MTM2.com

Alright, here is my S10 (half body.. ).

http://tehacidx.bladestorm.net/misc/3d%20stuff.zip

The zip file contains both BIN and Zmodeler versions. It is very detailed as of right now, and i was wondering if someone could help lower the polys without losing the looks. I havent modeled the front or rear bumpers yet, because i havent had the chance. I'm not going to model the bumpers. The rear will be filled in, though.

I also plan to hollow out the bed and give it a fiberglass look. As far as the cab, i'm not sure what to do with it yet. Whether i will hollow it out or leave it as is..

I dont know. Any suggestions?

Okay, first, I just played around with zmod (first time in ages) and I had no trouble opening and viewing textured models. It didn't matter if the raws were in the same directory as the models or in an ART folder. For my tests, I converted a bunch of smf files to bins. Both versiions (1.05 and 1.07) worked without problems.

Secondly, your S10. This is what I see in BinEdit.

<center>

</center>

An incredible modeling job. Yes, indeedy. Suggestions for cutting back the verts would be to paint the grille instead of modeling it, maybe a bit less rounding on the wheelwells, join the box to the cab, and close off the box. I know I know, it's a shame to take away from nice modeling, but the game won't handle that once you put two sides to it, and add some undercarriage and maybe engine detail.

By the way, there are no textures in the download zip so I couldn't really see anything beyond shaded mode.

I didnt make any textures for the truck. I don't want to make textures until the model is completely finished.

I appreciate the comments about how good the model is. I've worked very hard on it, and this being my second model, i'm very appreciative.

Due to the fact that its not textured, you dont see the faces i've used to actually draw the lines of the doors and such. I've done this because i originally planned for the model to be used in games such as Grand Theft Auto, which can handle high poly/vertex models.

I will go through later today and try and cut down the vertices, without losing detail to the model.

How many vertices should i cut it down to, and wont creating a frame (with an engine) make alot more vertices?

Thanks gain.

Alright. I've done as much as i can. I reduced it to a good ~480 vertices. I have mirrored the faces on the body to give it the fiberglass look, and i've removed the bed. I've filled in the rear end also.

As far as texturing.. Well, i can't do it. I can't find good textures to map off of, and everything i thought of to make good textures from scratch came out looking like crap.

I ask, is there anyone out there who can possibly collaborate with me on this project, and create textures? It'd be nice if they can be mapped to the truck also, but i can map them if i have to.

I'll make a readme with credits and stuff and your name will be in it, and you'll also hold high respects with me.. I know its not much, but i really can't handle texturing! I don't know how Rep Fan does it!

Anyway, i appreciate all comments and all help i can get on this.

Here's the latest file:

http://tehacidx.bladestorm.net/misc/3d%20stuff.zip

Thanks guys.

EDIT: OH! And when i was working in zmodeler, i somehow permanently screwed up the normals on the model. I dont know what i did, but i can't fix it!

You might ask Alpine here

http://mtm2.com/~bbs/

I haven't seen him a couple days but he's handy in a paint program and likes these kinds of challenges.

Posted! Thanks Phineus.

As of right now if anyone still wants to give it a shot, let me know.. Position is still open.

Do you have any refference photos of the actual truck?

>>EDIT: OH! And when i was working in zmodeler, i somehow permanently screwed up the normals on the model. I dont know what i did, but i can't fix it!

it seems that u have joined the verts together from both sides. i know that BE doesnt recognize it half the time, i also know that the game hates it(darkened faces). but what i didnt know is that Zmod also dislikes it.
what u gotta do is select the inside body and either delete it, or detach it from the outer one. that'll fix that up.

lookin great so far , keep it up

See if this version fixes your normals problem...
http://www.mtmc4fun.com/temp/Chevys102.zip

I'm not familiar with ZM at all so I can't confirm one way or another.

ps. I blanket mapped the body and included the textures in the zip

Yes, it fixed my problem, but i know what you did to fix it. Now theres double as many vertices as i had it down to! 934 as opposed to 487.

This means that the model will lag in game. Is there positively no way that i can do this without detaching the faces?

LEGWON, as far as reference pics, i havent saved any, but there should be alot up on google images...

The truck is a 1995 Chevrolet S10. Usually searching for 95 S10 brings up a good amount of results.

>>Yes, it fixed my problem, but i know what you did to fix it. Now theres double as many vertices as i had it down to! 934 as opposed to 487

the verts dont kill the game too much. its more the faces that hurt the performance of mtm2.

like i said earlier, mtm2 doesnt like back-to-back faces joined to the saem verts. it creates darker faces and u can totally tell that there joined. it just looks plain ugly.

>>LEGWON, as far as ...
umm, that was malibu

> Is there positively no way that i can do this without detaching the faces?


What I would do is redo the underside of the truck with a lot less detail, or better yet just close off the bottom with a few big faces and forget the fiberglass idea.

You can always save what you have now for other games that can handle the higher face count.

I know, but i heard models with more than 1000 verts can't be env. mapped, and have to be set to mtm1 style shading.

Maybe i will just completely box off the front end or soemthing.. I dont know. I'll think of something.

On a high vert body, you can also make a firewall, and completely close off the inside of the cab. That way you won't need any faces in there, you'll never see them anyway.

Another way to do it is to make one face that is used as a blocking panel. Like on the inside of the hood, instead of all those inside faces, make one plate that covers all that up, that is visible from the bottom. If the body is that bad, always put a bed cover over the box. You can also make the wheelwells open, or fiberglassed, but make some inner fenderwells, and close off the whole bottom.

There are many ways of making a high vert body ok to use with no problems. Alot of my Bigfoot reps use bodys from Evo, and the whole truck, frame and all is all under 1400 verts. Always remember, if you can't see it, it don't need to be there. I just redid 90% of my trucks, so when you get your truck done, you can always spin it around in Binedit, and you'll find all kinds of things you can delete, that you'll never see.

Detail is cool, I know I love it, but like me I never used to care, but I wanted people to use my stuff, so I had to reduce the verts. No matter what you make, all of it can have shiny faces. That mapping error is because of too many models on the truck, or vert count, if you keep it under 1000 verts you can run the truck also with the water effects ON on tracks. When you step over 1000 verts, that's when you start to have problems. It's an old game, nuttin we can do about it.

But my suggestion is to make it 80% of how you want it, and 20% of it taking into account of others, and the old game. That way "most" everyone will be happy. Bottom line, if people like it enough when it's done, they'll find a way to drive it, one way or another.

Go into your game's graphics options and turn off the truck reflections....This will allow a truck with more than 999 vertices to work in MTM2 using the mtm2 shiny textures.

Shoot for a target number of less than 3000 vertices...the less, the better. If you can get below 2000, that would be fine.

Just expanding on a few points.

Firstly, Leg is right to say that faces are what impact the rendering performance (since they are what gets drawn, it follows that more ploygons will slow it down). But the vertices are what cause the errors.

If you have under 1000 verts on any given model (we usually talk about the body model since it's the most prevalent component of the truck), Shiny faces work perfectly "as designed" in the game. It's nice if you can stay under the 1000-vert limit, but most people don't pay it much attention anymore since it's just too restrictive when making a detailed truck.

Above 1000, you get a "Can't environment map model" error if you use Shiny faces. To get around this you can either set your face types to non-shiny (which generally looks bad), or as BD says go into the game's 3D graphics options and turn off "Truck Reflections" (which lets you keep your nice shiny faces, and the graphics effect you lose by turning it off is really no great loss). Nowadays, virtually everyone who downloads trucks has the "Truck Reflections" option disabled, so you can pretty much safely assume that anyone who will want your truck has already turned the effect off, and just set your truck to Shiny faces anyway.

Going further, somewhere around 1500-1600 (I think) vertices we encounter the "Noah Phenomenon", a bizarre bug where the track floods with water anytime you drive your truck near a water feature. The solution is to turn off another 3D graphics option, "Reflections", which is what makes the water nice and mirror-like... or alternatively, just don't drive on a track that features water. Some (maybe most) people have this option disabled as well - I personally don't since there are not that many trucks over this limit that I like to drive (especially after Rep Fan trimmed down many of his trucks ), and I just like the nice water.

I personally think that keeping below the Noah threshold (ie. around 1400 verts) is a good target to aim for, and not just because I stubbornly hang on to my Reflections: because if you go much further, you'll almost certainly start seeing lag issues, especially with two or more trucks on the screen at the same time. Technically, the game can still run fairly smoothly (subject to computer specs) with a truck detailed to 2000 vertices or beyond... reliable so long as it's the only truck in the game. Once you get to around 3K, you start getting really <i>really</i> bad graphics glitches (and trust me, you really don't want to go there - have a look at <a href="">this example</a> to see the sort of thing I'm talking about).

As for painting your truck, you may or may not find this useful but this is the process I use when building textures for customised models:

I, like yourself, like to get my model pretty much complete before texture mapping it. When I have it down pat, I view the finalised mesh in the modelling program (in my case I haven't finished digesting the Zmodeller manual, so I use BinEdit) and take screenshots of it.
<center>

</center>
You might need to chop up and isolate parts of the truck to get a clearer shot of them; I also find it helpful to select groups of faces and open the texture mapping window to get screenshots of specific sections of the mesh (I don't know if Zmod texturemaps the same way, but BE's mapper lays out the mesh nice and flat while maintaining the shape and proportions... usually).

Then in my paint program, I cut and paste all these bits and arrange them to make my texture files. Then I'll colour them in roughly, and using the original wireframe lines as a guide (because I'm a perfectionist) map them precisely onto my model.
<center>
|

Then simply colour them in using the wireframe detail as a guide, and presto!

|
</center>
Easy? No. But it's tidy, and gives a nice accurate fit. (With this particular project I wanted to make textures that would be nice to re-use, so I was very diligent about the details... one could easily have taken shortcuts on the less important bits, if you didn't need a large paintable surface on the roof for example.)

Of course, as has been said I mostly hand-paint my trucks so this wouldn't work if you wanted to base your textures on photographs. Although if you're modelling from blueprints (as I belive most of you Zmodeller'ers do) you could easily use the blueprint designs as the basis for your textures too...

Thanks for the tip. One thing i can't do is just make the textures look good. I don't know how you get your textures to look so realistic so simply.

Anyway, bad news for me (followed by good news) - My uncle came down this weekend (he's moving in) and we were futzing around with my computer, attempting to overclock it. In short, we overclocked it and it was fine, overclocked it more, and corrupted my hard drive and fried some part of my motherboard.

Good news, the only thing that was really wrong was the motherboard. We ended up replacing both the motherboard and the hard drive, though, because at first we thought it was just the hard drive..

I made out better in the end. I ended up with a better hard drive (same size, just 7200rpm and 8mb buffer) and a better motherboard (8x agp... good stuff.) - And HOPEFULLY after i get all my drivers downloaded (such as the latest video drivers) i wont have to worry about crashing. It hasnt crashed yet, and i even tried playing Vice City which usually crashes. (The game did give me an error, but i believe its because i havent applied the patch(es) and updated my video drivers yet.

I've yet to re-install MTM2, but i will soon, and luckily i stored my truck up on my website otherwise i'd be up a creek without a paddle as far as the project goes. I do have to re-download all my tools and stuff, though.

Anyway, work will be a little delayed. Hopefully not too long, but it's spring break and, well, i want to have fun.

Alright guys. I'll be letting you know.

Alright guys, i'm back up and running again, but i'm missing one big part of the project... I lost my photoshop cd! I'll have to search around for it, because i knwo its somewhere..

But anyway, here is the latest update. 454 vertices, WITH fiberglass AND outer detail. The cab is completely boxed off.

I made the inner fiberglass very simple. It's still shaped to the body of the truck, but not even half as detailed. It will still look good. Besides, when i'm done with the truck i plan to have the inner body be a darkish-gray.

Heres the model:

http://tehacidx.bladestorm.net/misc/S10.zip

I'm still wondering if i should merge the bed and the cab together. Not 100% sure..

So what's my safe limit on vertices again? I should have about 908 vertices when i mirror the half of the truck and merge them together.. I still plan to put a (low-vertice, hopefully) motor along with a frame in it.

I'm not sure if i want to attempt at creating a frame or motor, so i'll probably just use a pre-made one.

One more question before i go... When it comes to truck scale.. How big is the average monster truck body, so i can re-size it?

Alright, thanks guys!

(Quick side note: The normals are SLIGHTLY messed up in a few small spots, but i figure it will be fine because they wont really be noticeable in-game, unless you're staring at those certain spots... I'm not too worried about it, though.)

----Whoops! One more thing.. Is anyone still willing to make textures for this truck? I'd appreciate some help.

i usually scale it to around 18 or 19 feet long and keep proportions.
Lookin good.