Quote from Racon :

Just thinking aloud, but does the spare need to be a 'real' (squishable) tyre? I will make any spares I need out of ordinary triangles in the editor to save a bit of CPU, but could LFS do that automatically on loading the mod maybe? (ie, if the spare is set and visible, calculate the shape/textures once, add them to the 'ordinary' static triangles and then just forget about the spare completely.)

LFS runs at ~500 fps without even being CPU bound on modern systems, so perhaps that's overthinking a little bit? :ь

I'm converting my old XRT-based VOB mod to a a new mod system.
I have renamed VOB to SRE and everything seemed OK, but when it comes to texturing, Editor is crashing when i press "pages" for 5th object (next object after the brake calipers in XRT).
Any ideas how can i bypass this of what should i edit in old VOB to prevent this?

Quote from Racon :

Just thinking aloud, but does the spare need to be a 'real' (squishable) tyre? I will make any spares I need out of ordinary triangles in the editor to save a bit of CPU, but could LFS do that automatically on loading the mod maybe? (ie, if the spare is set and visible, calculate the shape/textures once, add them to the 'ordinary' static triangles and then just forget about the spare completely.)

I think if there is only one spare tyre, it's fine to use the existing spare tyre system. It uses the same draw system as the real wheels so it looks best that way. My point was only that if the spare is actually invisible then it would be a waste of CPU/GPU time and power. But for visible spares it's a reasonable use.

Quote from Snoop.DriftEra :

I'm converting my old XRT-based VOB mod to a a new mod system.
I have renamed VOB to SRE and everything seemed OK, but when it comes to texturing, Editor is crashing when i press "pages" for 5th object (next object after the brake calipers in XRT).
Any ideas how can i bypass this of what should i edit in old VOB to prevent this?

I haven't heard of the editor crashing on correctly formed objects, saved from LFS. So I guess the VOB, created by external software, is corrupted. Can you delete that subobject, in subob mode? Or is that subobject important? Maybe you could try saving and reloading the whole model, before entering page mode, in case the save and reload fixes something. Also you could try "clean object" in case that might remove something that isn't needed, in case that thing that isn't needed is the thing that is causing the crash.

Is it possible to flip the interior without mirroring the texts on it when swapping the driver side? s_clock texture seems to be mirroring itself when needed but regular overlay texts don't. Thanks in advance!

Quote from Tomsteel :

Is it possible to flip the interior without mirroring the texts on it when swapping the driver side? s_clock texture seems to be mirroring itself when needed but regular overlay texts don't. Thanks in advance!

If the mapping name starts with U_ then it doesn't flip.

Thanks for the tips, it took me hours earlier today to find that panel on the top right.

What I was trying ask is about regular texts like on the switches, which should act exactly like the gauges you mentioned once they are mirrored.

@Scawen, thank you soooo much, saved my day!

Quote from Scawen :

I haven't heard of the editor crashing on correctly formed objects, saved from LFS. So I guess the VOB, created by external software, is corrupted. Can you delete that subobject, in subob mode? Or is that subobject important? Maybe you could try saving and reloading the whole model, before entering page mode, in case the save and reload fixes something. Also you could try "clean object" in case that might remove something that isn't needed, in case that thing that isn't needed is the thing that is causing the crash.

Thanks a bunch, Scawen!!! Cleanup works like magic!
You saved my model. You can't imagine what i went through to get it textured in 'external software' years ago, so deleting this subobject would be very painful.

Why does the editor use .png instead of .dds? I get error "Colour type RGB but A is required"... yeah but how am I supposted to get Alpha channel saved in a .png?

Quote from Amynue :

Why does the editor use .png instead of .dds? I get error "Colour type RGB but A is required"... yeah but how am I supposted to get Alpha channel saved in a .png?

You need a paint program that supports png with alpha - my old one didn't so I downloaded GIMP for that purpose.

Quote from Amynue :

Why does the editor use .png instead of .dds? I get error "Colour type RGB but A is required"... yeah but how am I supposted to get Alpha channel saved in a .png?

PNG supports alpha channel just fine, use e.g. Photoshop to manage that.

I couldn't find a way to save it with Photoshop without losing Alpha channel, but GIMP did the trick. Thanks for the tip.

I'm trying to convert a .VOB mod I've made in 2011. I was able to load it into the editor by renaming the file to .SRE
I've ran into two issues.
1) Mirrors appear black in the game. I can't figure out what is wrong. They appear to be properly mapped with "s_mirr" texture They worked in the past, back when it was a .VOB mod
2) LFS Editor always crashes when I click on the "page" tab in the main model view.

Quick answer:

1) I don't know what's up with the mirrors, you'd better have a close look at the official vehicles and see how things are named.

2) A crash with a matching description (due to incorrectly formed VOB model created by external software) was solved for one user by clicking "clean object" in subob mode of the modeller. Just a few posts up from here.

How can I change a mapping direction?

Example screenshot attached.

I want to change it from "right" to "top"

Quote from r3zp3k7 :

How can I change a mapping direction?

select the mapping
go to the correct view
draw the drag box
click "ADJUST"

Quote from Scawen :

select the mapping
go to the correct view
draw the drag box
click "ADJUST"

Worked perfectly. Thanks!

Thanks for the answer.

Quote from Scawen :

1) I don't know what's up with the mirrors, you'd better have a close look at the official vehicles and see how things are named.

I had 3 mappings - one for each mirror. After long trial and error I figured out that the interior mirror have to go into a sub-object and the side mirrors have to be be mirrored and use one mapping. Now all 3 mirrors are working, but there is a problem with side mirrors (see attachment). Frame of the mirror somehow gets reflected in the mirror, not even near the edge the mirror. I saw this issue on another mod - "SV EVOLUTION V12"
Can anything be done to fix this (other than remodeling the mirror)?

Quote from Scawen :

2) A crash with a matching description (due to incorrectly formed VOB model created by external software) was solved for one user by clicking "clean object" in subob mode of the modeller. Just a few posts up from here.

Clicking "clean object" did stop "page" tab from crashing the editor but the list is so longer than the screen and there is no way to scroll down the list , so I can't see all of it.

I've also noticed that after importing the .vob renamed to .sre, the smoothing groups appear to be working - edges are sharp where they should be. But after you make any change to the model (for example move one point) and then exit from modeler into the main editor, the entire model becomes "smoothed". So I will have to redo smoothing groups on the entire vehicle from scratch


By the way, your tutorial videos are very useful. I hope you can make more - you could cover some of the mysterious buttons like - what does "clean object" or "magic triangle sort" even do...
Would be nice if the editor could display some tips or short description when you hover your mouse over certain buttons.

Quote from Amynue :

Would be nice if the editor could display some tips or short description when you hover your mouse over certain buttons.

That's what it's doing already - when you hover over a button, a description is shown at the bottom. See the attachment, where I was hovering over the "magic triangle sort" button.

Thanks for the info. I'm not sure what I can do about the mirror issue, but I will bear that in mind. I have seen that before too. The trouble is if I increase the clipping distance for the image rendered from "behind" the mirror, it might miss a part of the side of the car.

The page screen shouldn't really be so long, usually. Alarm bells are ringing! Is it necessary to use so many separate textures? Usually only repeating textures need to be on their own texture page. It's more efficient for most texture cutouts be be on a shared page with other texture cutouts (as you see in the official LFS cars).

But anyway, there is a text size button "text" down at the bottom right that may help, if you reduce the text size, you'll see more pages on screen.

I don't know why smoothing groups have been lost on your model, I haven't heard of that before. Have you tried "compress groups" in subob mode? Maybe the originally imported model has an 'illegal' number of smoothing groups.

Clean object gets rid of excess unused things, like unused mappings or unused texture pages, etc. Magic triangle sort tries to sort the triangles in such a way that further away triangles will be drawn first. This can help with alpha sorting and sometimes Z buffering.

There should be descriptions of the buttons down at the bottom of the screen when you hover over almost every button in the modeller (but not the vehicle editor, yet). If you are not seeing the tips, maybe your text is too big?

Quote from Scawen :

The page screen shouldn't really be so long, usually.

I imagine. The .vob was built over a decade ago using ZModeler and the "LFS Car Importer" (made by Magnot). Some pages repeat as much as 7 times and they look exactly the same. But I can't see a way to delete any of them, even unused (red) ones.

In LFS Car Importer you could only see the "maps" list, while the "cutouts" and "pages" were managed by the software. Only now I can see how much of a mess it is.

Quote from Scawen :

But anyway, there is a text size button "text" down at the bottom right that may help, if you reduce the text size, you'll see more pages on screen.

That did the trick, now I can see the end of the list Thanks.

Quote from Scawen :

I don't know why smoothing groups have been lost on your model, I haven't heard of that before. Have you tried "compress groups" in subob mode? Maybe the originally imported model has an 'illegal' number of smoothing groups.

I tried a few of my simpler .vob mods from the past and they all have this issue. When you first load them into the modeller they look perfect, but when you switch into the "groups" view, you can see that the entire model is actually one group. When you make any change to the model, save the .sre and load it back in, it all becomes smoothed (see attachment). Only the original untouched subobjects - such as brake calippers have proper smoothing groups.

Quote from Scawen :

There should be descriptions of the buttons down at the bottom of the screen when you hover over almost every button in the modeller (but not the vehicle editor, yet). If you are not seeing the tips, maybe your text is too big?

Oh wow. I was using the Modeller in windowed mode and couldn't see them. Only now when I decreased the text size to see the pages, I'm now able to see the descriptions Thanks for the tip! Will make things easier for sure.

I remembered how that smoothing thing works. When you first load your model, the vertices in what would be separate smoothing groups, are duplicated. That's not the LFS way - it wants to merge the duplicate vertices - so usually it detects this situation and it runs a big algorithm that assigns smoothing groups to all the separate surfaces, before merging the vertices. From memory, this situation is usually detected by the lack of smoothing groups in the loaded object. LFS decides that indicates an old VOB mod and does the algorithm to assign smoothing groups. I wonder why this isn't happening for this model. Maybe there are a couple of smoothing groups in the original loaded data? You can see by clicking "groups" down at the bottom right after loading the model.

Quote from Scawen :

When you first load your model, the vertices in what would be separate smoothing groups, are duplicated. That's not the LFS way - it wants to merge the duplicate vertices

There is no smoothing groups in Zmodeler so sharp edges were achieved by splitting the surfaces at the edge, so that you have duplicate verticles where you want the edge to be sharp. That way each verticle has normals facing in the direction of the surface it remains attached to (not sure if this sentence makes sense).
https://www.zmodeler2.com/docs/program/lessons/advanced/les2_normtools.html

Quote from Scawen :

I wonder why this isn't happening for this model. Maybe there are a couple of smoothing groups in the original loaded data? You can see by clicking "groups" down at the bottom right after loading the model.

As you can see in the attachment from my previous post (the middle screenshot), the entire main object is assigned to the smoothing group 0.

I think it will be best if you take a look by yourself so that you can better investigate this. I attached a fairly lowpoly .vob to the post (9700tris).

Thanks, I've found out the reason for it.

In the detection to answer the question "Is it an externally created object" it checks for two things.

1) As mentioned before, the existence of non-zero smoothing groups. I believe as you say there are no smoothing groups in the main object's LOD1.

2) The existence of another LFS-specific feature, namely "Triangle refers to mirrored point".

Because this model contains triangles that do refer to mirrored points, it is assumed to have been created within LFS.

Unfortunately there is another reason for this check. The function to automatically assign groups does not support triangles that refer to mirrored points. So I can't easily just add a button to force it to do the group assign function.

I think the best thing may be manual group assign. I think this may be easier than you think, if you use the "group select" function.

- CTRL+SHIFT and click on a triangle.
- Then assign that group of selected triangles to a smoothing group.
- Clear selection
- CTRL+SHIFT on another group and assign that.

Etc... well, it may be a bit laborious, but at least you don't have to individually select triangles.

Quote from Scawen :

I think the best thing may be manual group assign. I think this may be easier than you think, if you use the "group select" function.

- CTRL+SHIFT and click on a triangle.
- Then assign that group of selected triangles to a smoothing group.
- Clear selection
- CTRL+SHIFT on another group and assign that.

Etc... well, it may be a bit laborious, but at least you don't have to individually select triangles.

This does indeed work great on freshly imported .vobs. Sadly the mod I'm currently working on already got smoothed by the LFS Modeller long ago and I've done too many changes to the model to now import the .vob again. I will have to select triangles manually on this one, but for the other mods I plan to convert to .veh I will definitely use the method you described to assign smoothing groups after importing the .vob, will save me many hours.

Thanks for the help!

Is it possible to assign different engines to the configurations?
I'd like to create a cup version with a slightly more powerful and much louder engine. Is it allowed to upload 3 versions of the same mod?