Fat-Alfie

It's been a few months since I worked on RoR, but seeing Tdev's latest updates has inspired me to continue with my crawler project.

All exterior meshes are now finished, although not textured or mapped. Cabin area still needs to be modelled, and textures need to be created.

Current stats (including 4x wheels and tyres) - polys: 42,124 / tris: 45,887

I intend to take my time to ensure I finish this project, even if that means taking the occasional break.

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I've had a few health problems for the last 3 weeks, so not much progress

Started work on the rear running gear, which seems to be going quite well. Once that's all modelled I'll work on the component textures and uv mapping.

Had an email off Dustin Webster (hi Dustin, if you're reading this) who very kindly sent me a link to the latest crawler he's been involved with. It's so cool and I really want to make a replica of that too now! }:-(

Once the RockHer II is completed and in-game I'll probably start on his latest crawler. It's not as pretty, but damn it climbs like a devil!

Not much progress visually - spent some time UV mapping the body panels (tedious but necessary if I'm to add ambient occlusion later). I'm hoping to get all textures onto a single 2048 x 2048px texture without losing much quality. It's going well so far, as the shot of the rear shows:



New light texture and new Red Bull logo look nice and sharp compared the the low-res artwork down the side (from the old 1nsane skin).

Once all the panels are UV mapped I can start on creating the

I originally made a replica of Becca Webster's Red Bull RockHer II for a game called 1nsane several years ago. I was approached by Dustin Webster, Becca's husband and spotter. He had seen some screenshots of 1nsane and wanted to know if 1nsane could be used as a simulator, so they could experiment with various suspension set ups, in a virtual environment. (original thread http://www.insaneheat.com/index.php?topic=5478.0)

Although disappointed that 1nsane wouldn't be able to do this for him, he was still really into the virtual rock-crawling we were doing, and wondered if anyone would make a replica of his Red Bull RockHer II. I volunteered and we began corresponding away from the 1nsane forums.

Dustin provided me with all the info I needed, such as dimensions, weights, gear ratios, high-res photos, and I set about trying to create his crawler for him to drive in 1nsane. Even though I was limited to 2100 verts, and 1024 x 1024px textures it didn't turn out too bad, and Dustin loved it!




Well, four years on and I thought I'd try to recreate the Red Bull RockHer II again, but this time for a game that can do it justice. Thankfully I still have all my correspondence with Dustin, along with most of the images he sent me.

I started off with the frame, wheels and tyres, making sure all the dimensions were accurate.





Once I'd got the tyres and bead-locks mapped and textured I moved onto the body panels, which are all pretty simple shaped. I have to say, it was very nice not being restricted by the poly-count this time.




I quickly added a section of my old 1nsane texture, just to get a better idea of how it working out.




Next step is to finalise the textures for the bodywork, and then start on the running gear. I'm pretty happy with it so far
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Just a quick update - I'm still working on this map, adding more trails and objects almost daily.

Latest changes :

1. added 3 new trails
2. re-did the alpha-splat textures to reflect the modified heightmap
2. changed ground textures from 512 x 512px to 1024 x 1024px (no drop in FPS)
3. experiments with caelum particle system to add tiny specs of dust / pollen (similar to Dirt3) to the atmosphere

Plans are to add electricity pylons, disused watermill, falled trees / logs, boulders (already modelled) as well as some kind of wooden rope bridge (on to-do list)

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So, I finally uploaded a beta of my second crawler for RoR. Some guys in IRC said I should write about it here, so....

It's still a WIP, but there are only minor things that need fixing, like the fan mesh, for example.

It has automatic rear-steer (cos I'm lazy) but you can disable that if you prefer.

That's about it really. It's a crawler. It goes slow. It climbs well.

enjoy



Firebug-crawler-WIP

This is a nice handy way of documenting my thoughts and ideas about my RoR projects.

After the recent flurry of talk in the forum about understeer and steering geometry, I decided to change my Tatum Buggy steering to feature the Ackerman angle. 3 nodes later, and the buggy feels much better. Steering feels more stable and understeer has been reduced considerably. Thanks Lifter, for the suggestion.

I've just spent 15mins looking for info about Caelum scripts (for my La Paz map) but I can't find anything that helps

I've been re-working the roads on La Paz to make them tighter and twistier. It's hard trying to visualise how a road will look on a 4km x 4km map, when you're drawing it in by hand in Photoshop with a 7px wide brush. It's getting better though, now the tracks are more challenging.

Things to do :- Alter the steering on my Firebug crawler to add ackerman angle, work on new buildings for La Paz, finish off suspension meshes for '37 Ford Rat Rod, add more trail runs to Riverbed... so much to do and so little time.