need to be separate and have a specified naming convention. For example for the wheels I have test_car_lr_tire

then just change the lr to lf, rr and lr. This is the same for the rims, brakes and calipers. Also the american spelling of tyre needs to be used which gave me some problems earlier. To export the objects I had to use the GMT file exporter which are the file types rfactor 2 uses. Here's what it looks like.

Progress Review

Last week I needed to create a progress review to show where I am and and where I'm heading. It needed to be in the format of a poster so I made these two and tried to make them as visually appealing as I can. I may end up using these to present my work at expo tees too. I talked about my research into what mod tools/game to use. My modelling process and programs Im using and everything I've done so far. And what I plan to do next.

Bucket seats

I have been working on getting the car in rFactor 2 recently and ill post some updates for that soon but for now here are the bucket seats I recently textured. Again using xNormal for the normal and ao map baking. Marmoset 2 was released recently as well so i haven been playing around with that for my beauty shots. I set out to make some bride seats from the start which is a big Japanese company that makes racing seats. I also decided I was going to make a carbon kevlar seat as they have an interesting pattern on the back which i tried to replicate on my texture.

Steering wheel

I've been fixing up the model and trying to remove any unnecessary triangles without loosing any detail. I managed to remove about 7,000 tri's. So the whole car is about 50k tri's at the moment which should be fine. I wont be making and LOD's at the moment, I'll see how the game runs with my model first.

I've also textured the steering wheel, I used nDo2 to add all the stitches and leather texture. I added some smudges to the brushed metal bits too in the specular map as brushed metal show's finger prints.
Here are the diffuse, normal and specular maps ip made. and the final result in marmoset.

Wheel Texturing

I decided to texture the wheel as I know It wont need any adjustments to the model and for rfactor 2 the texture for the wheel has to be on a separate texture sheet. I used xnormal to bake my normal maps and ambient occlusion maps. The normal map needed some fixing as you will always get errors baking something circular. I used Ndo2 to add some more details too like the tyre tread and text on the side of the tyre. This is the normal map, Diffuse and specular maps I made.

And heres a pic of the textured applied to my model in marmoset toolbag.

Fixing things & lowpoly

I met with my supervisor and he pointed out a few things to change in my model so over the past few days I've been fixing any errors and improving the topology. I decided to change the design of my front wheel arches and the front spoiler. Some of my friends said they could be improved and I did say earlier that I was thinking of changing the front spoiler to a more aggressive looking one. Here are my new front arches and spoiler.

I also started making the lowpoly. I did this by just duplicating the highpoly model, deleting the turbosmooth modifier and then just removed loads of edgeloops. I got the model own to 57,000 tris which should be completely fine. I will just have to see how rfactor runs when the models ingame. If it needs more optimization I could easily go back and delete some more loops.

And here's the high and low poly next to each other. High on the left and Low on the right.