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A Ferrari 312 body is tested and enhanced in Racer's Modeler.

THE BASICS

This tutorial will show you how to get SCGT cars into Racer. Before continuing, make sure you get the following:

• A Windows PC, which is needed to get the files from the .MAS files; no Linux or SGI support for this is known to me.
• Tony Hirst's VRL2VRML
• Tagforce's MASpuce (v1.0 or higher, perhaps MAStudio might be the choice of today)
• An SCGT car (download the SCGT version of the Ferrari from the picture above from this site, or go here for quite a lot of cars)
• Racer's Modeler and perhaps CarLab (see the download page)
• At least about 20Mb of free disk space while converting
• Optionally, use 3D Exploration (see http://www.xdsoft.com/explorer/) for a great generic model viewer.

THE STEPS IN FLYBY

The steps in short are like this (I'll talk you through the steps below):

• Extract the MAS files to get to the VRL files and the BMP texture images
• Convert the VRL files to VRML
• Import the VRML files with Modeler to DOF files, modifying some
• Import the VEH file to get some physics data right
• Test the car

IMPORTING THE BODY

I'll assume you downloaded the example Ferrari P4 by Pat Painter. First, unzip the zip file to a temporary directory, say C:\T\FERP4. You get some audio, a thumbnail, a .MAS file which contains the models and texture images, and a .VEH vehicle file which describes the physics.

Run MASpuce, and open the .MAS file (P4F1P4F.mas in the case of the example file).

Now, click Execute to extract the files to the directory (by default, all files are extracted; if you have selected any Child Files, select all 'Child files' (click the first, then scroll down and Shift-click on the last file), then click on "Execute" to unpack the VRL and BMP files to the same temporary directory). If it asks for a .PCK file, just enter 'ferp4' and press Enter. The .PCK file is not used.

Next, run VRL2VRML and open all the .VRL files in the directory. Select the P4F1VA.VRL file. The filenames of the SCGT VRL files are a bit cryptic, but you'll recognize this as the body. The A upto E versions are models that go from high-detail to low-detail. I'll use the highest detailed version. SCGT is quite old by now and it doesn't really use that many polygons. Use 'View Wire' if you're not really sure if you have the right model.

Next are the steps (I must elaborate on these later):

• Create a new car directory, for example, data/cars/mycar
• Copy a car.ini from an existing car as a base for the car's physics (data/cars/ferp4/car.ini for example).
• Also copy other important files: all *.crv files (torque.crv for example), and the views.ini file and any other .ini files you encounter in this directory. Also copy the view .tga files (rpm*.tga, kmh*.tga).
• For sounds, copy all .wav files too. For example; engine.wav, skid.wav etc.
  A fallback mechanism to have some sound if none is in the car directory is being design (22-3-01).
  
• Don't modify the car.ini file too much just yet. What you WILL want to edit is the starting comments, and the car.name value. This last value will be shown in Racer's Config screen when you select a car.
• Use Modeler to convert the body WRL file to DOF format (this loads much faster, and can contain optimized meshes).
  In more words: run Modeler, click 'Import VRML' and select the body file (P4F1VA.wrl in the example). After you've loaded it, it looks small; press 'Scale x100' to see it. It's probably without textures, but not to worry, that's for later. If you really want to see them, make a subdirectory called 'images/' in the temporary directory where you're loading the .wrl file from, and copy (don't MOVE) the texture images (*.BMP) to that directory. Re-import the model, and any textures that are supplied should be loaded.
  To get better performance, click 'Optimize', and select 'Generate normals' after that. This will normally make a bad-looking model (rendering errors) turn into something much better. Also try to give it some shininess (values from 10 to 50 do a nice job).
  You may wish to use 'Enlighten model' if there's still a lot of black materials on the car.
  Scale the model back (Scale /100) and click 'Export DOF'. Name the file 'body.dof' (this name is preferred).
  
• Copy the .DOF and .BMP files to the car directory.
• Use CarLab to select the .dof files, or edit car.ini directly (for starters, editing the file directly is actually faster and better). Make sure the body.dof model is loaded in car.ini (see body.model.file).
• Test your car; most easily done in Carlab, and when it works a bit, use Racer itself. Use Config to select your car, and if you can, hook up a terminal (9600bps, 8n1) to COM1 to see errors to avoid checking QLOG.txt for errors. Most crashes will first generate some errors, so you'll know where to look.
• To export wheels, you need to convert the *TLFH.VRL files into WRL and to DOF using Modeler. Note you must center the wheels in Modeler before exporting to DOF. SCGT uses wheels directly placed at the car location, but I use a more centric approach, so rotating the wheel is easier.

IMPORTING THE WHEELS

The wheels are placed at their absolute position in SCGT/F12K. Racer uses wheels that are centered to the origin. Here are the steps:

• Use Modeler to import the wheel WRL models (there 4 of them, above your can see P1P4TLFH.VRL for example, the *T*ire, *L*eft*F*ront in *H*igh detail).
• To get a close look, click 'Scale x100'.
• Use 'Center to Origin' to get the wheel in the right place for Racer.
• Click 'Optimize', and after that 'Generate normals'.
• Optionally you can use 'Enlighten model'. Gives a nice shine to the wheel often.
• Scale back ('Scale /100').
• Export the wheels as .DOF (you might use the same names, only use a .DOF extension) in the data/cars/<yourcar> directory.

Now you must get the wheels at their right location under the car. Modify car.ini in the following way:

• Find 'susp0' (upto susp3) and find the relative location, susp0.x/y/z. This is the basic attachment point of the suspension, but the wheels are located relative to the suspensions. So insert the X/Y/Z offset from the center of the car here. For example, the default Ferrari has x=.7, y=0.4, z=1.3 for its front left suspension (susp0).
• Do this for all suspensions; you probably only need some mirroring, i.e. x=-.7 for the next suspension (y/z remain the same, but make sure they're in the car.ini file).
• The wheels themselves have an extra offset with regards to the suspensions; wheel0.x/y/z belongs to susp0 for example.
  Modify these if you don't want the default values of 0/0/0 (it may be best just moving the suspensions and leave the wheel offset at 0; no suspensions are being drawn anyway).
• Add the model as wheel0.model.file=<wheelmodel>.DOF (do this for all wheels).

TROUBLESHOOTING

• Black textures; during your importing in Modeler you'll probably find that you can't see the textures. This doesn't matter too much really, as long as the textures are in the car directory, Racer will find them when it runs. If you insist, you can create a subdirectory called 'images/' in the directory where you call Modeler from, and copy the images there as well. This will display them in Modeler itself.
• Dark models; perhaps you'll encounter these. I believe I had to enlighten the wheel models for the Ferrari. Just loaded the WRL model, scale by 100 (to get a look), click 'Enlighten Model', then scale back (/100) and export to DOF. You can do the same later if you already have the DOF model; just import the DOF, enlighten, and export again.

AFTER YOU'RE DONE

You can use the .ar format to pack your files in one, also protecting the files from unwanted modifications. This will also enable quicker loading.

(last updated November 13, 2012 )