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Plaything 2 Guide

To get a car into P2 to edit the mapping, you have to realise that a C2 car model is divided into 2 parts, the carname.dat and the carnameSHELL.dat. This is coz, for some godonlyknows reason, it seems C2 uses 2 models for each car (3 if ya include the simple ones). The carname.dat is the full componentised ar model, including all the wheels, doors moving parts etc (actors) and the carnameSHELL.dat, the full car model minus the wheels saved as a shell only, no moving parts. You'll get why I did this long winded bit in a mo. Right, to texture the car you have to texture the car with all moving parts included (actors) and then, here's the fun part, do it again with the shell. Ok, not fun, tedious, you have to do the EXACT same thing to both, or you'll get weird effects in the game. A fully fixed car, doors closed uses the SHELL, as soon as you get hit or open the doors, it uses the other. Tex differences become apparent when this happens. Ok, down to the nitty gritty. Fire up P2 and from the File menu, choose Import BRender ACT file. Navigate to the folder of the TWaT extracted car (complete with TIFFRGB folder) and select carname.act. You will then be promted to also find the carname.dat and carname.mat. You should have the car in P2 now and on screen. We dont need the objects window, grab the edge of that and hide the bugger, it takes up valuable screen space dammit! At the bottom of the screen, grab the top edge of the materials selection screen and pull it up a tad, so ya can see what's goin on in there. See the bit where it says material groups, you should have 2 titles, General and carname. Click carname, and you should have all the textures pop up just to the right of this. Select one. In the tools menu, select the pen tool (bottom left icon). Now in the view window, right click and select pick. The pointer should now be a crosshair. Put it anywhere on the model and click. Depending on the models orientation (P2's buggy, I'll get ta this bit later), you should have now pasted the selected texture on one or more areas on the model. This is one way of laying textures on a model. It's not terribly accurate, takes practise but does have its uses, it was the only way I could get the Coupe de Villian's tyre tread textures on the car without distorting the rest of the wheel textures (and thats got to do with mapping, also later). Now, deselect the pen tool, right click in the view window, select pick... and start clicking. Areas now should start going green, to show that they have been selected. Click a green area again to deselect it. Hitting D will deselect all areas. Choose a texture, and then, from the Selection menu at the top of the screen, pick apply material. Now hit D, this'll allow you to see what you've done. This is the method to apply a uniform texture to a larger area (say, to fill a bonnet with one texture as opposed to the other way, which would tile the bonnet with many smaller versions of the same texture, and look ugly as hell). If you liked what you did, you would choose save, then navigate to the cars DIR and save it there, and close out P2. Then you'd delete carname.dat and carname.mat and rename these files correspondingly: Object.dat and Object.mat. You can delete the other Object files, they aren't needed. Thats the car done with actors in place, now ya gotta Import Brender DAT file, chosing carnameSHELL.dat, and you'll also be prompted to load carname.mat. Do all the editing again, exactly the same (except for the wheels, this time there are none). Save to the cars dir, overwriting Object.sdf if ya didn't delete it. Delete carnameSHELL.dat and carname.mat, and rename the new Object.dat to carnameSHELL.dat and Object.mat to... yeah, u got it...carname.mat. The car should work in the game now, with the new texture mapping.Ok, thats basic texture mapping. Later I'll go over how to edit the mapping to fix distorted textures and get em looking the way you intended em to look.

Scarehead

What Next: Part II -new-

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