Making .pmp Objects:

In Indycar Racing 2, the normal .3do objects use .mip textures. These do not support a transparency color yet [later papy sims do] which means that something like a tree won't look very good in ICR2. At least, when you use a regular -three dimensional- .3do with .mip textures. But there is a second type of object in ICR2. This is not exactly an object but more of a placeholder for a 2-dimensional image, that always looks the same from all angles. The image is stored as a .pmp file. A .pmp file does support a transparency color. So when you convert a track and it has ugly borders around the trees, I will show you how to transfer a .pmp object from one track to this track to make it look better. This works better on a non- or lowbanked track then on a high banked track. This is, like I said, because the object looks the same from all angles. So when you're in the high banking, the tree doesn't stay upright but will tilt as well. Which looks...odd... to say the least.
[You will need the Last Chance Tools]
[You might need the .3do editing tools by Marcello Bassino]
[you will need a .dat tool and an image editing program as well]
The .pmp files that Winmip creates are not of the same high quality as the ones made with the Last Chance tools by Róbert Szikszó. Which is why we are going to use his tools instead of WinMip.
First we need to find some .pmp objects to copy to our new track. You can download the Nascar 3 converted Watkins Glen track from the Track Archive on this site and use the .3do tree objects in it.

How you find out what a .pmp-.3do object is, is not too difficult. Just keep opening .3do's of 1 kb in 3doEd until you find one that doesn't seem to have any polygons. Open it in Notepad to see which file it calls to [this is in the first line somewhere] and find out in the directory where you unpacked the .dat if this is a .pmp file. It is ? Good, this is a .3do you can use.
1 - Look at your new track in 3doEditor and find out what the name is of the object you want to replace. Now copy that .pmp-.3do from Watkins Glen over to the working directory of your new track and rename it to replace the object you found.
2 - Copy the .pmp file you found, over as well.
3 - Using theLast Chance Tools, convert the .pmp in your new track -the .pmp you just added- to a .pcx file. Do the same with the same .pmp file that is still in the Watkins Glen track folder.
4 - Open both .pcx files in your imaging program, as well as the sunny.pcx file of the new track. Save the palette of the sunny.pcx [in Paint Shop Pro this is found in the Colors menu].
6 - Increase the color depth of the old .pmp object [the one that has the right colors] to 16 million and load the palette you just saved. Colors should still be normal.
7 - Copy the old .pmp image and paste it on the new .pmp. Save and exit.
8 - Convert the new .pcx back to .pmp with the Last Chance Tools.
9 - Repack the <track>.dat file and put it back in its folder.
That should have done the trick. When you decided to not just copy the file over, but to edit the position of the .3do or to edit the actual contents of the picture in the .pmp, there are some things you need to keep an eye on:
A - the .pmp is a picture within a white border (palette # 255 always !). Make sure there is at least 1 line of this color around the image, otherwise pcx2pmp can't read the file.

B - Sometimes your paint program will set the white border to another color which has the same RGB values as the palette # 255, in my case usually color # 35, white. Edit the palette so that palette # 35 is a weird color (bright pink will do nicely) and color the border in color # 255. Save the file and convert the .pmp.

C - As soon as you have a .pmp in the track, it won't show up in 3doEd, but you might want to adjust placement of the object. Just take some object like a truck to temporarily replace the tree to make adjustments.
D - If the .pmp looks too small in the game you can adjust its size by decompiling the tree.3do with xinfo.exe In the flavor file there will be one line that looks something like this :
  FID | Offset | Values
==================================
    3        88            4      600000           0
 The 600000 number you see here is the size of the object.You need to increase this value to get bigger objects, decrease the number to get smaller objects. Then repack the 3do using the pflavor utility