Hey folks, I don't do forum stuff that much, so idk where this would go. Is this a good amount of reference material for a good high quality mod? This may take many months, but I am so ready for that juicy final result. I don't want to over promise and underdeliver so I hope there are some seasoned pro modders out there willing to give me some pointers as to where to start. I know I am way in over my head as a beginner, but I'm doing this for my sake since it's a dream car since I got into cars. If there's enough steam for this then maybe I'll release it. The 2 dyno charts are to demonstrate drivetrain loss. The non thumbnail attachments are just service training manuals.
I wasn't asking you to do anything, I'm just looking for second opinions and ideas, and I forgot the /s
Yes. I don't want to sound like a jackass, but this is probably too ambitious of a project for you, mostly because you don't have the experience since you are asking for pointers where to start. I've seen heaps of threads like these (some with a half completed basic mesh in Blender), just to be never heard from again because guess what, creating a high-quality car from scratch for this game is REALLY hard and takes a LOT of time and knowledge. You should slowly work your way up. Start with simple things like skins, then proceed to do jBeam, creating meshes in Blender and constructing UVs. Then start with modding existing cars. Once you know what you are doing, it's time to step up. But that's just my 2 cents. If you want to prove me wrong, go ahead.
I'm starting by doing blender donut stuff. Then I'll go for topology. Then uv mapping and baking textures. I'm asking mainly for pointers in the mesh. Shell, engine, panels, or drivetrain, etc. Only after I master the basics. I'm okay with deleteing the whole thing and starting fres, I've done it twice as I learned.
The amount of media you have there seems to be good enough, altough I would still get some more pictures of it from different angles, but also pics of the engine bay & possibly underside/interiour (if you're planning to make a custom one). Since you said you're a beginner, I would rather have you create a Volvo 940 as it's relatively simple with its boxy shape, but also has some curvatures to it, which will later help you with understanding how to create round-ish shapes.
Volvo, huh? I see you have good taste. Looking at it it, it makes sense, even the interior has square bits and bobs. That aside, I'm stilling filling my folder full of images, and I ripped a low poly, poorly modeled guidance mesh of the interior and exterior from Test Drive Unlimited. None of the stolen bits will be used, since it was a confusing mess and looked like dookie after turning up the subsurface multiplier.
Make it lore friendly, as in it has slightly different looks from the real life one and a beamng company badge. (make a new one, like an ETK competitor) Also if this is your first mod you really should try a configuration mod instead of a full car
ETK is BMW so Audi is... Otto? Auto Union? It has to be something better than that. I don't care that much about making it to repo, especially if there's copyright issue, but I see what you're saying. IRL cars mostly look cheap, especially the type of stuff you see on world of mods
my rule of thumb for modelling a car is to find at least 2 decent (not 5x5 pixels) blueprints of the car, as blueprints usually have little innacuracies, and with 2 made by different people, those mistakes become pretty obvious. then I just have google images open on the car, and just looks at all kinds of different pictures to see the shapes of parts, etc.
I've already readjusted the blueprint twice, cause few things didn't match up. Matched the millimeters on it with the ruler and grabbed an etk 800 for scale. Turns out the etk 800 is short in stature.
Not much of a problem there, just scale it up a little, your gonna have to create or adapt the jbeams anyway