vehicle modding info

by Doug P » Fri Jan 04, 2013 2:06 am

I remember a few of us talking about this once before a long time ago for the NAGT mod. This is a good guideline to uses but with today's PC performance you could get away with more. Also you can rob Peter to pay Paul. In this I mean you can uses more on say the body but you'll need to gain them back by taking from maybe the low res interior. The two areas a model need to look sharp is the exterior and the high res cockpit. The high res cockpit is the one used when drivers use cockpit mod to drive.

Remember, these amounts aren't set in stone, you can move them around or go a little over. Just be aware, if you do go over in one or two areas that a total around 8500-9000 for best performance over all. A good rule of thumb to remember is the amount of cars going in a mod. If it's two or three you could get away with a slightly higher poly count. But if your looking at a six or seven car series they each need to be lower then the norm. The reason is when the mods loads, they load to memory. The more models the more memory needed, plus the track will be loaded at the same time.

Bump maps are a good tool to use but I'd recommend them to be used in quite high res areas. They tend to show square pixel edges on low res stuff. Bump maps can be an art in themselves. I've seen some that look terrible, and other that work well. It's all in the way their set up. Just another learning curve that comes with modeling.

Original post by Rantam. http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/1 ... nt-for-rF1



Optimal polycount for rF1

Well, first of all, consider this just as a suggestion if you're interested on creating a car for rF1. Today we have more powerful PCs than those available when rF1 was originally released, so you may increase these numbers without noticing a big impact on performance.

Anyway, the optimal polycount is around 15000-25000 (including wheels), for a high res version of the car, divided like follows:

* 8000-10000 Body
* 1000 cockpit outside view (and that's even too much)
* 1000-1500 x 4 for the wheels. But it's better to use less polys if possible and use them in the body
* Apart we have the body details and other elements like: wipers, mirrors, driver, etc.


Additionally the exterior of the car will need:

* 200-500. Shadows model to generate the shadows
* 50. Collision model

And we have also the Hi-Res cockpit (using on cockpit view). You may use 4000-5000 polys on this one, but this number is not so important. In some of the cars we're creating we have very high detailed cockpits with around 20000 polys, and rF can move them smoothly without problem.

The golden rule in any case is trying to optimize the polycount as much as you can. Keep in mind that a lot of players still having old computers running rF1.

Hope this will be helpful


[Note] 20,000 poly drivers cockpit view. The modeler/s talking about this say that's far to much and try to keep it down to 5000 like the author firsts suggests.

I hope this helps and hasn't scared you to much. I realize this is your first model but a little knowledge never goes a stray.