-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 15
Building a ride
Start by opening up templatevehicle.blend (in the templates folder) in Blender. Use Save As to make a copy of this template file to the appropriate folder as described below:
All rides are kept within the rides folder. Each subfolder in here is the name of the track type of the ride (e.g. GoKarts). Inside those folders are the name of the .DAT file for each vehicle of that track type (e.g. KART1). A single .blend file within this folder should be named the same as the folder (e.g. `KART1.blend).
Model your ride vehicle (or vehicles, for a multi-care train). When coloring your model, stick to solid colors, and, in general, try to do this by using separate materials rather than textures. Use the included Remap [1-3] materials for remap-able colors on your model.
For proper rendering, you must set the Pass Index for any non-remap-able materials to 2. Remap-able materials should be set to 1.
A peep model (with bones for posing) is provided in templatepeep.blend in the templates folder. Note that if riders ride in pairs (as they often do), you will need to edit this model so that the second rider is wearing a magenta shirt, and both pants are brown.
We use animation in Blender to record the ride vehicle from all necessary angles. Make sure to parent the Vehicle empty to your ride vehicle for proper animation when rendering. The included animation in the template for the Vehicle empty only includes the most basic angles, and will need to be expanded for most rides. See one of the existing rides, or AE's ride tutorial page for more details about the angles necessary. You should always check the original game images as well to make sure. If a ride has multiple cars in its train, you will have to duplicate the animation for each car in the train (make sure to animate the visibility of the different cars so they don't all render at once).
If your ride has visible peeps, you will have to repeat all of the animations with just the peeps visible (and with the cars still masking), and you'll have to do this multiple times if you have multiple pairs per vehicle.
Once you have your animation set up, render it (Ctrl-F12).
Once you've rendered the frames out of Blender, we need to convert these images into the palette that RCT2 uses. To do that, you'll use one of the scripts from the scripts folder. You'll need to open a command prompt in your ride's folder and run one of the scripts from there. The compile script will convert the images to the standard RCT palette, while the compileremap scripts will convert using either 1, 2, or 3 remappable colors (respectively).
At this point, you can attempt to use Buggy's Ridemaker/Ride Converter to create a .DAT file using your generated images. I (zrowny), have been unable to get this to consistently work, so YMMV.