Let me start off by saying, I originally
wrote this editor to be used only by myself
with no intentions of distributing it to others, so you
can take your hopes for an
easy to use, nice user interface and throw them out the
window. hehe.
The editor and editing process are by no
means easy. You will need lots of patience
and persistence to achieve a clean looking fully functional
model.
This editor is still beta, There are many
functions yet to be implemented, many
refinements to be made, and maybe a couple of bugs...
For further information and or tutorials
on CarEd, go to the official CarEd support
site:
The Carmageddon
Fan Club
http://cfc.allgames.com
You will need to install the Java 2 platform
and the Java 3D extension from Sun.
Currently The Java 3D runtime only supports Open-GL for
Windows so you need that
as well. If you are using Win98 or NT4.0 the Open-GL
support should already be there.
You can find the Java 2 platform here: (about 9 megs)
http://www.javasoft.com/products/jdk/1.2/jre/download-windows.html
and the Java 3D extension here:
http://www.javasoft.com/products/java-media/3D/download.html
You MUST install both the Java 1.2 platform and the Java
3D in the same directory.
The default is c:\program files\javasoft\jre\1.2
To run the editor, you should probably create
a shortcut to the batch file that can
be found in this zip archive called cared.bat. You may
need to enter the full path
to the java.exe in the batch file. It should look something
like this:
c:\progra~1\javasoft\jre\1.2\bin\java -classpath cared.jar CarEd
Make sure the cared.jar and the cared.bat
files are in the same directory. If
you launch the .BAT file and a DOS window appears and
then quickly disappears,
you will need to open up a DOS prompt, cd to the
directory containing the
cared.bat and then type cared to see what the
problem is.
When the editor is running, you will notice
that a DOS window will also be
running in the background. This window is used for debugging
info, and will
show any errors you may encounter. If you want to get
rid of it, you can replace
the java executable name in the batch file with
javaw.
The only problem I have ever had running
this program is when I initialize the
3D window, sometimes the editor hangs and you need to
kill it by pressing Ctrl-c
in the DOS window. This bug rarely happens and it is
a problem with the Java Open-GL
implementation. Other than that the editor should be
pretty stable, MUCH more stable
than the Stainless PlayThing2 editor.
You may also want to download a TWT extractor
that can be found on most any
Carmageddon II site, so you can look at other models
in the game.
The main window has 4 views, three are three
editing views, and the fourth is a
browsing view.
To get an idea of how a car is oriented in
each view, you can load up one of the
carmageddon .DAT files that can be found in any one of
the car .TWT files.
Each of the three editing views can be translated
and scaled with the mouse so
that you can see detailed enlargements of any section
of the car you need to work on.
Hold down the left mouse button over an editing view
and move the mouse to translate
the view. Hold down Alt and the left mouse button
and drag to scale the view.
The Browser view can be scaled the same
way as the edit windows, but it also supports
rotation to let you see all sides of your textured car.
Hold down the left mouse button over the browser view
and move the mouse to translate
the view. Hold down Alt and the left mouse button
and drag to rotate the view.
1.4 PLOTTING POINTS (Vertices)
To add a point to the currently selected
component, simply hold down the Alt key
and click on one of the edit views. Make sure you do
not move the mouse when you
click or the edit view will resize instead. When you
add a Point (Vertex) it will
become the only selected point in the component thus
allowing you to move it around
by right clicking on the appropriate edit view and dragging
the mouse.
If you are modeling a real car, it
is a good idea to brows the web and download as
many pictures of it as possible. If you are lucky enough
to find a side view, front view,
top view or back view, you can use the image trace feature
to accurately plot the model.
Image tracing simply allows you to load up an image (GIF
or JPG) and display it in one
of the three editing views. You then can outline the
image with points to get an exact
fit. Press Alt-1 to load a trace image into the
left editing view, Alt-2 for the front view
and Alt-3 for the top view.
(figure 1.2)
1.5 SELECTING POINTS (Vertices)
When you have a few points plotted, you can
select groups of them by holding
down the Ctrl key and dragging the select box
around the points you want.
When you release the mouse button, all points within
the box will be selected.
To de-select points, simply hold down the Shift
key in place of Ctrl.
By default, the only points that are selected
will be in the currently
selected component. You can select points from other
components by changing the
selected component or enabling the Select from all
visible checkbox in the
Points box (see figure
1.1).
If you need to align two or more points along
an axis or even mirror two
points along an axis, select the points and click on
one of the Align buttons
found on the component edit window. The only one I ever
really use for cars is the
Align X to make sure the car is exactly symmetric
across the X axis.
A note about triangles, if you are new to
3D modeling, here are the basics: 3D models
are composed of nothing but lots of little triangles.
Other shapes such as rectangles
can easily be made from two or more triangles. Most model
components will only be
viewed from one side, so if you had a cube, you would
only see the outside of the cube
and not the inside. By using this principal, 3D games
can speed up the drawing process
by only drawing one side of any given triangle (the outside).
When you define a triangle
with CarEd, only one side will be visible and the other
will be invisible.
You must have 3 points selected to define
a triangle, it is a good idea if possible
to create a triangle that shares 2 points from another
triangle, so the new triangle
knows which way to face, otherwise you have a 50-50 chance
that the triangle will
be facing the wrong way. If it is facing the wrong way,
then press i to invert
the triangle and make it face in the correct direction.
You can see how tedious this
becomes quickly. You may have a bunch of components on
the screen making it difficult
to see what you are working on so it is a good idea to
hide all other components by
clicking on the Only visible checkbox on the Components
box (see figure 1.1) or you
can hide specific components by
selecting them and disabling the Visible checkbox.
Most components will be connected to other
components, so it is very important to
be sure that they line up. To do this you need to determine
which vertices the components
have in common. Go to the connecting component and select
all vertices that will be
shared and copy them to the clipboard Ctrl-c.
Now go back to your new component that
will be connected and paste the vertices. You should
be able to build the new component
off of these points and have a well defined connection.
If you move any of the connecting
vertices, by default the editor will move the vertices
in any connecting component
by the same amount. In some rare circumstances you will
not want this to happen, so
to disable this feature you can go to the main windows
menubar and turn off the
Edit-Effect Links option. You should turn
it back on when you are done.
There are a few different ways to manipulate
a model. You have seen how to move
points with the mouse, but now lets take a look at some
of the more advanced types
of transformations. Looking at the Point and Component
boxes you will see two buttons
Transform and Iterate (see figure
1.1). The Transform button will bring up a dialog that
will let you define exactly how
to manipulate selected points or the current component.
Simply type in the needed transformation numbers and
click on the Ok button.
The component Transform even allows you the option
of applying the transformation
to all visible components. Remember you can experiment
with different values here
and then select Edit-undo to remove the
transformation.
Iterations are a form of transformation,
but they create new sets of components
or points. Both the Component and Point boxes have an
Iterate button (see figure 1.1).
The most commonly used iteration is to create
a point or component on the opposite
side of the car (mirroring on the X axis). For instance,
if you have the front right
wheel plotted, and want to create the front left wheel.
You would select Iterate
from the components edit menu. A Dialog will pop up with
transformation, origin and
number of iterations fields. All we want to do is mirror
the Front right wheel along
the X axis, so we would type in a -1 scale for the X
axis. We would only want one
iteration, and the origin should be (0,0,0) so all other
values are default. Then
click on Ok and a new front left wheel will be
created.
More complex components can be generated
by this type of transformation when using
multiple iterations, but watch out, if you have too many
iterations, the editor and
game will become sluggish with too many polygons.
Textures are simply RGB images saved in .TIF
format. The best way to create them
is by using Adobe Photoshop, but there are many other
good image editors out there
like L-View or Paint Shop Pro. Both the width and the
height of each texture MUST
be a power of 2 but do not have to be the same. eg. 16x16,
32x16, 64x64, 128x16.
Valid dimensions are: 2,4,8,16,32,64,128. I would not
recommend creating a texture
with a dimension beyond 128x128. TIF files support many
types of images and even
compression formats but to be on the safe side, ONLY
create RGB or RGBA 24-bit
color (8-bit per color component) images that are uncompressed
and in DOS format.
I still have a few bugs in my TIF reader
that may cause problems if the TIF is saved
with LZW compression.
When you have created your texture, save it in the \tiffrgb\
directory of the car you want to
use it on. eg. c:\cared\cala\tiffrgb\
Photoshop allows you to create RGBA TIF
files with an alpha channel that defines
translucency. This option will allow you to create your
own (see-through) window
textures, but if you do not have Photoshop, you can borrow
the SCRN.TIF image
from someone else's car.
One thing to keep in mind about colors is
that Carmageddon II will tend to bleach
out brighter colors, so you will want to keep color saturation
as high as possible.
CarEd uses simple projection based texturing.
Basically you can think of it as if
you are projecting your texture (Image) onto the surface
of the currently selected
component. You can project the texture form one of six
sides (Top,Bottom,Left,Right,
Front or Back).
To texture a component, you will first need
to import the image. In the Textures
box (see figure 1.1),
click on the + button which will create a new texture slot. Then
click on the ... button which
will bring up a file dialog allowing you to select the .TIF image.
Now from the Components box (see figure
1.1), select the component to be textured
and click on the Texture
drop dow, select your new texture, then click on the Map to drop
down and select how you want to
project the texture. From the main CarEd window, click
on the Refresh button on
the lower right to see what the texture will look like on your
model.
Grouping components allows you to have multiple
textures per car part. A good
example of this would be a car door. A standard door
is usually made up of three
components: The outer door, the inside of the door(cockpit),
an a window. Each
component has it's own texture but they are all part
of the complete door.
From the main CarEd window, select the Component-Group
components menu option
which will bring up the Component group dialog. The list
on the left side will
display all components that are not part of any group,
The upper left list
displays all defined groups and the lower left list displays
all components
contained in the selected group.
To define a door group you would click on
the + button to add a new group,
rename the group to something like LDOOR, add
the components that make up
the door and you are done.
You will notice the Is Master Group
checkbox. This allows you to define
which group is the main car body, which all other components
and groups are
attached.
The cared editor uses it's own 3D file format
(.OBJ) that is not compatible with any
other 3D editor formats. If you want to import and export
3D models from other
modelers, you will need to be able to convert the files
to (.ASC) which can be imported
into the cared editor. At the moment (.ASC) files are
the only external 3D file format
I support, due to their simple text based data. You can
load .DAT files from
Carmageddon II into the editor, but that is only useful
for grabbing car parts that
you may want to reuse, like a driver or the wheels.
When you are working on your car, you should
always save using the File-save
option which will generate my .OBJ format files. The
only other type of save you
should should need is the compile car when you
are ready to test out your design
in the game.