First we are going to need a few prequistes.
Blender
Lucas's Mod Launcher (duh)
Lucas's Pure3D Editor
Lucas's Car Renamer
Lucas's RCF Explorer
The car model you intend to port
Firstly after you aquired your 3d model in
OBJ format, we can import it into blender.
Now (depending upon what you want) you cut and paste meshes like the doors and wheels if you want real car damage.
Now to center the car in the model, you need to hit these keys in combination
Ctrl Shift Alt C and select
Origin to Geometry.
Then move the car to the center of the blender space. I would export another car's model from SHAR and use that as reference. Now when you have the car body ready, go to Export and be sure to select this check box.
Now we will use one of Army of Cola Remastered's cars as a template. Now import your model for the main body.
The car will be pink, this means there are no textures asigned to it. We can make textures by importing image files and adding them to a shader.
Be sure to change the shader type from
Simple to
environment and type
EnvMap.bmp if you want the car to have reflection.
Now to assign shaders to the car, go into the mesh and change the names of the meshes to the shader name.
The last thing we need to do is move the wheels so they are properly alligned to the car. This can be achieved by going to the skeleton of the car and changing the corrdinates for W0, 1, 2, and 3. W0 and 1 are the rear right and left tires.
While W2 and 3 are front left and right.
Now we have to add the car to the game, give it sound, and give it stats.
We have to create the file
CustomCarSupport.ini
Then we have to rename the car and give it a free index entry. 90-250 are free I believe.
Now we have to extract
car_tune.spt from
scripts.rcf
Just copy an entry and rename the car name on the top to the file name of the car.
Now we need to copy a con file so the car has stats. Copy one from
scripts/cars/CARNAME.con
Finally we need to add phonebooth icons for the car, and a copy of the car for the showroom.
Be sure to make one for both the car, and damaged. Name these
CARNAME.png and
CARNAMED.png. Now we just copy the car to
art/frontend/dynaload/cars/carname.p3d
you can also do this to make the shop car smaller in file size.