Mod F1 1982 for rFactor

I come late for this one, but regarding the weird textures after converting from GP4, study carefully where the parts appear because it is not uncommon that the mapping requires a 90º or 180º degree rotation (Or mirroring) of the texture for the use after converting to another format.

Alberto Ibañez wrote:

I come late for this one, but regarding the weird textures after converting from GP4, study carefully where the parts appear because it is not uncommon that the mapping requires a 90º or 180º degree rotation (Or mirroring) of the texture for the use after converting to another format.

Oh don't worry about the textures, they're fine. As I said in an earlier post, the GP4 car and the GPC79 car share the same UV mapping, so to say. I did fit all the parts correctly by making a sort of template of the wccarbody material mapping using blender, and then I fit the parts of the GP4 liveries to that mapping, so they fit like a charm. The real problem I have at the moment is the 3D model being just..right but wrong. I contacted David Sabre about it with all the things I've found out so far, and I hope he can help me with that. And hopefully give me some advice on what to do if the issue re-appears, namely when I start working on the Brabham BT49D, which I also have to "take" from the GPC79 mod and slap GP4 textures on it, and swap the 1979 tires with 1982 ones.

Now, so far I'm pretty happy with the Alfa-Romeo.
Thanks in large part (actually, full credit) to Alberto Ibanez and David Sabre for helping me out with some graphical/physical trouble with the car, namely the wobbly tyres and the sagging/broken suspension, the only thing I'm having to work on is the driver/helmet 3D model, the dashboard, mirrors, basically the cockpit interior with the little details and then...the LOD models, of which the Alfa 179D has/is going to have three.


Now, about the cockpit gauges and the mirrors..

Even though I've got all the textures in the Alfa179D_tex.mas and the following entries in the respective files, AKA the GEN and the cockpit_info file.. (given that the car is basically a GPC79 car, I also used the GPC79's cockpit-info data except for the digital stuff which..i don't think is really needed anyway)





...My result keeps coming up like this:



So I can't get the mirrors to work. Neither do the gauges work, or even show up. I had to comment out the last three things in the RPMLED section of the cockpitinfo ini because otherwise my game would just crash without any errors in the trace file. 
Is there anything I did wrong in the conversion process? I mean, I took the cockpit mirrors from the 179_cockpit gmt which has nothing to do with the way the car looks like from the outside, and repositioned them to fit on the car when looked at from the driver's perspective. On the outside, I placed placeholder mirrors since they don't serve any function on the swingman view anyway, plus the same method was used on the GPC 179. So I really don't get what's wrong here.. Other than that, here's a first look at the (still unfinished) inside of an Alfa-Romeo Tipo 179D..

For the mirrors and gauges you need to have the material setting Render Target set to True.

In older versions of 3dsimed I think that it was a tick box in the material setting.

Ohhh I see! How could I miss that!   Works like a charm now. But the physical mirrors just look..soo messed up. Is there a way I can assign a "different" mirror bmp to the actual mirrors while the virtual mirrors stay the same? Or is that not possible?

BTW: The RenderTarget property also worked for the gauges! Yesssss 


EDIT: Nah...trying to assign two different mirror BMP's just crashed my game. Oh well..now how am I gonna fix that horrible-looking mirror texture in the physical mirrors? I mean..probably by stretching it out a little, but man..

The mirrors probably need to be re-textured or at least re-scaled. You can try and re-scale them in 3dsimed, I can't remember how in older versions but its probably somewhere under edit materials.
The mirrors can be re-textured in zmodeler2.

To restretch just rescale the texture horizontally in simeditor and center it again. But really, doing it in Zmodeller is way easier.

Yeah, I've been doing and trying that. To be honest, ZModeler2, at least the one I have, it's just so..weird, so to say. I'm barely able to really do anything in it, even though I used it for the exhaust re-design on both the FW08 and FW08B. In the sense of textures and mapping, I've so far see 3Dsimed as the better way to do it, but I'm really just trying to make things work with as little damage as possible 

Anyway, yeah..the mirrors on all cars need a re-work, to be honest. At the moment it's either "Have good-looking actual mirrors but with crappy virtual mirrors" or vice versa. I think that should be addressed in a general overhaul of all mirrors in all cars, which I'm very sure I'm not talented enough to handle alone.

Anyway, on to the cockpit details! Graphically, the car is almost done!

Pascal Mikula wrote:

Yeah, I've been doing and trying that. To be honest, ZModeler2, at least the one I have, it's just so..weird, so to say. I'm barely able to really do anything in it, even though I used it for the exhaust re-design on both the FW08 and FW08B. In the sense of textures and mapping, I've so far see 3Dsimed as the better way to do it, but I'm really just trying to make things work with as little damage as possible 

I'll stand corrected. One look into the ZModeler2 tutorials and I see that many functions just lay hidden somewhere, it might seem!  

Anyway, thanks to ZModeler and the UV remapping thing I managed to make the cockpit interior section look  a little more...like an interior instead of just one black mass of goo. Things are coming together!

Pascal make sure you use the materials like tires, rims, chrome, carbon, suspenions etc etc / shaders from the 79 final chapter mod
the original shaders from the 79 mod are too washed out

François Remmen wrote:

Pascal make sure you use the materials like tires, rims, chrome,  carbon, suspenions etc etc  / shaders from  the 79 final chapter mod
the original shaders from the 79 mod are too washed out

Yeah I'd love to but downloading the "Final Chapter" mod would take DAYS for me, plus my old 3DSimEd2 doesn't support third-party shaders like SRPL and stuff like that, unlike 3DSimEd3, for which I don't have a license.
(EDIT: Yeah, there's this "HardwareShaders" folder in the program folder, and just copying all the rFactor shaders over to there worked a little, but it doesn't recognize most of them so yeah, good luck figuring that out because the 82 mod has its own shader pack which I remember looking very different from what the cars look like while I worked on them)

So I'd rather get the car done now and then patch it up later when I'm working, or when I'm already done with the BT49D.

Just a note for you. If you use SPRL shaders, they don't transfer to AMS very well. They appear too bright so we have to edit them.

Talking about the Alfa 179D..


The class of '82 has received yet another new student, however for the first round only.
Graphically, she's finished. I have all the parts in there, cockpit interior, details, pedals. Rear wing, front wing, wheels, everything works fine.
The only things I'd still need to get done are the shadow, collision and LOD models. I mean, all the 1982 cars have full-size collision and shadow models, I'm not sure how they actually work or what they do, if those actually are the ones casting shadows or not, or what the purpose of the collision model is, since the collisions and parts coming loose works just fine, but I'll do them anyway, just like the other '82 cars. Also, LOD models.

Also, how do the dashboard lights work? The REVLED works, but how do, say, low-fuel and high-temp lights work? I've tried to look into the CSGT70 mod because I know that the Porsche 917s have temperature, fuel, hell even pit request lights, but I can't see any way to write anything into the cockpitinfo file. So yeah, that'd actually also be a lot of help. Thank you!

Richard Coxon wrote:

Just a note for you. If you use SPRL shaders, they don't transfer to AMS very well. They appear too bright so we have to edit them.

I have no idea what shaders the current 1982-spec cars use, to be honest. In 3DSimEd2, they just get shown as "T1 Diffuse", basically just plain texture, and the Alfa 179D (as well as the 179 from GPC79) has "Bump Cube Specular Map add alpha specular reflect T1" and with all due honesty, I have no idea what any of them are or do. Never changed any of them. But I remember that they had other shaders in 3DSimEd3, but I can't remember since I haven't been able to use it since..early May, I think.

Pascal Mikula wrote:

Talking about the Alfa 179D..

Also, how do the dashboard lights work? The REVLED works, but how do, say, low-fuel and high-temp lights work? I've tried to look into the CSGT70 mod because I know that the Porsche 917s have temperature, fuel, hell even pit request lights, but I can't see any way to write anything into the cockpitinfo file. So yeah, that'd actually also be a lot of help. Thank you!

For the lights such as fuel or temp you need to have 2 textures, a bright one for when the light is lit and a dark one for when the light is not lit.
The dark texture will have 00 at the end of its filename. eg temp00.dds
The bright texture will have 01 at the end of its filename. eg temp01.dds
Also you need temp.dds, this is copy of the drak texture.
In this example temp.dds is assigned to material in 3dsimed, then further down on the material editing menu there is a Animation tick box (I think in earlier 3dsimed versions), click the tick on, and then in the text box enter 0,1
The 0,1 is for the other dark and bright texture to be displayed.

If you load a gmt back into 3dsimed it can lose the animation data (tick box) and if you save the gmt it will lose the animation. For lights and gauges check that they are still ticked before saving.

David Sabre wrote:

Pascal Mikula wrote:

Talking about the Alfa 179D..

Also, how do the dashboard lights work? The REVLED works, but how do, say, low-fuel and high-temp lights work? I've tried to look into the CSGT70 mod because I know that the Porsche 917s have temperature, fuel, hell even pit request lights, but I can't see any way to write anything into the cockpitinfo file. So yeah, that'd actually also be a lot of help. Thank you!

For the lights such as fuel or temp you need to have 2 textures, a bright one for when the light is lit and a dark one for when the light is not lit.
The dark texture will have 00 at the end of its filename. eg temp00.dds
The bright texture will have 01 at the end of its filename.  eg temp01.dds
Also you need temp.dds, this is copy of the drak texture.
In this example temp.dds is assigned to material in 3dsimed, then further down on the material editing menu there is a Animation tick box (I think in earlier 3dsimed versions), click the tick on, and then in the text box enter 0,1
The 0,1 is for the other dark and bright texture to be displayed.

If you load a gmt back into 3dsimed it can lose the animation data (tick box) and if you save the gmt it will lose the animation. For lights and gauges check that they are still ticked before saving.

Yes, that I know, and the fuel light has those textures already. But how do I tell the game that that's supposed to be a low-fuel warning light, for example?

BTW, as far as I have seen, on no cars in this mod do the warning lights even work, even though they have their respective 00 and 01 textures.
The Alfa 182/179D has those lines in the cockpit info file:

RPMLED=182_RPMLED
//LEDFY=182_LEDFY
//LEDLF=182_LEDLF
//LEDSL=182_LEDSL

I commented the others out since they were crashing my game, but first of all, which parameter is supposed to be which and why don't they work? (I could imagine LEDLF meaning LED Low Fuel but..it doesn't work)

EDIT: I hope you guys don't mind if I look into the CART88 cars for some formal stuff; so apparently LEDSL is for high oil temperature, LEDLF is for low fuel, as I suspected, but what is LEDFY? I mean..it can either be high water temp or pit request. Or is there anything else it could be?

Anyway, also about the RPMLED: of course the textures have to be called, in my case, 182_RPMLED. But the number behind it, for example in the CART88 Penske, there's 165, 170, 175 and 182. I assume the 1 stands for light turned on, but the two digits behind that, do they indicate the percentage of RPM at which point the lights get turned on? I mean, my RPMLED currently only has 182_RPMLED00 and 182_RPMLED01 and that works..somewhat fine, the LED turns on about 2,000 rpm before redline, but is it what I think it is, a way of telling the game WHEN to turn on the light, at what RPM percentage?

EDIT#2: I'm also looking at the Alfa 182 dashboard right now. It has two RPM lights, one with a material called 182_rpmled30 and one with 182_rpmled28, where 182_rpmled30 turns on before 182_rpmled28. I mean, both use the very same textures, and there really is only 182_rpmled00.dds and 182_rpmled01.dds in the texture MAS file, so..is it still what I think it is? I'm a little confused now.

EDIT#3: I've now entered the low-fuel light as the LEDLF in the cockpitinfo file, and also given it a unique name so it doesn't clash with any files in say cmaps.mas - still doesn't work. Neither does it light up when I have low fuel, nor when I overheat the engine, nothing. Yet, in the CART88 cars, no such instance is named in the cockpitinfo files, only the RPMLEDs. I wonder what you guys' secret is.. 

EDIT#4: Neeeeeevermind..I got it to work somehow. I totally forgot that the low-fuel light doesn't just turn on, it blinks! Well..that sort of hampers its visibility, but I guess it's the late 70s so to hell with user friendliness.

Warning lights for cockpit and such are mostly hidden in the common mas of the mod itself or a seperate mas
like for example "91common.mas" in my case

at this moment im looking for the best materials to crank up the mod
same as you do as  highly recommend to look into VLM groupc, hgt, srm90 , endurance series v3.0  and f1sr92  mods and ofourse the 79final chapter, all  are very good specialy on chrome aspects , where HSO mods are not good at is to generate realistic mat/glance chrome materials aswell carbon, suspension materials , they to washed out and in AMS its even worse.

if you compare the group c mod from rF1 to AMS you see the rF version is  more crisp  like the 79 final chapter compare to the original 79mod in the same sim! imagine in AMS it looks WAY too bloomy
take a VLM track and you will notice it or one of mine i made in the past, specialy with theHudson kerr sky and all correction i made in the lighting department!!
this also works in line and have hughe effect with the tracks, AMS you have to shut the graphic plugins in
the config then the track need to modify into natural Hudson kerr blends in the gdb and most important the SCN has to be altered aswell  which are invisble! so it never wil look that natural like in rf unless the mod tracksfiles are become visible!

it doesnt mather it use a sprl shader because if the track is NOT adjusted to sprl textures it wont give the full effect , however the mod will look great on a modified track with the correct blends and adjusted scn but this as far i know cant be done in AMS which is very odd, better said, a hughes handicap!
im lookinng at your 82 car on the latest version i working on now at Imola and its ultra realsitic! love it!

Material names. You do not need to add anything in the cockpit.ini.

LED165 Usually Green
LED170 Usually Yellow (sometimes Green)
LED175 Usually Orange (sometimes Yellow)
LED182 Usually Red

LEDSL = Overheating/Temperature Warning.
LEDPSR = Pit Stop Requested (Pending).
LEDPSY = Pit Stop Accepted (Yes/Go for pit stop).
LEDLF = Low Fuel

LEDFR = Black Flag
LEDFY = Yellow Flag
LEDFB = Blue Flag

David Sabre wrote:

Material names. You do not need to add anything in the cockpit.ini.

LED165 Usually Green
LED170 Usually Yellow (sometimes Green)
LED175 Usually Orange (sometimes Yellow)
LED182 Usually Red

LEDSL = Overheating/Temperature Warning.
LEDPSR = Pit Stop Requested (Pending).
LEDPSY = Pit Stop Accepted (Yes/Go for pit stop).
LEDLF = Low Fuel

LEDFR = Black Flag
LEDFY = Yellow Flag
LEDFB = Blue Flag

Yep..that's how I got it to work, too. But since my RPMLED is called 182_RPMLED, I assume the cockpitinfo ini overwrites/specifies it at least for the rev light?
But now that all makes sense..man I should have really maybe looked into the gmt files of some modern F1 mods where the lights are all on the wheel, maybe I could have noticed that earlier with the material names 

Francois Remmen wrote:

im lookinng at your 82 car on the latest version i working on now at Imola and its ultra realsitic! love it!

Not sure if you mean generally all the 82 cars I've published so far, or just the latest say 182T, but thank you for the praise. I mean, mostly they're literally the same on the outside as they were in the 0.95 Varjanta mod, but now with the addition of the Alfa 179D and (in the near future, thanks to all the stuff I learned while working on the 179D) the Brabham BT49D, I feel/fear this is going to become some sort of mix between 1982 and GPC79 cars. The German in me doesn't like that, to be honest since there are definite graphical differences..so you can instantly distinguish a car made specifically for the mod from a car that's from a mod dating three years back.
Anyway, there are still some cars missing. Let me name them here: Arrows A4, Toleman TG181B/C, Theodore TY01, Ensign N180B, Ensign N181, Ferrari 126C2B (or whatever the car was they entered at Caesars Palace), Lotus 87B, Fittipaldi F8D.

Now since I've slightly re-mapped a part of the Alfa 179D's cockpit interior using ZModeler, I discovered the UV-Mapper function in it. It's all well and good, except for the fact that the texture of my new material I'm trying to add to the mesh is square, no matter what!
That wasn't much of an issue with the cockpit interior, since the end result looks good anyway, but I'm trying to re-texture and re-map the mirrors right now.



And I think it's fairly safe to assume that the normal mirror.bmp is NOT square, but I'm asking myself why on earth ZModeler makes it square, and why it refuses to properly scale it. In the texture browser, it's displayed correctly, but in the UV Mapper, it just stays square, which honestly doesn't make things any easier. So how does one fix that?

Yes unfortunately zmodeller only admits square textures.

To solve that, you can scale the texturing object (The one visible in your right image) in just horizontal axis until it fits well over the distorted image.

Modify-->scale (And select only the H in the top bar)

Alberto Ibañez wrote:

Yes unfortunately zmodeller only admits square textures.

To solve that, you can scale the texturing object (The one visible in your right image) in just horizontal axis until it fits well over the distorted image.

Modify-->scale (And select only the H in the top bar)

Yikes..well, I guess that's one way to solve it.
Anyway, in the meantime I brought in the second Alfa 179D, so I suppose Bruno will have something to practice in at last
Plus, I suppose that except for the mirrors, the car is, from a graphics standpoint, now..finished? Progress about 95%? Holy damn.

Also, about the mirrors, I think the way they're mapped, that's about as good as they can get, I'm afraid. I just re-mapped them and the result was basically the same as before, so I suppose if I map them differently to scale the "objects" differently, the mirror texture is just gonna wrap around again and basically gonna show on, say the top 20% of the mirror it's gonna show part of the bottom texture of the mirror and vice versa. I'm afraid the shape of the mirror basically causes this, but I'm really not sure. Maybe I should try another approach to mapping them, but then the visibility of stuff in the mirror could get compromised.

This is the texture that I use for mirrors. Its easier to see if the texture is applied correctly and not stretched.


In the uvmapper you need to scale y so that the mirror reaches the top and bottom of the texture.
Then scale the x until it looks correct in the perspective view.
With the texture above it is far easier to see if the mapping is correct.

BTW Dave how do you create the shade maps for the textures in your models? Does zmodeller 2 create them already and unwrap the model to a flat texture, or do you have to go surface by surface manually and do the shading with a graphics editor?

I use xnormal or smak to create ambient occlusion maps (shade maps) and then they usually need to be edited by hand.