Fiat Barchetta Riviera

[Mr Whippy]

Problem with mirroring also, is that if the authoring isn't done nicely (or mipmaps are generated automatically), you can get leakage across the mirror line of texture information from other parts of the texture atlas... ie, a soft black line down the middle of the car...

Liveries are not a huge concern if the car isn't the type to have them, but so many things are not mirrored sometimes, so it's nice to have the texture reflect those differences (ie, fuel filler cap, door lock key hole perhaps, non-symmetric boot badging, tow hook cover etc)

Hmmm

Dave

 

[QuadCoreMax]

@Ruud

lol, it shouldn't be too hard to fix since it's only a checking condition to implement.
Now, that's also an issue with my new driver, where I mirrored the bones, will try to duplicate with -x instead & check what Racer debug tells me.

+1 Some1

Here's a picture of my newly UV checked car (2/3 days)...had to cycle thru all polys to check if they were all planar projected & sewed, right, cuz you want nice transitions...& sure assigned the correct material to them.



Note at the top right of my UV map, I overlapped the 2 bottom pieces of my wing, so yeah, it could be layed out/unfolded with more accurately. Got UV space remaining, hehe.

@Dave

You're right, for little things (symmetrical) you could go for it, it just constrains you to texture one half & for sure it's a gain of time when creating the actual text map.

With that method you overlap UV's...hm could be dangerous with Cg extended code, because we listen to UV's position...

 

[hierafas]

Thank you all for your comments! Here are a few images of the new map and applied to the model:



With the renewed map the car doesn't show any of the problems I had earlier. Guess I have got to get used to do more work on UV maps in future.

Got the bump maps applied and it looks ok. It's important not to overdo this effect overwise the model looks like a toy car.

Now for the silver metallic shaders. I need help. Tiberius' Jag would be my first adress for getting inspiration unfortunately it doesn't work. I started checking the Shader tread it's 35 pages, d'oh. Could somebody just give me a hint?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Mr Whippy]

Wow, fantastic work...

As for metallic, well using a soft specular can work quite nicely to generate the effect authentically enough at the distances your screenshots were at.
Have a look at my Lambo Murcielago release shaders perhaps!? Not perfect, but fast and look fine in most circumstances.


Inspirational use of bump maps there, they really work well. And your fabric roof looks really realistic. Need to finish my Z4 off now

Dave

 

[camsinny]

Indeed, the roof looks great!
There a subtle specular map having an effect there?

Quite looking forward to driving this.

 

[QuadCoreMax]

Me too, good job there !

 

[QuadCoreMax]

Ok fellas, I gived also a look to this car, unfortunately there's definitely some serious issues in SM (smoothing groups / soft-hard edges). That's just 1 thing, most textures are way to huge (16 mb tga) & UV's weren't perfectly 'layout/unfold'.

Too bad....It would surely take some time to adjust/recover the mesh as it should be....

 

[hierafas]

Well I'm not in a hurry

I looked up smoothing groups (and found this

) and yes zmod v107 doesn't have that. You can however detach objects and calculate normals. That's what I did here and it worked with most of my creations ok. Could you please highlight serious problem areas?

For the textures - they just are big because I use to draw/photoshop them in higher resolution before scaling them down later. You got a WIP version with the textures still in their original resolution until max. 4048x4048. I was a bit lazy. That the textures were not perfectly unfold, well, blame that on me and my zmod again. There is a LOT of handwork involved, you move every triangle more or less by hand in it's proper position. I haven't learned another tool yet and get always stuck with it again.

Nothing to worry I don't have to much time messing with the model right now, but I normally don't do half things. It will be released when it's done.

 

[Harey]

Well I'm not in a hurry

I looked up smoothing groups (and found this

) and yes zmod v107 doesn't have that. You can however detach objects and calculate normals. That's what I did here and it worked with most of my creations ok. Could you please highlight serious problem areas?

For the textures - they just are big because I use to draw/photoshop them in higher resolution before scaling them down later. You got a WIP version with the textures still in their original resolution until max. 4048x4048. I was a bit lazy. That the textures were not perfectly unfold, well, blame that on me and my zmod again. There is a LOT of handwork involved, you move every triangle more or less by hand in it's proper position. I haven't learned another tool yet and get always stuck with it again.

Nothing to worry I don't have to much time messing with the model right now, but I normally don't do half things. It will be released when it's done.

As much as I'd love to drive this little gem of a car right now, I'd rather wait for a good car to be released then, a car that had a rushed release, and is half done.

 

[hierafas]

Hi everybody,
I am sending 2 new teaser images. Problem with these is, it looks nearly done on those pictures but it just isn't. I am still in the process of learning and understanding cg shaders for visual tweaking and receive a lot of kind help from other forum members. Right now it is for me all about color control via shaders (silver and red on the pictures use the same texture) and optimization of reflection of each of the parts.
Stay tuned,

 

[Harey]

I actually tried the color controll via shaders a little while ago, pretty nice really, I think its easier to just leave the texture, white or a very light grey. and just change colors with the shader, its especially easier if you have baked textures. and while the file size may be a little larger because you'll have different shaders for each color, each color can be different by a larger amount, like having a pearlescent paint on one color while the other is just a gloss.

 

[AMGfan(BPM)]

wow intelligent color change would be a nice addict for racer!!!

 

[Charlesweb]

Well, as a simfan and owner of a 97 yellow barchetta, I specially registerd over here to follow your great work on this. It looks awesome already!!!

 

[aadilf1]

Really nice keep it up

 

[hierafas]

@ Charlesweb:


To my understanding only silver and black Riviera variants had a silver-red interior. For this reason I created a black interior to cover also other color variants:



I received great help from Cosmo regarding color and reflection control via shaders. The green one is my favorite:



Next steps: Creation of needles, wheel blur, lights, refinement here and there..

 

[camsinny]

Looking good!

Honestly though, I've been playing with blur models lately too and I wouldn't bother with them. Maybe just replace it with a lower detail wheel at speed (i.e. a LOD) rather than bother with blurred textures.
Keen to see your results though.

 

[Alex Forbin]

Very nice work there!

Alex Forbin

 

[Charlesweb]

Thats correct. My yellow one has a black interior. Some of them has silver on the clocks made by themselfes.

 

[hierafas]

Greetings everybody,

I have some trouble with running Racer after I replaced my desk computer with an ATI machine. It freezes the system after a few seconds and forces a rough restart: therefore I use a Dell Vostro for playing and testing, which is a little bit annoying, especially when trying things out. I got a MSI 785GME51 with integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200, would that work?

Barchetta: Added a new set of rims, brakelights, optional 3rd brakelight, onscreen-dials. Our Dell with its widescreen has another aspect ratio that my old machine: this made me realise that the dials are not resampled properly and look squeezed. I guess there is no cure for this?

I am done with modelling and adding gimmicks. Now I would just like to make it work smoothly with Racer. It still misses light effects, wheel-blur, physics optimisation, sounds. I won't toy around with moving heads/ arms (though that would be nice with a cabrio!)

Cim-sd, Charles-web or other Barchetta drivers: Could you please pm me?

 

[Stereo]

To fix aspect ratio problems in widescreen, you need to tweak a couple values in Racer.ini.

  width=1920
  height=1080
  ; Surround Gaming (Matrox TripleHead2Go)
  ; Pixel aspect ratio; normally 1 (pixels onscreen are sized 1:1)
  aspect=1.333
  ; Rendering aspect; 1.333 for most VGA resolutions, 1.6 for example for a 1280x800 screen (Apple screens, 16:10). 0=automatic (width/height)
  render_aspect=1.333

16:9 is 4/3*4/3 so both get set to that value. I'm not sure why it works like this - from how it's described it should be 1.0 & 1.78. But then you get the squished dials.

It makes the needles shorter than they should be but at least the dials are round. Digital elements also don't necessarily line up the way they should due to spacing issues.