How To Make A Converted Track Look Better:
| This is not so much a tutorial as it is a bunch of tips and tricks thrown together. |
| [Winmip or Last Chance Tools will be needed] |
| [a good image processing program will come in handy] |
| After you have converted a track to ICR2, you will see that it doesn't look quite as good as it looked in the sim you converted it from (N2/99/3/Legends)...First of all your freshly converted track won't have any fancy track screens. Luckily, you can add those yourself. You can read a tutorial about that subject later on. |
| Secondly, ICR2 doesn't support transparent colors in the .mip
textures. This causes the ugly backgrounds you see in your track. In an earlier version of
the N99->ICR2 convertor the transparent color was set to black, this was later changed
to blue. So, depending on the version of your convertor you will see blue or black
backgrounds where there would be nothing at all in the graphically more advanced Papy
sims...Transparent mips are most noticably used for : trees, grandstands and people. Convert all your .mip's to .bmp's and use your favorite paint program to correct the graphics. Needless to say, it helps if you know your paint program well. |
| Sometimes It's smart to just use black as the backgound, for example on towers or grandstands. If you want to be more creative than that, on objects like towers, you can just paint / paste something on the background color, for example a billboard. To be safe, only use other textures form the same track to avoid palette problems : |
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| There are a number of solutions for trees. You can make a single tree, or a small group of trees into a .pmp-3do, a proces explained in another tutorial. You can't do this with a big row of trees or on a high banked track though, it will look funny. |
| What I've done with my last couple of tracks is this : I use Paint Shop Pro but I'm sure that the same features are in other paint programs. Set the blue background color of the tree texture as the transparency color of your program, copy and paste as transparent selection in your texture. Do this a number of times until there isn't a single pixel of that devilish background color left : |
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This looks better in the game than you would expect it to. You can also do this with those (even in N3) awful rows of people : |
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| Or you can paste the trees on some billboards [I stole this idea from Brett Shannon BTW, thanks Brett :) ] |
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| These are just some ideas, see what works best for your track. If you have an object that you don't know how to fix, you can always replace it with one that works better...of course, if the object is from another track you need to copy the .mip files it uses into your track as well. This is covered in yet another tutorial. |
