Top video that is, great sense of speed.

A shot I took just off the grid at aston, looks better than my renders i'm trying to do.

Quote from mrodgers :

Are you talking in real life on public roads here? If so, then FWD was thought up for the ease of moving a vehicle in inclement weather. With RWD trying to push a 3000 pound car through a foot of snow, the rear tires will break traction much easier, thus you won't be able to move the car. Yes, the back end loosing it and sliding also is a factor. With FWD, it allows the car to be pulled through the snow because of the weight being over the powered wheels, unlike RWD. And, yes, the back end will slide much less in nasty weather.

Also, FWD allows a more compact front transaxle, thus less weight, thus a smaller motor to pull the car, thus better economical running and better economics for the automotive manufacturers to build the cars (ie, more money for a new technology that is cheaper to produce putting more money in their pockets.)

In the public automotive world, FWD vs. RWD has nothing to do with oversteer and understeer. It started from trying to move and drive a car in winter weather.

I don't really want to quote this wiki as it is not 100% but it says there that...

"Predictable handling characteristics: front-wheel drive cars, with a front weight bias, tend to understeer at the limit, which according to for instance SAAB engineer Gunnar Larsson is easier since it makes instinct correct in avoiding terminal oversteer, and less prone to result in fishtailing or a spin"

...as one of the many advantages of FWD including the increased traction in bad weather and fuel economy. I didnt say it was designed because of that or that was the only reason why FWD is around today, I said that I believe that is one of the reasons it is so common today, even in countries where weather is good. And the reason why I think that the XFR is one of the best cars to go fast in LFS.

And this is there too "It is easier to correct trailing-throttle or trailing-brake oversteer."

Quote from samyip :

For your earlier question about the tyre wall being mirrored, it could be the surface normal is pointing the other direction, try force 2 side on the material to see if it renders ok, if not, rotate the U or V angle to 180 degrees of the bitmap in your material editor.

Q1, You can adjust the pivot of any object. Go to the Hierarchy tab, then choose Pivot, select 'Affect Pivot Only' then you can move your pivot points about. Once finished, remember to de-select 'Affect Pivot Only' button.

Q2, You can do that, some people prefer this way, but you will have to flip the surface normal to point inward, or force 2 side material. because if you don't do that, the inside of the sphere will not render.
The other way is go to Enviroment and assign an enviroment map to the Background. Make sure your mapping is checked on 'Environ' and 'Spherical' and on your Sky light, check on 'Use Scene Environment' that will use the bitmap colour for your light.

Q3, for the scene you have at the moment, it is like a sunset, I don't think you will need a spot light as the sun has gone down, there is more ambient light around and the shadow should be more difussed. The light needs to be slightly warmer and you may need an environment reflection map for the reflection to reflect your background image.

Q4, I don't have a UFR, I can't answer you on this one, but you can always create your own texture by taking a few photos of your own.

Hiya, thanks for taking the time to reply and help me.

The whole tyre wall thing is driving me mad, I click editable mesh, then I click element, then I flip and it all goes into triangles, does flip normal do that normal face flip thing? I cant pivot it, doesnt seem to do anything, its very tempermental wether it renders or not, I can shift the view and it wont render. See the pics of what I see in 3ds max and how the render turns out.

See attachments.

On the render, it shows the rear tyre wall because of the acute angle but the other one wont show, if I render it at a wider angle neither show. The strip above the doorsil doesnt show in my preview but in the render its there, you can see from underneath the car that also 2 bits by the rear number plate are also showing up in a strange way, reversed. This just happened randomly while I was working and now I dont know how to reverse it. argh what am I doing wrong.....

If you use the skinning kits from master skinners then they usually come in 2048 res, I try to save my files as that before I resize + jpg it. Opened an XFR skin that took me ages to create, because I wanted to render it, but alas I saved that skins file in 1024, so careful of that, you may need it a higher res in the future so save the backup in its original size.

I only voted for 1 skin as I didn't have time, a flamey LX6 but hey, I just love firey skins.

Quote from Forbin :

Exactly my point, it's so forgiving that you never spin out. In fact, the easiest way to recover from a slide in a FWD car (should you ever find yourself in this rare circumstance ) is to simply stomp on the gas. You never have to learn to countersteer, which is an invaluable skill to have and not having it severely limits your ability to drive the proper cars.

If you're spinning out in the RWD cars, you've clearly spent far too much time driving FWD cars.

Well I meant, people spinning out on real life road driving but yeah, you would probably find that most people on todays roads would be unable to cope with a RWD car compared to a driver who learnt and always drives one. Is it better to just ignore FWD and go to RWD and stick to that, or better to learn FWD then put that to use in RWD later and learn that more specific aspect of it?

edit: I have been racing a lot in the XRG lately, and I first raced on XFG, I learnt the lines, the track, the braking distances, then just got in the RWD car and found it quite the advantage. I just adjusted to the different car because i could focus on just this aspect.

Last edited by richy, Wed, 8 Aug 2007 23:51. Reason : more blabbering on

as I understood it, FWD is used a lot on road cars since its easier to learn to drive, more forgiving, safer (dont spin out exiting corners) since you understeer more than oversteer, which is harder to correct?

And in LFS this leaves more room for people to learn racecraft, lines, economy and setups.

Just my opinion of course.

Quote from Forbin :

No no no, stay away from front-wheel drive. First of all, it'll teach you bad habits. Secondly, FWD is just plain evil.

What bad habits, I need to check if I have them

Well, I think I will like to plug how awesome the XFR is for learning to race. Once you step in it you think, oh crap, the tyres, how do I keep those from burning up. This makes you drive much cleaner, smoother, avoid understeer and use a little oversteer to your advantage. It makes for close racing, since its a GTR of the XFG, but at an increased pace.

/plug over

Quote from Bogey Jammer :

you can open .blend files with 3dsmax?

nope im trying to mess about with blender too!

Awesome thanks. Going to try and create a tidy scenes collection with all the pictures with them as backups and maybe if they are ok I can send them to other people! nice tips about speeding up rendering and retreiving all the maps!

The thing with the tyre wall is weird, in the preview window I cant see the cromo tyres logo but when it renders they show, sometimes it wont render the tyre wall logo... ah well, I think its because its such a thin object on the side of the tyre and global shadows are hiding it or something cos if I view it from a very acute angle it shows there.. confusing lol.

Q1) A new question I have, when I rotate a wheel or object it rotates around a different axis and becomes out of align. Like I would like to rotate an object around a 90 degree right angle from the ground rather than do a rotate and then have to move the object into where I think it should be. Like a tyre wall object is a round object right, so I want to rotate it around so I can adjust where the writing is on the wheel, but when I rotate the object it wont stay on the sidewall of the tyre....

Q2) Also I created a huge geo sphere to create an environment, like I wanted to put a sky map / graphic on the inside of this sphere to be like a sky, with my ground plane in the middle, is this a bad idea, how do you go about creating a sky in 3ds max...

This is a render i've been doing with a UFR.

Q3) I have a just skylight only at the moment and I think it shows, the car looks a little plastic from the rear. Do I need a couple of spot lights on there do you think? What obvious lighting issues can you see?

Q4) The UFR dds files are limited, theres 1 parts dds and a material dds so theres lots of blank areas, I managed to fit the RA_seat to the UFR seat, it seemed to fit ok, but I couldnt find the UFR seat or the interior doors etc, is this just something to work around and fit my own materials to it?

Cheers!

Quote from kurent :

It is impossible with the newest version of Blender. You need v2.42 and you can import LFS cars in .obj format.


Luckily I still have the cars in .blend format and have uploaded them here:
LFS cars in Blender format.rar

Even though I am using 3ds max 9 this is still really useful, thanks kurent you are a star!!!!

Hello, didn't want to fill up the tutorial thread with questions that really don't relate to the 3ds max 9 rendering tutorial on this section, anyway, since I got started things have been going well and I am getting some results which are making my desktop look nice.

Ok first question is, do I need to keep the same directory structure for the saved scene to work still, like if I send the scene to someone else do they need all the .jpgs and .dds in the same directories?

Second is a problem I have with rendering a tyre wall logo. The first one I did worked fine, I mapped the dds to it and the logo is showing on the tyre. I move to the next sidewall but I have a problem, I put the same material on it but it has gone on the wrong side of the tyre wall. I hope this picture explains it some. The front of the tyre wall is black but when I look behind it there is a mirror image of the logo like, the graphic has been put on the wrong face of the object.

Any help is appreciated.

This has happened to me on the race start screen too, i've seen a few people getting kicked off by what looks like the server. When it shuffles the layout and weather settings etc, if you've already joined the race it kicks you off and you need to rejoin. Its ok if you're just careful of this and wait for the system to load then join, if you're too quick itll shuffle you off...

You can hold the blue flag out stationary and that is a blue flag, normal blue flag rules apply, you are part of the race. but if you wave the flag then its a waved Blue flag, a different flag action.

This means that you are not part of the race (mid race join) and that you should move over immediately and not interupt the race. Give way to Racer_01 will be spammed because you should do that even if it will cost you the lap.

Blue flag = Flag has been shown to you

Blue flag waved = Flag has been waved at you.

Thats my understanding of it. I'm sure I will be corrected quickly enough.

edit: Bah too slow.

Last edited by richy, Tue, 7 Aug 2007 19:57. Reason : bah

Quote from Bonetti :

hi...the link... http://www.sharebigfile.com/fi ... n-Blender-format-rar.html doesent work.And i cant find the CMX20BJ script...

http://users.skynet.be/tom.demuer/software.html

This is for the CMX conversion script.

I cant get that download to work either.

Quote from FC3SCorey :

It would be a nice add-on (Deep dish mesh....) but not really necessary, one thing I would like to see is a way to limit the speed it takes to get from lock to lock using a game controller.

But really I want some SSR's or BBS rims! Good ol'e style 15x13 racing rims/slicks on an XRT!!

Look for BeSpoke add on for LFS.

I recently got the LFS add on called BeSpoke and had some great fun putting new wheels on the XFG XRG XRT. The ones I chose werent ricey, just nice polygons and worked well inside LFS for replays. But when you change the .rim file it changes them all to the same graphic. So after a race or so I just got used to the new .rim file and realised that it was more hastle to do it, but I kept it for special screenshots or replay moments.

I think I just want to see some variation on the track, however minor, so 2 or 3 rim types would be nice too, in my opinion. Sports rims 2 peice so it looks racey and shows a little bit of individuality between the cars.

I guess thats a +1 from me then. Is it? Did I agree or not? Dunno!

Quote from kurent :

Or you do as the tutorial says and tick 2-sided in the render tab.

Ooooh thanks. I saved the file with all the boxes ticked now so I did it the hard way but this is a good tip that I didnt read properly in the tutorial.

Quote from Becky Rose :

I read the post fine. So fine in fact, that I did not realise it had all these errors in. Possibly this is because I am as dyslexic as the original poster, although when my doctor tested for dysxlexia she just said 'nah - I think you're just thick'... . lol.

Anyway regarding slip into a corner, am I the only one who just cant drive LFS that precisely all the time. I mean somtimes I can, some cars/tracks/setups etc, but quite often I approach corners knowing what I want to do, but what actually happens is at the turn in points I react to whatever the car decides it is going to do in order to get around the bend.

I put this down to a lack of feeling from the drivers seat, i'm more consistent in real life - I swear! lol.

For me, I can only really do it at south city, I just practice a lot there and know my braking points well there. (remember, dont use shadows or other peoples skid marks as braking points they change!). I usually aim for the same consistent line but try to push my braking points and shift the weight of the car more to get it to go over and the back end can step out a little bit. Little mini scandinavian flicks on tarmac, in my head. Did that even make sense...LOL

Sorry to hear about your cat.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Heh. I mean it's all very fine and dandy telling someone 5 degrees is best, you might as well not bother.



When approaching a corner do you think:



a) I'm going to take this corner at precisely 63.5mph while maintaining an optimal 4.5 degress slip angle feathering the throttle to 65% at the slightly-late apex



or



b) hooolllld ooonnn!!!





......



I suspect more the latter than the former

I guess this depends on how many laps you have done in the car at that circuit, wether youre making a pass and are on the inside line, or sometimes just as a little surprise because of loss of concentration. I usually find that under braking i'll put a wheel on the dirt making my braking distance much longer and putting the car sideways and then it's a crazy dorifto with dip, while going into the corner.

Last edited by richy, Tue, 7 Aug 2007 12:23.

Quote from LineR32 :

Your missing the parcel shelf Richy, the only way you'd be missing it is if you've selected those polys and hidden or deleted them, or changed the meterial of it to glass.

Figured out what I am doing wrong.

Basically the materials that I selected for different car peices needed to be ticked as 2-sided. XR_interior1 and interior2 were the main culprits. Followed by mirrors and seats and some other things. Once 2 sided is there it makes the object more complete.

See the latest render I did, this time it took longer to create it since I have some shadows and lighting working. I am enjoying doing this stuff I hope I can learn how to do all the good stuff eventually.

Last edited by richy, Tue, 7 Aug 2007 03:38. Reason : added picture

A bit of slipping can really help at South City, it's good for getting you lined up for a nicer view of the apex (barrier) and the exit point of the corner, allowing for more speed on exit. Understeering in some of those corners loses tonnes of time where as a little oversteer gives you more room for error. Slamming the breaks on at top speed and shifting the weight of the car can get the back end to step out a little helping you to glide round the corner.

definately S2.

Heres a little update.

I am still stuck on a few things. This "gap" in the rear window that lets the wheel show through, I need to fill that somehow.

And the brake discs are square, I need to make them round to fit with my new wheels.

And the reflections make it look a little too bright.

Lighting is still pretty weird to me, like, it just makes everything black. Going hunting for more tutorials on other stuff...

Quote from kurent :

I agree, that's why I included ALL the cars in my tutorial! The "LFS_cars_obj.zip" contains all the cars of LFS. How are you not getting this?

LOL I just found them obj files and then realised. Sorry!!