Car making guide -
How to create a car from scratch - Part 1
Go forward to Part
2
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Which tools
/ files will you need?
- The free car editor of
Juan (download here).
Check out his other cool stuff.
- A template of a blank
car (download here).
First steps
Start the car editor,
choose <Load> and open the Blank X.car file for
editing. You will find lots of values in the table -
don't worry yet ;-) they will be needed and explained
later.
Start your car creation by giving it a name: MyCar
After this you should save your car to a new file
named MyCar (click <Save>). |
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What are we
going to create?
A car! Who guessed that?
Nono, you can also create planes, boats, helicopters,
skateboards, bicycles etc. but we just want a simple car
which should look like the one in the left picture (very
simple).
Click on <Model> in
the upper right corner to open the Edit Model window.
The window is divided in 5 parts: a toolbar at the left,
3 two-dimensional squares (front, side and top view of
the car) and
a three dimensional square. The
four blue circles are the wheels of the car. The easiest to
understand is the top view (lower left quadrant). You
are looking at the "car" like a bird. The car
front points southward. |
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The Model
window
To make this a bit less
mathematical or geometrical, you should think of
building a car in this editor like building a real car
model with pieces of cardboard. You would assemble those
cardboards in a way, that the result looks like a car.
Here, you can only use triangular pieces of cardboard.
You must put triangle after triangle together to form a
car-like shape. The triangles are called polygons
(poly).
We will begin with the front of the car. Let's fire up
the model by adding a new poly to our empty model (see
left picture: click on that button, results in right picture).
A poly (triangle) is made
of three edges called Vertexes (or Vertices). You can
see the number of the currently chosen Vertex in the
toolbar (see right pic).
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If you point
the mouse at one of the edges of the poly, you can see
the number of the corresponding Vertex in the status bar
at the bottom of the window. Choose Vertex 0 in the top
view window (lower left quadrant).
We will now pull this
Vertex to the front of the car to make it the lower
front edge of the car. Pull it in front of the front
wheel like shown in the right picture. The X value of
the status bar should be about -1,0, the Z value about
1,8. In the top-view quadrant it looks okay now.
From the front-view
quadrant (upper left) you can see that the edge is far
above our wheel. Since we do not want to build a monster
truck, we should get this edge down to a more street
level. |
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Choose Vertex
0 in the upper left window (front-view) and pull it down
to the middle of the wheel (Y value should be about
-0,2, the X value should stay at about -1). You may have
noticed yet, that there are three dimensions X, Y and Z.
X is the horizontal value, Y represents the height of a
Vertex and Z is the depth.
Now pull Vertex 1 in
front of the right wheel the same way to X=1, Y=-0,2 and
Z=1,8. |
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An easier and
more exact method is to double click on the Vertex
(edge) and type in the values in digits. Let's put
Vertex 0 to X=-1, Y=-0,2 and Z=2 (see right picture).
Vertex 1 should be
(X/Y/Z): 1 / -0,2 / 2 and
Vertex 2 should be (X/Y/Z): 1 / 0,4 / 1,8.
We have finished our
first poly. |
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You can now
take a look at the car's front by using the 3-D
quadrant. Left click and hold the mouse button in the
lower right window and move the mouse to the upper
right, you will rotate the car this way. Right clicking
and holding results in zooming in or out when moving the
mouse up or down. Try to find the view which is seen in
the right picture here. |
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There is
something very annoying about polys, and that is that
they have only one visible side. In our cardboard
example, imagine that the cardboard has one ugly
underside and a nicely painted upper side. You would
only want to see the upper side at the outside of the
car, otherwise the car would look ugly. Here at GR, the
ugly side is transparent. You must always keep an eye on
turning the nice side of the poly outward, otherwise it
is not visible. To see the direction of our poly, you
have to change to the Polys mode by double clicking in
the 3-D quadrant a few times until you can see the word
Polys in the right corner of the status bar.
The fact that our Poly (triangle) is only an outlined
shape of blue indicates, that the invisible side is
turned outward, which we would like to change. Flip the
poly around by clicking at the <Swap Vertex>
button (see right picture).
Now our Poly should be a nice dark blue triangle,
indicating that the nice side is pointed outward.
Continue
with Part 2 >>>
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