Making a car

I have been making cars for a few years now and during that time I have got many questions regarding how I do it. How do I go from an empty folder in my computer to a car that everyone can enjoy in the game? What programs do I use? How much time does it take? Is it difficult? How did you start the first time? Can you teach me to do it? After answering all those questions rather hasty several times I decided to put this article together explaining everything more detailed. So here we go, I’ll start from the beginning.

The Beginning

When Rally Trophy came out I fell in love with it. It was one of the absolutely best rally games ever and it felt good to play. The cars did what I was expecting them to do. By now, though, I know that there are many strange things going on in the physics, but it’s still fun to play. Soon it become obvious that the game could be modded as new skins, sounds and physics started showing up. I was keen on trying a 4WD modern car in the game, as it had the most convincing physics. So I started investigating the physics files and found that they where not that hard to understand. For sure many things stayed untouched as I didn’t know what they did but the most important things where easy. I made WRC physics for the escort in the game and later I added textures to it. But even though it went like a WRC it was still just an old escort.

Then it happened. A tool for changing the shape of cars where released. I had some troubles getting it to work but after asking around a bit on the forums I had it installed. But I had no idea how it worked. Luckily I also found downloadable videos showing a simple car being made.

I studied it and managed to make an Impreza by watching a few seconds of the film, pause it and then do the same thing myself and so on. It took a long time but after many disastrous results I got it working in the game! It had loads of small drawbacks but it worked. As time moved on and I made another car, the Peugeot 206, I learned more things and could add more details and make things look better and better.

Now, back to the actual making of a car.

Setup and Research

The first thing I do after deciding what car to make is to make a new folder naming it as the car. In that I make a few other folders to get a good structure. This is necessary as a completed car with everything around it can use several 100’s of Mb of hard disk space. This might sound strange as what you download is just around 5 to 10 Mb or so. But what you get is just the final result, not the full Photoshop files, original sound recordings, blueprints and pictures.

The most important thing to get first is blueprints of the car, basically a drawing showing it from all sides. I use Photoshop to resize and cut those pictures to the same scale. Then I use them as backgrounds in the 3D program. That way I can “build” the car on top of it, following all the lines to get the shape right. I have used ZanozaModeler to make the 3D shape, basically because it is free and because the Rally Trophy filter worked with it. The filter is used to import existing cars from the game to the 3D editor and back. Or if you make an entirely new car just export that to the game. 3D Studio can also be used instead of ZModeler.

After finding the blueprints next thing is to gather as much information about the car as possible. Usually that means spending hours with Google finding pictures and technical data. You could make a car with just the blueprints, but they rarely show everything, only the basic shape. That’s why I need all the photos. Looking at a car from just the side, front, back and top doesn’t show how the model should look from a ¾ angle. Nowadays I constantly compare my model with pictures to see if something looks strange. Sometimes the blueprints are actually very wrong…