Quote from Aleksandr_124rus :

Great modeling, and yea using scanned data as a guide is like heaven for modelers, I had so much suffering with inaccurate blueprints that I stopped doing real cars altogether.

I never thought that using random net images as a source to generate point data is this reliable, maybe I m just out of date, I always believed that you need a good 3D scanner or at least a phone with a dedicated app to scan the real thing.

Quote from adirany :

I understand that some LFS racers need some modding.

But in regard to the mediocrity of most the mods available, I am in doubt.

Developing a race car is a difficult task. That may take months or years of hard work, dedication and knowledge.

What LFS needs is more professional cars and more laser scanned tracks.

To Scawen: Excuse me for my sincerity but is not this some diversion to appease some users.

LFS needs to be updated.

I don't recognize anymore my LFS.

You need to understand that everythings has its upsides and downsides, there is no perfect decision when it comes to allowing community involvment into the game content creation.

What I mean is, without modding we would probably not see some of the actual (and future) well crafted mods and since as we know LFS is a small budget game, we won't expect comparable amount of content from the devs themselves anytime soon.

But at the same time, it's true that the content that the devs did or are doing in the future has a guaranteed quality that mods don't fill most of the time, that's why I could understand the logic behind refusing mods support.

So that's why, and if you noticed, there is a tight integration and multiple filters to promote decent mods and to encourage modders to make some efforts into their work, and I think this is the best approach to, at least partially, resolve the lack of quality of some mods.

Quote from sinbad :

This is really cool. It looks like a legitimate European hatchback, which could be said of original xfg for sure. I really like how you have carried over enough styling cues for them to obviously be related. You should post some images of the two cars side by side.

The door mirrors are perhaps too small relative to the size of the car, but that's all I could offer in criticism.

Well done for not being tempted to go ott with the power, too. Keep it compact and not too heavy.

Yes you are totally right, if you look at the more recent interior WIP images, you can notice that I made them a little bit bigger.

If I remember, 2006 was the year when the EU forced the car manufacturers to adopt a minimum mirrors size for safety purpose, so compared to most modern cars, I took the liberty to not respect this requirement since this car is supposed to be a little bit older than that.

What I need is some spare time to quickly export a wip model to check and make sure the ergonomics are usable once and for all.

But yes, there is some mistakes I made with the general car proportions that I want to summarize when I finish this project, as a reminder and advices for me and for those who are interested in cars creation.

Quote from Eric :

Impressive and very professional work!

I'm loving the high standards you've acheived so far. Good luck with the texturing.

Thanks for the compliment , I will try to do better next time, since it's nowhere near the efficiency of the original lfs cars models.

Quote from VladM :

this is looking very very good. genuinely excited for this, glad its coming along nicely.

Thanks, it annoys me how much little time I got these past months, I have so much personal projects waiting for completion, I just want to see the damn thing ingame !

Last edited by lfsrm, Tue 15 Mar 2022, 07:14.

Well that's one less project on my todo list .

Good luck and happy modeling!

Well since I finished with the optimizations, it's time to mess up with the editor..




Still importing and organizing the car parts and materials, after that I will dedicate some (alot) of time to create the car textures.

Quote from versiu :

Any progress on it? :3

Yes, I still have to finish some parts of the interior.


Often I don't like the design of some elements, so I tend to redo things midway which drag the whole project, plus I did the mistake of doing a high res version using subdivision, I should've started modeling the whole lowpoly car manually, because now cleaning the mesh will take even more time, and time is something that I lack nowadays.

But that's just my inexperience modeling lowpoly game assets, that's why I think this project is a very valuable learning experience.

Quote from Desaparecido :

This looks amazing, and like it was mentioned before, it kept the DNA of the XFG, really solid work.

About the exterior problem, if you get rid of the antenna, solve the problem? Or it has to be a more drastic change, to be able to do a good interior?

No it's just optimization, sacrificing some surface smoothness to meet lfs's triangles limit.

oh wow that's alot of details, top quality! I wonder how much triangles you got in this ?

Can't wait to drive it !

A very clean model, can't wait to drive it!

Quote from fangio86 :

Very good idea! congrats!

Thanks, I am trying my best to make it as believable as possible.

Here are some screens of what I completed so far for the interior base mesh :





There is still a few things I need to complete :

- modeling front/rear seats
- interior doors details
- finishing the steering wheel details (buttons etc)
- interior central mirror
- seat belt
- interior floor mesh
- Maybe a separate mesh for button texture ?
- adjusting the size of some elements (windshield wipers..)
- and a lot of optimizations, right now the whole car is over 70k.


The steering wheel size seems a little bit small, when compared to the rb4 it doesn't look at all like a 35cm wheel, I thought the size I used was pretty standard for road cars.

Last edited by lfsrm, Sat 18 Dec 2021, 09:33.

Quote from raidho36 :

It struck me as odd decision to prevent your own hosting. Then I remembered that you're an indie company so you need all the money you can get, so I figured being extra tight on piracy is fine. But then I realized that your monetization policy was to one-time charge for content packs, that's obviously an unsustainable approach for a game that's meant to exist for more than a year. So it makes complete sense that you'd try to take money from online players who are still playing. Again, you need that money and your current monetization model only profits off of new players, not sustained audience, and it's not like you can exactly just change one-time payments to annual subscriptions. So I guess having exclusive ability to host online servers and charging for access to them works well in lieu of having a game subscription. Calling it anti-piracy measure was basically just so that no one thinks it was a scummy move, wasn't it? It's not like you're nickel&diming like EA. Just be sure to make the server package downloadable when your company goes out, otherwise it'll become impossible to play online a perfectly good game.

You can still host a server for free using the ingame (start new host), it's just non permanent.

Congratulations! Hopfully this will give LFS some popularity boost.

Quote from denis-takumi :

i tried. have some troubles to save string to char array with specific length. and i want know can vertices and faces having custom properties.

Thanks for your time, just thinking about 3DS licensing cost it gives me headache :'(.

Last edited by lfsrm, Thu 16 Dec 2021, 10:36.

Quote from ACCAkut :

Curious. So your exporter can translate the 3DSMax made UVs into the form the LFS Editor uses? Would love to have that for Blender.
And most of all, does it work for non-projected maps? or does it work from those "camera positions" in Max?

+∞

If someone could make the same thing for blender, it would be great !

Quote from loopingz :

Interesting work! Did you make any progress?

yea sorry, I thought it might be better to finish the interior base mesh before posting a preview.

I'm just stuck at work lately, can't make good progress outside the weekends.

I will try to post some preview when I come back home.

Oh nice update! very clean modeling as usual , must looks very cool with the new graphics update.

Personally I prefer the logo to be a little bit smaller.

It's me or there is no default skin yet ?

Edit : nvm, it's in the editor but not in the game directory, a simple copy/past should resolve this.

Last edited by lfsrm, Fri 10 Dec 2021, 08:44.

Quote from Eric :

I have to say, lfsrm, I'm pretty impressed with the car design and the speed of your progress so far! For constructing a fictional car, you really have a natural feel for it.

Car interiors can be fiddly to build without any frame of reference, but I've found that viewing your progress in VR can help.

I'm watching this project with interest.

Thank you,It means a lot to me! I literally grow up playing LFS, the game never left my hard drive!, you guys are an inspiration for many of us!

And thank you guys for letting us experiment with the game engine, there isn't many games that offers such accessible modding tools! it's definitively a great thing for the community !

The interior is trickier than I thought, especially since the model needs to be driveable in-game, I have only a rigged human body shape and some pictures for (rough) references, VR would definitely help (since it's also compatible with blender) if it was available for sale over here..

But again this is a great learning opportunity !

Quote from Flotch :

The master has spoken Wink
I agree, impressive

glad you like it !

Quote from fatalunfair :

I don't think I could do this if I had a gun to my head and 10 years of time, wicked stuff man.

Thanks for the compliment, I think with the amount of resources around the net now, it's easier and faster to learn something new compared to some years ago.

Finding time and motivation is still a big obstacle...

Yes! the possibility of importing UV maps would be a huge time saving.

Quote from Kova. :

Damn, this car is probably one of the best i've seen here until now.

Not that i'm kind of fan of its design, but of the way it's made.

First of all, it does look well made and designed
And second one, I like how it's keeping XFG's DNA :
-The overall form of the car
-The way it look like grabbing designs from some IRL cars
(front look like fiats stilo/punto, rear a mixture of a duster and 208)

Can't you try, for the interior, to take XFG's actual and make some slight modern changes? It's how most of constructors were doing in the past

Worst case scenario, you will make a gen2 of it with redesigned interior on the future

Thanks, I'm still figuring out the interior shapes and dimensions, so the only thing I can guarantee is it will retain the central "punto-like" air vents style with of course some (many) changes.

Plus there is some issues I (maybe) need to fix with the front window shape, when I tried to test out the car dimension in-game, I found the interior front view a little bit claustrophobic for my taste :



I need some opinions about that.

EDIT : I think it's actually fine when compared to an Audi A1, which is nearly similar in size :

Last edited by lfsrm, Thu 11 Nov 2021, 13:32.

Quote from ACCAkut :

No, apparently you can't right now, that exactly was my result of those trials above. The moment I hit "Apply" on the Edge Split modifier in Blender, the mesh is split up according to the smoothing settings I created with those sharp edges. The LFS Editor imports this raw mesh with its Normals and bundles them into Smoothing groups according to each meshs Normals' orientation.

oh well, that modifier does indeed completely separate the mesh geometry.. I don't know if it's ok with the actual game engine, I am pretty sure it wouldn't do well with the future real time shadows if you want to do something for the long term.

Interesting, I didn't know that you could export smooth groups directly from blender!

Quote from FIZ :

Please don't!
Interior > Exterior while driving.
Imho, only the front and the back of the car should be detailed, leaving less detailed the other parts (top, sides, bottom) that are more rarely seen during a race.
Interiors in LFS official cars are sooooooooooooo empty.. 15 years ago was ok, nowadays nope, not at all!
Amazing work man, keep going.

You pretty much said it ! I will surely do some more optimizations after the completion the interior base mesh.

Quote from ACCAkut :

Is the X-shape of the front grill intentional? Really nice believable design, hats off for that

Yes, it's supposed to house a logo texture.

Pretty much finished with the exterior, but there is a slight issue ( major one in fact ), the exterior alone is 36k triangles, so I guess I must compromise in the overall shapes quality , unless I make an UF1-like interior .

Quote from Eclipsed :

Looks nice. Regarding technical specs,you should consider a "basis version" which could fit in the current GTi class - 3rd (and who knows,maybe in time 4th and 5th) car would make racing more interesting in that class. And maybe the top version (same engine,just turbocharged to make it real life like) could fit in TBO class? Aaand of couse a race-spec version could fit in NGT class and some crazy 4WD super version can be used as RX car...
Just throwing out ideas,maybe you're interested to fill some of those.

I might consider all these variations, after I get the necessary motivation boost by at least completing this first version.

Plus I'm worried about the texturing part of the editor, so we'll see how things goes..

Quote from Van Sterberkt :

Looks nice! Are you thinking about a XRG (RWD/saloon car) replacement with matching specs as well?

Why not, if I succeed to properly convert this car.