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I've been working on my replica of a Ford Falcon ute for longer than is polite to mention. I'm "nearly" finished on it, but something unusual has made itself apparent of late... Even though I'd mapped the textures very precisely in BINedit, when viewed under the game engine the textures seemed to have 'creeped' on the model.

For example, I had the sides of the cab and bed mapped to seperate texture files, and the bed textures had a one-pixel-wide line drawn on the cab-end of them, to give the appearance on the model that the cab is seperate from the bed. I carefully mapped it in BINedit, making sure everything lined up precisely. But then I got it in the game, and the textures had 'creeped' such that the line on one side wasn't visible, while on the other side there was actually a gap:

<center> BINedit pics (side-on)
In-game pics (side-on) </center>

Everywhere else on the truck, it's the same story... This pic probably illustrates it best - even though it appears mapped perfectly in BINedit, it can be seen that the tailgate texture appears to have shifted to the right when viewed in the game, so that there is a gap (visible as a black line) on the left-hand side, and my dark-red dividing line is absent from the right side entirely:

<center><IMG SRC="http://mtm2.com/~d2s/temp/falctextures2.gif" border=0>
BINedit/In-game tailgate pic </center>

But the most annoying thing is the appearance of a line down the underside of my truck! If you look at my texture layout , you can see that the chassis texture is placed in the top-left corner - so the game appears to be wrapping around to the other side of the texture to form a red and black line (which most definitely is not visible in BINedit) that runs down the middle of the underpan!

<center><IMG SRC="http://mtm2.com/~d2s/temp/falcline.jpg" border=0>
In-game underside pic </center>

Fortunately, all these things are fairly easily fixed - the underbody I can remap, being careful to keep it one pixel away from the edge of the texture, and the rest can be fixed by tweaking the textures - but before I do, I'd like to offer the truck to anyone who wants to beta test it for me, to see if they get the same results, and hence help me decide whether it's worth changing it...

<center> http://mtm2.com/~d2s/temp/falcau.zip </center>

The pics posted here were taken on my new comp with its GeForce4 under Direct3D hardware acceleration, and I've noticed that the effect is the same (minus the texture smoothing) when in software mode (ie. Tracked2), although the line running underneath it doesn't appear in that mode... I also tried the truck in-game with the 3Dfx renderer on my old comp and it seems to give the same results (although it's harder to tell because it blurs the textures so much...).

Thanks,

D2S

PS. While I'm about it, anyone have a suggestion for what I should do about the MTM2 shocks hovering under the wheel wells ? I feel I should model some shock-tops or something into the wheel wells, but I can't think of a design or colour that would suit it...

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

<font size=1>Edited by Drive2Survive (04-02-2003)</font>

I'm getting an "unable to open model: AUWHL16L.BIN" error message from the truck. I don't see any wheel or wheel-textures in the POD.

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I had a somewhat similar problem to the shifting textures in the back of the Cherokee racer I converted and remapped. I finally realized that the texture was mirrored on the truck, and when I tried shifting it one pixel to the right, it was actually going to the left on the truck...! That's probably not related to your situation, but I wanted to mention it anyway...heh heh.


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- BigDOGGe's Boneyard ...The Best Custom Trucks in MTM2 -

> "unable to open model: AUWHL16L.BIN"

ditto

> "unable to open model: AUWHL16L.BIN"
ditto agian.

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HEY BUDDY, the gas is on the right!

OK. I had to go the long way around, but I had a full tank, and I was curious.

I renamed your TRK file to FALCAU2.TRK and changed the wheel models to the stock bigfoot set.

Then I tried to repod it as FALCAU2>POD in Tracked2......crash.

I reopened the TRK file, and changed the listing for the custom WAV files to stock ones (forgot the WAVs too).

crash.

OK. I changed the number of lights to zero, in case you had some custom light textures.

crash. grrrr...

Aha! I mis-spelled the stock wav filenames.

ah...ah.......it worked.

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I see the texture shift in both Tracked2 and MTM2. It looks like you could fix it easily by masking and cutting the tailgate from the texture (leaving behind an all-black area), then paste it back in the same place, but shifted one pixel to the left. That would be MUCH easier then remapping it.

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OK, I retract the above suggestion, as I tried it myself with little success. I tried both shifting the tailgate texture one pixel,then tried resizing the tailgate texture area smaller by 1 then 2 pixels in width only, but I could not get the "gaps" on both sides to be of the same width. one was always wider or BOLDER than the other, or disappear altogether.

I think the main problem here is that you are trying to produce a gap on the edge of the texture area being mapped. it might be easier to make the tail-lights part of the tail-gate texture, with the dark lines representing the gaps painted far from the edge of the texture, then map the whole back end as one unit.

--OR--

Or you can do what I did on a few trucks, and that is to make a physical gap between the bed and the cab. I split the body into 2 models (front and back), spread them apart lengthwise by 5-10 Binedit units, then filled the gap with new faces. Then I mapped the new faces to a black area, and ended up with a perfect-sized gap-line on both sides. I've seen this done on NFS models. making changes on the tailgate texture will not affect the gap line this way.

In your case, separate the tailgate faces from the rest of the model by making a copy, deleting all faces except those of the tailgate, and same it as a separate BIN, then delete the tailgate faces from a second copy of the model, and save it as well. Now, shift all the vertices on the left edge of the tailgate model 5 to 10 units to the right, and do the opposite on the right edge. Now combine the tailgate model with the "tailgateless body" model and save it.

You will now have a copy of the Falcon body, with REAL gaps 5 to 10 units wide between the tailgate and the tail-light lenses on each side. Fill these 2 gaps with new faces, and map them black.( or place wider black faces a short distance behind the gap, and it may resemble and actual gap, like on the real truck, IF the screen resolution will permit seeing features that small on a model!

I used this second "filled gap" method on my SIDEWINDER MT truck to make the cab/truck-bed gap line straight and even, as well as on others, as I has the same problem you have placing a clean black line on the edge of the graphic...Due to the unusual design of the truck, I placed the "gap" on the left side only on that model.


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- BigDOGGe's Boneyard ...The Best Custom Trucks in MTM2 -

<font size=1>Edited by ZOtm_BigDOGGe (04-02-2003)</font>

<font size=1>Edited by ZOtm_BigDOGGe (04-02-2003)</font>

SHOCKS: Some shocks have a threaded shaft extending upwards from the top, or some have an eyelet mount, as I used on the high-detailed sprint cars. The latter may look better.

it depends on how they fit in the car however. If you look at the chreokk race ST version I just released, the tops of the shocks penetrat into the wheelwell surfaces. As a result, the eyelets were hidden within the body, so I deleted that portion of the shocks with no loss in visual appeal.

If the truck will be a monster version, then go with the eyelets...the shocks will be mounted low enough for the top of them to be visible.

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weird line underneath:

It looks like there's plenty of room on the texture file to place a texture of the whole bottom of the truck on it, instead of splitting it in half. Check out some of the bottom textures on the EVO trucks. Usually, they are just a small rectangle somewhere on the body texture file. Some trucks in EVO have better bottom textures than others. (the one I used on the ST cherokee came from the tahoe, ....check it out!).

I'm sure one of the trucks in EVO would have bottom textures similar to the Falcom UTE. You could modify it to resemble the Fal's chassis, then paste it on your existing RAW. The items seen under a vehicle are rarely symetrically laid out anyway. There's always SOMETHING thats on one side only.

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- BigDOGGe's Boneyard ...The Best Custom Trucks in MTM2 -

Thuh Wheelz: Gosh, that's really odd. A have a lst file written with all the files the truck needs that I use every time I want to compile a pod, and the wheels (and wav files, and lights...) are definitely written in there. But I checked my pod file, and what do you know, there's no wheels in that just like you say. I wonder how that happened...
Well, I just recompiled it, so if you're still keen you can try 'er again (and see what problems you get now, lol). Thanks y'all, this might have slipped under my radar when I came to releasing the truck...

For the textures walking all over the model: because I first mapped it in BINedit and it looked right, but then when I tried it in the game found that the textures had shifted, I thought this was a peculiarity of the game's graphics engine. But now I think it's the other way around, and BINedit is the program that's misreporting. I've seen the game in software mode, Direct3D, and 3Dfx, and all three appear the same, except that the line underneath doesn't appear in software mode.

Additionally, I opened the truck in Zmodeller just out of curiosity, and wouldn't you know, the textures appear as they do in the game rather than in BINedit, line underneath included: it's there if I turn Texture Smoothing on, and disappears when I turn it off - which correlates to the graphical differences between software and hardware modes in the game.

Thanks for the shock suggestions BD, I'll have another look around. I was sorta thinking of something generic that would almost suit a normal car, but for the fact that it's a monster truck (that's kinda the philosophy behind the whole truck... hope you understand what I mean, lol). To make it clear, the truck *will* be a monster version, the way it's set up now (ride height, wheelbase etc) is pretty much final, although I *may* make S/T variants later on...

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

well i dont understand any of this. i tryed it again, it worked. <font size=+2 face=Wingdings>J</font>
the back seems fine but flickers, both the game and binedit.
this is what i seen. bottom,side, back

but then i (just for kicks) put it into Zmodeler, and seen this.

http://www.mwg.mw-gaming.com/legwon/pics/falc3.jpg

http://www.mwg.mw-gaming.com/legwon/pics/falc3.jpg

i think this is very odd considering that u got almost the revers effects.

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HEY BUDDY, the gas is on the right!

bilinear filtering bites the bin

Hey D2S, I've just come to realize your line is caused by "bilinear filtering". Quite apart from that technical term, mtm veterans who have gone before (who or where I couldn't say) have established that one mustn't map models to the edge of a texture. If you do so then weird things occur - such as your line, or if it's the edge of a flat panel - some color oddity at the edge. So let it be said plainly - don't map to the edge of a texture, one pixel in may do the trick, but two is probably best for the game engine ("the underbody I can remap, being careful to keep it one pixel away from the edge of the texture"). In the past I've mapped to the edge and seen the edge oddness, but for some time I've avoided the edge when possible, and looking at TRI textures see they always have (in MTM2).

FYI, terrain textures are physically 64x64 pixel RAWs, but the "seamless" pattern is actually the 60x60 core of that texture, the two pixel border is a buffer zone (which consists of the edges of adjacent 60x60 "core" textures, performing a kind of "pre-tiling" effect).

Just a few weeks ago I read something that identified what those border pixels are all about - in the secondary release of Slice60 (w/TrackEd4) Gromit (presumably) wrote: "slice60.exe - Slices up true-color .TGA files into tiles, and fixes up border pixels for bilinear filtering"

Ah, bilinear filtering, so that's what's up with terrain textures! When I read of your "line", D2S, I thought - I'd bet that's bilinear filtering too. So I did some searching, here's one comprehensible definition: "Bilinear Texture Filtering - Bilinear filtering is a computationally cheap but low quality texture filtering. It approximates the gaps between textures by sampling the color of the four closest (above, below, left and right) texels. All modern 3D accelerated video cards can do bilinear filtering in hardware with no performance hit." - <a href=http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Gamers-HOWTO/x249.html>link</a>

So yep, our game "wraps" textures by nature using "bilinear filtering", it does so with terrain textures in mtm2 (mtm1 did not), and to a lesser degree - model textures, explaining the "why" of "why you shouldn't map to the very edge". "It approximates the gaps between textures by sampling the color of the four closest" - yes, and that's a bit problematic when there is no adjacent "next pixel" to sample from for natural effect.

Oh, D2S, nice job on the <a href=http://mtm2.com/~d2s/>website</a> refurbishment. Rock solid content with a unique look and clean navigation, well done sir.

>> one mustn't map models to the edge of a texture

Aww? Dang, I do that all the time (this is the first I've had concerns from it though). Bad Dave! No biscuit! I guess I'll have to give it a more thorough going-over than I originally intended...

>> nice job on the website refurbishment

Bless you dear sir, you are too kind

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

> Aww? Dang, I do that all the

It's kinda old news, tho the topic has been debated. In short, Never Do This


> Bless you dear sir, you are too kind

Indubitably ;-)

Nice pic and suggestion Replica Fan, hehe.

D2S, here's a tip: before releasing a POD you should make a temporary pod.ini with the only basics in it, in addition to your pod, to test for missing files or other oddities, like so:

7
startup.pod
truck2.pod
cockpit.pod
ui.pod
sound.pod
music.pod
your.pod

^ that would not work with a podzipped track but it should cover trucks.


Then.... you should mount every single track and truck ever made and mount yours at the bottom of the list to see if any names conflict.

> make a temporary pod.ini with the only basics in it

You'd also have to rename the models and art folders cuz the game will read from the hdd.

> mount every single track and truck ever made and mount yours at the bottom of the list to see if any names conflict

Yea, hehe.

> rename the models and art folders

So right!

"THE EDGE OF THE TEXTURE IS BAD"

Oh, not to put too fine a point on it eh?

>> Holden "Sandman"

Too bad I'm making a Ford Falcon then. Heh.

But maybe I can do somethin' with the Holden ute BigDOGGe converted from NFS...

Anecdote: When that Sandman panelvan toured the US, they censored the art on the sidepanel with Hawaiian-style necklace and hula skirt. David McKay, the artist who did painted it (who is responsible for the "Mambo" brand of Australiana) was not impressed.

Kinda hard to see, but you get the idea

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Please use the brake provided and not the vehicle in front of you.
- V8 Challenge online racing guidelines

<font size=1>Edited by Drive2Survive (09-02-2003)</font>

Isn't this fun.

It took me two hours and about fifty attempts, but I finally remapped the tailgate to be perfect...

<center><IMG SRC="http://cownap.com/~d2s/temp/falctextures3.gif" border=0></center>

Unfortunately, it looks pretty skew-whiff in BINedit but that's the price to pay to make it look sweet in-game I guess.

I also fixed up the underside using a texture of the chassis of a Ford TS50 extracted from my demo of NFS:HP2, hmm that only leaves me with every other panel on the vehicle to remap...