thecarlover's mods - Suburban/Avalanche now available!

[Sillyworld]

Brilliant work, Sir.
*Clapping intensifies*

[RobtheFiend]

Nearly shorted out the keyboard, *drool*

[vmo]

Yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss (in a time t=+∞ ago) ssssssssssssssssss!

[Oskiinus]

Mid engined 8L V12 edged beauty... Here we go!

[thecarlover]

I'm still working out some kinks with the side intake morphs. While vent placement on them is not entirely what I hoped for (same with the "bump" behind the windows), some fiddling around can give decent results. Even without vents, morphing the side intake areas a bit can give more texture to the body. Morphs let the rear take 395s with room to spare, and 315s in the front (I'll change that to take around 365s). An interesting thing that I didn't expect was what happened to the engine bay when I used RWD instead of AWD...



This thing reaches 420 km/h in 2005 while costing just under $180,000 to produce, and I haven't adjusted in the aerodynamics in the .lua yet.

I'm also now planning to modify this body a bit and have that version available in the late 80s. With the right fixtures, it can look very much like a Diablo instead, so a few changes (more straight lines here and there), and it'll fit right in a decade earlier.

[thecarlover]

Murciélago now available! First post edited, standalone download:

thecarlover00SupercarLarge.zip

Murciélago standalone download

(298.88 KiB) Downloaded 279 times

[vmo]

Thanks!

[titleguy1]

It's pretty good. But, as I think with all of your mods, I wish you could add more morphs, it seems too much like a Chinese copy of a real car. But, that's all!

[Oskiinus]

CYKA YES
What about Steam release? Aired too?

[thecarlover]

CYKA YES
What about Steam release? Aired too?

Yup, check the first post. I can't attach any more files to the first post, hence the standalone being here.

It's pretty good. But, as I think with all of your mods, I wish you could add more morphs, it seems too much like a Chinese copy of a real car. But, that's all!

As far as morphable zones, it's got one more than the McLaren body. If you mean how much deformation happens with each morph, I'm limited by the mesh for that. I try to max out all my morphs without making the body look ridiculous, and a design such as this leaves me pretty limited with what I can do. Something that's mostly straight edges (like the xB) gives more more morph options. As much as I would have liked to have a morph to make the front end a very pointy wedge, that's not possible with the mesh, and the morphs I have there already look ugly at certain combinations of extremes, so what's there is all I could do. I could extensively rework the mesh in that area, but there's no guarantee that would improve the morph options. I do agree it's pretty limited in what the morphs change, but there isn't much I can do about that.

[strop]

I wish I understood how the morphing worked! I don't want to ask too much but does making simpler meshes allows for greater morphing?

Interesting take on the side air intake morph. It does come out a bit ratty at the extremes but it's unique to the bodies in the game so far.

EDIT: unfortunately the vents don't seem to want to place in the side cutout part very well at all

Right, I'm going to see what I can do with this thing and see if it is enough to replace my original concept for Mercury!

[Slim Jim]

Christmas came early. Thanks man! Great job!

edit: also looking forward to the not-a-Diablo body as well.

[thecarlover]

I wish I understood how the morphing worked! I don't want to ask too much but does making simpler meshes allows for greater morphing?

Interesting take on the side air intake morph. It does come out a bit ratty at the extremes but it's unique to the bodies in the game so far.

Right, I'm going to see what I can do with this thing and see if it is enough to replace my original concept for Mercury!

Simplicity doesn't necessarily allow greater morphing, it mostly has to do with angles of the polygons. If moving something back and forth, but the polygons are sloped, it will only move horizontally and the slope will get distorted. This is most obvious with the morph in the middle of the doors on the Mazda 2 body (one of the late 90s hatches). Now, to solve that, giving vertical movement would give the option to keep the slope, but when it's a door, the entire seam is selected, so vertical movement would completely distort the top and bottom of the door. This is why the Murciélago doesn't have a morph on the doors. This kind of thing is less of an issue at either end of a car, since vertical movement can be allowed there. Another issue is stretching the front or back of a car that tapers inwards from the sides. If the tapering starts at the wheel arch, the morph will have a section following the original taper angle, but wherever it gets stretched/compressed, that angle will either be straightened out or angled more, creating distortion. The problem here is that sideways horizontal movement isn't possible, since the middle of the car cannot cross over the centre axis (overlap here causes issues), so it's about a delicate balance of letting the taper get distorted but not to the point that it's very obvious. There are other issues, some that can be solved with multiple morphs, but depending what it is that can really complicate things and even mess up existing morphs, which would then need to be redone. Others have to do with the smoothing groups, which is why there are extra "creasess" in the side of the Murciélago. For the reflections when morphing, one smoothing group will get distorted, but if the morph is next to another smoothing group, that one won't be affected, and so the extra creases are edges to smoothing groups to prevent the side intake morphs from making the sides look severely dented. The problem with the existing distortion at their extremes is that if I added vertical separations of smoothing groups, those lines would look terrible on the car. My solution was to keep the morphs that look good at low intrusions but have distortions at high intrusions as those can be covered by the vents applied to the area. I'll admit that some things could be possible if I took the time to figure out a solution and worked very delicately with the morphs to apply it, but there's a point that just gets to be too much effort.

Edit: the vents are tricky and are hard to place when morphing the intakes to their extreme (some positions don't work), but there are no issues at less extreme angles. Just play around with the dimensions of the vent and the angle of the morph until something works. I hoped that the area would be detected as a front section, but with the mapping of the middle being, well, the middle, anything facing front or back isn't possible.

[strop]

Okay that's very helpful, thanks for taking the time to write all that. This explains why if the morphs are too extreme in some bodies, the body creases up and it looks awkward.

So the not-MP4-12C body in this game allows for that ridiculous morph at the front because in its original form, the entire front section is pretty much vertical and not much else?

There are some tricky ways and means to trick the game into reorienting the vents on the surface of the flares where the angle is simply so great that the game decides that despite it being a 'middle' zone, the vents are stuck on in a perpendicular orientation.

Either way, this car fits some pretty big engines, so I will look forward to whacking a turbo on a V12 and seeing just how fast I can get it!

[thecarlover]

Yeah, the McLaren body has that flat area, but the curves would likely be why it's only the middle of the bumper that's morphable, and not the whole front end. I could possibly do something different with the front, but that would only use 2 morphs instead of 3 and would also require some fairly major reworking. I might attempt it on the Diablo body, and if it turns out well, possibly update the Murciélago body with some modifications.