The Driver Syndicate/Vehicles/Creating Vehicle Models

The Driver Syndicate vehicles are utilizing many of EGF features such as phyiscs model, skinning, animations, body groups and LODs.

Coordinate system and alignment

Alignment of model

The Driver Syndicate uses metric system and Blender unit by default is equal to 1 meter.

Note that there are slight differences of coordinate systems axes between Blender (Z+ is up and Y+ is forward) and The Driver Syndicate (Y+ is up and Z+ is forward)

Using this knowledge, you'll need to align the front of our vehicle by the Y axis.

Applying materials

Material names in Blender are going to correspond the name of material file located in materials folder after you export and compile your model.

Materials/textures that are unique to the vehicle can have any name, but should be named after the vehicle, and not be the same as any other materials/textures.

In this example screenshot there are three materials which are veh_vette, glass and lplates.

The lplates name stands for license plates and it's UVs should be mapped to [0,0] - [1,1]

Damage Model Overview

Damage zones

Damage model is very similar to the Driver 1 and Driver 2 and utilizes separate model file with pre-defined damaged shape.

Vertices are assigned to the specific damage zones and this allows blending of individual parts between clean undamaged shape to the damaged shape.

For vehicle to support damage model, it needs to be set up in specific way but it is pretty similar to the regular skinning setup as it utilizes Shape Key and Armature

Vehicles in game identifying damage zones in a directional manner and consist of 7 zones:

1. front.left
2. front.right
3. side.left
4. side.right
5. back.left
6. back.right
7. top.roof (optional)

Each of the zones is meant to be damaged individually but there 4 more zones for car windows that are depending on zones above:

1. window.front - affected by front.left and front.right
2. window.back - affected by back.left and back.right
3. window.left - affected by side.left
4. window.right - affected by side.right

Each of the windows will appear damaged depending on the damage levels of zones they are affected by.

For example, if front.left or front.right getting damaged more than 75%, it will take damaged appearance.

Making Armature

An armature with all available bone names, along with a random "Bone" bone, headlight bones can be omitted for cars without popup headlights.

Modifier to make a car work with the armature.

Armature must be added for a vehicle to have cosmetic damage.

The object that represents a Vehicle model also need to have an Armature modifier that points to the right armature.

If you want to make certain parts of models damageable, you'll need to create bones with names that are described in Damage Model Overview section above.

You can also copy the Vette's or the Carla's armature, and pasting that into your model's will work too.

Rigging Your Vehicle

Almost acceptable rigging.

Vehicle must have vertex groups that correspond with the names of the bones from the armature. Vertex groups can be auto-generated in Blender when parenting armature to object or make them by hand.

Areas of the vehicle can be assigned to vertex groups either by highlighting them in Edit Mode and clicking Assign, by using Weight Painting, or with a combination of the two.

Weight groups should be assigned in the correct area for each bone. The center for the front and back of the car should be assigned for the front and back bones.

For all the windows, you must specify only affected window vertices.

Popup headlights should not be assigned to the front.left or front.right bones, instead, they are assigned to headlight.left and headlight.right and their damage is animated in timeline.

Creating Damaged Shape

A damaged model defined by the Damage shape key

Shape key, generally named Base or Basis, is used as the regular, undamaged shape of the car.

A damage shape key, usually named Damage is used for the damage of The Driver Syndicate vehicles. The name is important only for the ESC script.

Usual ways of creating a Damage shape key are:

• Moving the front and back bumpers towards the center of the car
• Flaring out the quarter panels
• Moving the center rows of the hood and trunk up

LOD Models

The Vette and its low poly counterpart.

A low LOD (Level of Detail) model is used for vehicles that are far away from the player to increase game performance.

A vehicle's low LOD model should follow the general shape of the vehicle.

The low LOD should also have the main vehicle model's texture and a similar UV mapping.

When the low LOD swaps in, details such as the wheels and driver for a car disappear. Because of this, it's a good idea to have a low poly stand-in for the wheels.

If there are bodygroups that are noticeable from a distance, they can have a low LOD model separate from the main low LOD.

Physics Model

A physics model is the model of a car that collides with objects in the world.

The physics model is the general shape of the car.

The physics model is generally a little bit shorter than the front and back bumper.

The front and back of the physics model comes up at the bottom to help cars land smoothly.

If a car has a particularly low front or back end, the physics model can come higher to make collisions more regular.

A physics model shouldn't wrap around smaller details such as spoilers and mirrors.

Exporting FBX

Clicking on File > Export > FBX.

Autodesk FBX is the best intermediate format suited for vehicle and other models.

Reasons to use FBX over ESM models:

1. Consistent between newer versions of Blender
2. Lack of ESM model exporter for Blender
3. Better handling of shape keys and animations
4. Can contain multiple models inside so you can use single file for multiple meshes inside EGF model

Blender's default settings for exporting to FBX usually work well enough, this will put every model into one FBX file.

NOTE: Exporting FBX will not apply the model's Transform, Rotation and Scale and you need to apply Object rotation and Scale manually.

Compiling EGF

Relations to the Blender's objects in ESC script

Compiling EGF model first requires you to create regulare ESC script file which can be compiled with EGFMan.

For vehicle models it is required to have physics model.

As damaged car model is a separate EGF file, you'll need to create separate ESC file that compiles only damaged model:

// output model filename
modelfilename   "models/vehicles/vette_dam.egf";

// add material paths
materialpath    "models/vehicles";

// define models
FBXSource       "corvette.fbx"
{
	car_model_clean_hi  "body1"         shapeby "damage";
	headlights          "headlights"    shapeby "damage";
}

// bodygroup def
bodygroup   "body"              "body1";
bodygroup   "popupHeadlights"   "headlights";

In this example:

1. We specified alternative modelfilename
2. Added shapeby "Damage" which will apply Damage shape key to the car_model_clean_hi mesh
3. We don't need any LODs, additional body groups and physics models.

Once a .ESC file is created, EGFMan can be used to compile this script, and create EGF model for the game.

See Also

Model Compiler Reference

Vehicle Configuration File