Nascar Heat Conversion Manual

Converting a car from another game requires Permission from the original author if you ever plan on posting on the internet.

To convert a NFS4 car have some Serious common sense & some knowledge of 3d sim/racing.

So to get started first choose the car you are going to convert I will use this Starsky and hutch ford torino.

Which I downloaded from http://www.nfscars.net/

DON’T TRY CONVERTING THIS CAR IT WONT WORK

it has to many triangles for the modtools plugin to convert.

  1. Nfs Wizzard

  2. Zmod

  3. Set Texture

  4. Camera Controls

  5. Mesh Resizing

  6. Scale

  7. Export to .mod

  8. Tex

  9. Create .Car

  10. Transparent Glass

  11. Files Page

Now to get started First make a temporary folder on your desktop and give it a name ive named mine ~Torino~ I use the ~Tilde so that when I use Windows explorer later on in the conversion process it will always be near the beginning.

Now extract the Car.viv into that folder.

Next you will need NFS wizzard which you can get from my files page.

NFS Wizzard

Now open NFS Wizzard and click on the open file icon

And select your ~Torino~ folder. Then select the Car.viv file and click Open.

 

Heres what you should have

You will only need 2 of the files from here unless you plan on converting the dash too in this case im not going to do the dash it will take way to long to do I will make another tutorial for that later.

Now what I usually do here is take a look at the car to see if its even worth converting, to do that just double click the Car.Fce file and it will open a viewer (This may take some loading time) when it opens you should have this :

Now to see the car just tick the check boxes and the mesh will show up, the ones of most importance are HB and OC

Hb stands for High Body im not sure what OC stands for but it is usually the interior the other objects are usually not used so we wont look at them now.But the abbreviations I know are

  • HLFW= High Lt Front wheel
  •  
  • HRFW= High Rt Front wheel
  •  
  • HRRW= High Rt Rear wheel
  •  
  • HLRW= High Lt Rear wheel
  •  
  • ORM= Outside Rt Mirror
  •  
  • OLM= Outside Lt Mirror
  •  
  • OH= Object Head
  •  
  • OD=Object Driver

 

Heres what you have when HB and OC are checked

Now if you want to see how it looks with the Texture just double click the Car00.tga and it will open a new box with the texture in it like this

Now to see it on the car just click the Drop down box at the bottom of the mesh viewer where it says Texture and select the bottom selection which should be C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\~Torino~\ Car00.tga and allow it time to load.

Heres what you should have

Now lets Export these files and get started on our N Heat Version.

First you want to click on Car.Fce then Export

Export the file to your torino directory, and do the same for the Car00.Tga file. So you have this

Zmod

Now you can close NFS wizzard and open up Zmodeler which you can get from my files page I am using version 1.07a .

Now open Zmod and click on the Blue Import Icon at the top left toolbar,when windows explorer opens navigate to your ~torino~ folder and click the Car.Fce file one time and then the Files of type box and find NFS4FCE files (*.FCE) select that then click on Open.

when you select open you will get a pop up about damage parts select NO

Your NFS Car is now in Zmod. In this program since I don’t know it well I will only explain the necasary stuff. First now that your car is in Zmod you will want to delete the unneeded files I talked of earlier as well as any Dummys that are in the file, you can do that by selecting the object in the Objects Box at the right side of your screen by right clicking the line where each dummy and object are and selecting delete.

when your done you will want only the two I earlier said are imporatnt HB and OC

Next click on the Red Export icon at the top toolbar and export as a 3ds file , give the file a name as I have done (Torino)

Now we will set the texture to the car I first suggest that you close max and open the Car00.tga in PSP then resize it to 512x512 (ß Not necasary you can leave as 256x256 but it will be blurrier in Nheat ). RENAME the Car00.tga to the same name as your file and add a 1 at the end like so "Torino1.Tga"

Okay now on to 3Dsmax R3 which you can get from http://www.discreet.com/ .

Max is a very sensitive program and I suggest running it ONLY any other programs may crash it and could Muck up your Puter.

Now once max is open select Import from the file menu.

Then when the explorer window opens find your .3ds file you exported from Zmod and click ok/open

Then a box will open in the center of your screen select as I have done below and click OK

Now your car is in 3ds Max and I suggest you save Frequently to prevent the loss of the file so save as I have done below by selecting "Save as" from the file menu

Now next time you work on the car you can open Max again and open the Torino1.0.max file or just double click the Torino1.0.max file and Max will start. Now Lets get the texture on this thing.

Set Texture

Now click on Edit from the Top/Main toolbar and click "select all"

hit the "M" Key to bring up the matreial editor . Run your cursor near the bottom and you will see it turn to a hand shaped cursor, now drag up or down till you see Maps and click that.

Now you should see the stuff below and you should #1click the check mark box where it says Diffuse then #2 click where it says "None" and it will open the Material/Map browser where #3 you will click on Bitmap then naviagate to your Torino1.tga and select it then Ok.

Now click the Blue ball and box Icon.

to assign the material to your selection which in this case will be the whole mesh , Make sure your mesh (All Parts of it ) is selected as i said above use Edit and Select all then the Blue Ball and box icon.

(OPTIONAL you can click on the Checkered box icon so the texture shows in your 3d viewport but you must have Material color selected on the display tab at the right side of your screen)

now its ok to Close the material editor

You should save what you have if you havent already infact I suggest that you should have already saved a backup about 3 or 4 times by now so you should be at Torino1.3.max . Now the fun is getting close all we have to do is resize the model , seprate the glass and set it to a different material so get farmailar with what we have just done so you can set the texture yourself with out me re-explaining it to you.

Camera Controls

Some controls you should know about this point are Camera Controls These can all be found here

 

And heres a brief description of what does what.

Resizing the Mesh

Okay resizing of the mesh.

I have made a sort of an alignment tool that should get you close in size to a 110" wheelbase just Merge the file into your scene

Navigate to the wheelbase.max file and click open

When this box opens just select OK

Now this is close to what your scene should look like dont forget above i used the Optional setting so that the texture shows on the car in the perspective viewport

Now click the Zoom extents button and use the arch rotate tool in the perspective viewport to turn your model to the side so you can see a bit better whats happening like this

Scale

So as u see your car is pretty small

Okay now to size the mesh up, click on the "H" key and select-"All" button then hold the "Ctrl" Key down and unhighlight the Wheelbase text. Then click the Select button at the bottom

You should now have everything selected except the wheel base alignment tool. Now you will click on the Zoom all extents Icon that will center everything in each viewport and will make the wheelbase tool seem huge Don’t click any where in any of the viewports or your selection will be lost but you can always refer to the above to reselect.

Now click on the Scale Icon on the Main toolbar and hoover your mouse over the selected mesh (your car) in any viewport your cursor will change to the scale tool icon when you are in the correct place

when you see the cursor turn into the Scale icon then Left click and Move your mouse up or down to rescale, make it big really big .

You will also want to use the Move tool to bring the body up or down, in this case up.

Keep scaling up Even bigger than that ^ Try and get the wheel wells lined up close to the wheel base tool so the wheels fit just a bit big for the car , no need for perfection here as we can adjust the wheelbase and body posistion later from the physics.txt.

I like to do most my work in the bottom left viewport with the view set to "Left"

I don’t usually bring the body over the center line unless it dosnt line up right once in the game. try setting the rockers at the center axis line as I have shown here in the bottom left viewport with a dotted line and also for now just get the wheel alignment close no need for perfection yet as i said above.

When you get about how i have it above Save your file. As you see im on Torino1.4.max now and will now save as Torino1.5.max

Export to .mod

Now to export the car and test it out in the game . First extract all the files from the blankinstall.zip into the ~torino~ directory so you have all these files now in your working directory.

Now open up your Torino1.5.max file again in Max and Click on the wheelbase tool only and select Edit>Delete from the main toolbar.

Now select File>Export> Then in the drop down box select .Mod and save as High1.mod .

Now you will get 2 or 3 popups that look like errors there not just click OK to each of them.When that is done you can close Max the hard part is over.

Tex

First you need to make your Torino1.tga into a tex file this is quite easy just double click the Textures.bat

it will make a file for you called TORINO1.TGA.tex Just rename that to the car number you want your car to be for example Car77.Tex also make a back up with the original name TORINO1.tex

Next open reslist.txt and add Torino1.tex at the bottom like so .

This is just for back up you can remove it later

.Car

Now In your ~Torino~ Folder where you extracted the Blankinstall tools is a file called HighLow.Bat

double click that and it will make all the needed .Mod files for you from the High1.Mod file you just exported you should now have this .

Next right click on the Restool.bat file and select edit, change the name from Mustang.car to Torino.car like this.

Close that and accept the change.

now double click the restool.bat file it will make a Torino.car file for you.

now all you need to do is add that file in any mod folder and add to the drivers txt this info.

Name the Number as 77 that will tell the game to look for your Car77.Tex file

Then give the care a unique name that you will see when selecting your car in the game i named mine S&H Torino

And the most important is the Chassis it must be named as your car file is so in this case it's Torino.

 

Since we named the TGA Torino1.Tga the car will be able to use multpile Tex files from the drivers.txt lets say you changed the color of the TGA and made a new tex file called Car 74.tex (Blue Car) all you have to do is change the number in the drivers.txt where it now says 77, Change that to 74 and give it a diffrent name Like this

and it will use the Car74.tex file from the mod folder.

now try out your car in the game if the texture dosnt show then you did something wrong above look back over it all and see if you can find the problem PLEASE DONT EMAIL ME ABOUT IT .

Now that you see your car in the game look at it closley see which ways you might need to move the body to get the wheels closer to being lined up. You dont need to get them exact as you can edit that from the Physics.txt , For Physics.txt info please check Punko's Guide.

Now Lets get those windows SemiTransparent.

~To Be Continued~