Rendering a car nicely in C3, help me out?

[xk0be]

I haven't found any tuts on google or tgw/digituts, so I have come here looking for help. I haven't messed around at all with this so keep that in mind, this is mostly just to find out whats what. I just want to present this car I've been doing for a while nicely and work with the pipeline of getting stuff into an engine etc for my folio down the line.

So what I want to do:

normal map, unwrap, texture my vehicle
Get it into the engine
Render it really nicely with materials and everything
Maybe: Make it drivable and playable so basic rig and animate doors opening and stuff

Questions:

I read UDK has problems with normal maps on a reflective surface like a car body, how about Cryengine? Should I normal map this or does a medium poly work better? This is the reason I want to do it in cry and not UDK from what I understand because I don't want to do a medium poly, I'd prefer normal mapping or just keeping it high poly.

Is there a basic rundown of the process for anything here either somewhere already that I haven't found or can someone write up a quick concise version? I mean, I don't want to go in with just no direction or idea at all. Any tutorials or help to do this would be sweet.

[Brendan]

Firstly, what kind of vehicle are you making?

If it's a shiny new car, you shouldn't need normal maps for the exterior paintwork, only the tyres and interior materials (leather, etc). In which case, use more polys and no normal map for the car paint.

If it's a rusty car or one with a lot of exposed parts, then you might normal map it, or just bits of it.


A warning if you're using CE3, it does keep the 65k vert limit, and won't do squat if you're near this as a notice, and how it calculates the amount of verts is a secret mankind must not yet know (roughly equal to what the vert count should be, multiplied by today's stock market plus the square root of air). So be careful if you see the vert count climbing. UDK and Unity will both throw warnings and Unity will sometimes even fix it for you.

There are tutorials online about importing things into CE3, and you should be able to find the CE3 Lightbox for a decent showroom base.

Check the CE3 forums, they usually have some basic things that you can put into your game, like a fighter jet, a star wars walkers, they should have a car or know how to put your car into the game. There's also a bit about vehicle stuff in the Docs - look for that because that'll help a lot.

[xk0be]

Yeah, shiny audi r8. So I guess I should go middle poly, ugh. Thanks for the direction about the lightbox and ce3 forums, I also found a few tuts on Eat3d so I think I may have enough if I decide to tackle this..