Car database

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9 comments, last by Mistro 18 years, 4 months ago
Hey guys... I'm trying to develop a simple car game ... The focus would be on the vast variety of cars... I want to include crap cars like my toyota seca ... hehehehe.. My question is ; how would I go about drawing all these cars ? I plan to use openGL. But I need the specs for all cars and it is really Does anyone know of any "collection" of 3D car graphics ? I'm looking for something similar to an open source database from Grad Turismo. Cheers
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You can either create your own models of cars, purchase them off of someone else or use models that are openly available to you (please read the licensing terms accompanied with the models).
Would you know where I might be able to purchase these models ?

Also, how would I go about modelling these car models ?

I've done graphics, but I have no idea of how I would be able to model a car from a photo.
Modeling a car takes some patience to get right.

I recomend ZModeler (google it, i fogot the address... something like www.zmodeler2.com)

since its free and can export to a lot of different formats including .x


as for the basics, just set up the bluprints and create triangles on the bluprints accordingly ...



and then presto! good to go!




more pics here... Scroll down for older pics so you can see basically where to start etc. Just remmber that when focussing on games, think of less polies rather than more. so in otherwords, don't follow those 3d studio tutorials aimed at creating realistic looking models unless you want to render stuff. 3 million polies aint a hefty amount for a video card nowadays but once you add in shaders etc, it slows to a crawl. And then you have the environment too...




EDIT: guess I should add that the game the civic was made for initially was Midtown Madness... I later created an interior and put it into one of my own games.

[Edited by - Mistro on December 3, 2005 9:19:40 PM]
______________________TradeMark Designs
Hey thanks a heap Mistro !!!

Thanks for the reply ! extremely helpful !!
So its pretty much all trial and error with the actual drawing ?

Like nothing is to perfect scale ?
Nope, its all to scale. Aslong as you line the vertecies with the blueprints and you line your blueprints correctly.

I'll try to get some pictures up from 3dStudio so you can see, but the technique is similar in all modeling programs.
______________________TradeMark Designs
Sorry to double post, but its pretty big :)

as you can see the blueprints don't line up perfectly and this will be youre situation 90 percent of the time.



Also a thing to remmber is that in Zmodeler, the setting up of the prints is a bit different. You set them directly to the veiew ports and don't/Can't/shouldn't put them on planes since you can't see textures in the viewports.


And the ultimate resource: http://www.zmodeler2.com/?mode=docs

Check out the offline one titled "Tutorial: Creating cars from scratch in ZModeler (2.5 Mb) offline"

you might also want to read the beggining ones to to get a handle on Zmodeler. It also has some good tips on how to use bluepritns effectively (the first tutorial, online or offline)


EDIT: I should mention that the car in the pic is still in the works and is far from done, plus its not for a game so its pretty high poly without mesh smooth.


Also, for bluprints check out SMCars they have a HUUUUUGE selection of blueprints for pretty much every car manufacturer.
______________________TradeMark Designs
Hey Mistro... thanks for the help..

Btw, how long did it take for you to draw the honda civic ?
Also, what are ".x" formats ?
The first one (the ES civic) took about 4 months or so (weekend work here and there only remember) to model and texture and another month or so to get it working in game.

The ED is now standing at about 5 hours work (yea i work slow :) since I'm pretty picky about my accuracy)

.x is a directx model format. Its prety much just ascii based but you can read it in and load it into a vertex/index buffer using the built in DX functions.
______________________TradeMark Designs
What do you mean by ED ?
Sorry .... I'm a noobie.... did u mean entire development ?

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