Gmax vehicle models

[MattyFo]

Hey all,  I am going to be batting a parking garage for my city and I want it to look alive with parked cars.   It is going to take forever to model several different cars and trucks though. Has any one pre-made a set of vehicles in Gmax that I can plop and position in my model? Or can anyone suggest any alternatives? I'm pretty sure the maxis parking garage just has automata props added but I'm not sure how to get the to appear on a model and on multi levels.

[droric]

Hey all,  I am going to be batting a parking garage for my city and I want it to look alive with parked cars.   It is going to take forever to model several different cars and trucks though. Has any one pre-made a set of vehicles in Gmax that I can plop and position in my model? Or can anyone suggest any alternatives? I'm pretty sure the maxis parking garage just has automata props added but I'm not sure how to get the to appear on a model and on multi levels.

The normal approach to adding cars to a lot is to use a prop pack and add them with the lot editor.  Your parking garage is the building but you can add props all over it assuming the LODs are cut correctly.  If you need to render in the actual cars yes that will take quite some time to do.

[cogeo]

Why not just use the ingame prop-families (1-5 parked cars), there is quite a variety. There are at least two families, one for houses (visible during the evening and night) and another one for workplaces (visible during the morning and mid-day). And there are add-ons as well, like Mikeseith's which add more variety. They simply expand the family(-ies) so you don't need to list them as dependencies for your lots (the player may or may not have them installed, only in the latter case the variety won't be as wide). These are a little dated though, they do not display hover mini-queries and they are not timed either; if you wish to mod them, you may change them from non-timed to timed only before they are first instantiated in your cities, otherwise you may cause the prop-pox effect.

Not sure about trucks, but there are some (or just one?) small delivery truck(s) ingame. There are large truck props in SimGoober's and Jestarr's prop-packs (and possibly others too).

[MattyFo]

Thanks guys,  I've been out of the game for a few years.   I couldn't remember if you could put props directly onto buildings on multiple levels.  Thanks again.

[mrbisonm]

Just make sure to tighten the LOD's before rendering, because otherwise you will have problems placing the car props properly so they look good.

Fred