MikeSeith's Driveable Vehicles Tutorial

[vester]

This is  posted with permission from MikeSeith.

There is some pictures and files missing. Mike is looking for them.


Please post any questions in the thread: Help with automata




Welcome to the Driveable Vehicles Tutorial

In this tutorial I will show you how I make custom vehicles for Sim City 4. These are vehicles that drive around your cities and are driveable by your sims. What I will show you is only one way (my way) to make these custom vehicles and is meant as a guide. This is my first attempt at a full scale tutorial on any subject so please be patient and feel free to E-mail me with your questions. Hopefully I will be able to answer you. Please remember I am not all that good at mods, I happened to get this right because I got lucky and I am stubborn, if you have complex modding questions please ask the modding experts.

This tutorial was made in response to various people from Simtropolis who asked for a tutorial on this subject.

If you happen to find a way to import new useable 3d vehicle models into the game please let me know. I find the selection of vehicle types in SC4 very limiting.

I look forward to seeing and downloading many new vehicles on the simtropolis exchange.

Table of content:

Files		The neccesary and recommended programs and files.
Part one		FSHing for images. Extracting the fsh file for editing.
Part two		Editing your fsh file. Making the alpha chanel.
Part three		Putting the fsh file on the original SC4 model.
Part four		Replace a vehicle or creat a new instance.

And now, on to the tutorial.

[vester]

Files:

A list of the programs you will need in order to make a SimCity 4 Driveable car.
These are the programs I will be using in the tutorial. You may choose to use
different tools after you get a feel for making these vehicles.

	the ilive reader which can be downloaded from Sc4devotion
	Datgen complete which can be downloaded from Simtropolis
	The Fshtool which can be downloaded from here
	A simple graphics editing program like paint. All windows computers have paint installed.
	A good 3D program is also recommended. I use Carrara 3.
	Also importing a 3d model into gmax and taking a screen shot may work well and be cheaper.

   

Here is an incomplete list of SimCity 4 cars. You may click on the
images to download a .dat file of the car
These files all include the exemplar, fsh image, png image and s3d files.
These can be a great starting point for creating your own SC4 cars.

Download all the cars below in 1 zip file HERE    
(Sorry the files are missing)
   

   

   
       

[vester]

Part one:
Extracting your FSH file and editing the texture.

To start things off, you need to extract the FSH file from the model.For this tutorial I made a VW Golf from the SC4 brown hatchback car. Before starting, download the brown hatchback from the files page if you want to follow along.

Start by opening the brown hathback with DatGen Complete. Open it up by clicking the + sign. Then click on the images file and click on FSH images on the right. You should see the texture in the bottom window, just like the picture below.




Right click on "FSH Images" and select "Export File" from the menu.



in the menu in "Save as type" be sure to select "FSH Texture .fsh".



Now be sure you have FSHtool installed on your computer. If FSHtool is installed double-click on your extracted FSH file. The program will make a new folder with a bitmap named 0000 and a file called index. You can open the bitmap file and edit the texture with paint or whatever graphics program you choose.

[vester]

Part two:
Editing your FSH file and making the alpha channel.

Now, when it comes to editing the bitmap for your new texture all I have to say is keep it as close to the same size as the original as possible. Also, until you get lots of practice at this it will take many tries to get a good-looking car.

Once you have a texture that you think will look good then you are ready for this part.

One important thing to know about the FSH file is that it needs an alpha channel to look right in the game. Without the alpha channel you will have a vehicle that has black marks all around it or worse. One problem I had doing this is when I export FSH files from the sim city 1 files they always came out without the alpha channel. I went to simcity central to see how they got around this problem. All of their driveable vehicles have an alpha channel. So I opened up one of their vehicle files with the FSHtool. Now, whenever I make a driveable vehicle for SC4 I save it in this same file so I can have an alpha channel.

This is all very confusing I know, so I will explain...




Download a car from simcity central (I hope they don't mind this) and extract it with DatGen Complete. Next convert it with FSHtool:




Next, save the bitmap texture you made as "0000" in the folder holding the simcitycentral car.

making an alpha channel is fairly easy. After you save your bitmap texture, open it up again and make all the areas where the car is white and all the areas you will want invisible black.
Then save it as a 256 color bitmap in the simcitycentral car's folder and name it "0000-a".



You should end up with something like this. When you are ready to save this as a FSH file just double-click the file named "index" and FSHtool will convert it to a FSH file.

Make sure your bitmap is the same size ( 128X128 ) as it was when it was extracted or you will get an error message.

[vester]

Part three:

Now that we have our FSH file ready, we can use the ilive reader to put it in a .dat file.


First, you open the file of the vehicle you want to replace. In this case, it's the brown hatchback. After hitting the "fill the list" button, you right click on the "FSH file" and in the menu you select "remove file".



Next, you right click in the empty area around where the file used to be and in the menu select "insert file". This is the FSH file you just made.

picture part1-7.jpg missing


Now the new texture is in and it's time to see how it looks.

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Select the S3D file of the vehicle (the larger of the 2 S3D files). In the right window select textured and then start hitting that + button to get a good look.

picture part1-9.jpg missing


Now hit the button with the circle and arrows to view from all angles. On your first try this will not be a pretty sight, but you'll get better with practice.

picture part1-9.jpg missing


Now hit the button with the circle and arrows to view from all angles. On your first try this will not be a pretty sight, but you'll get better with practice.

picture part1-10.jpg missing

picture part1-11.jpg missing


When you finally have the texture looking the way you want it, its time for the next step. I will assume that you want to create an entirely new instance instead of just replacing the original car (variety is good). Now you right click on "FSH file" and in the menu select "generate new instance". The program will change the instance number of the FSH file.

picture part1-12.jpg missing


Now select the S3d file of the vehicle. In the window on the right, select the "Mats" tab. Right click the "material id" of the texture and select "change instance/name" from the menu.

picture part1-13.jpg missing


Here is the new popup window you will see.

picture part1-14.jpg missing


Change the "instance" to the new instance number generated by the program. Be careful to keep the 0x in front of the new instance. Click "ok". Then (very important) click on the button that says "apply".

picture part1-15.jpg missing


Lets finish this up in the next post.

[vester]

Part four:

Now right click on the S3d file for the vehicle and "generate new instance".






Next, click on "exemplar file". In the window on the right you will see a line that starts "model resorce key", this is where the exemplar file gets the S3d file instance number. Double click on "model resorce key" and a new popup window will open.




Go down to "values as text" box and change the last part of the number to the new instance number of the S3d file (highlighted in the image below). Then hit the "apply" button to the right of the box and then hit the "apply button below the box.




now right click on "exemplar file" and select "generate new instance". Now save the new vehicle in the SC4 plugins folder and play the game and look for the car. You can also change the PNG file in the windows paint program if you like, just remember to change the instance number when you put it back in the .dat file and change the instance in the exemplar file under "my sim icon".

At times you will want to change the instance or in some cases the group number of a file because when a file was inserted, the number was missing. If that happens to you, save your .dat in the ilive reader. The program will ask if you want to abort the save, click "no". Open the .dat in DatGen Complete. Look for the problem file, right click on it and select "edit file and index info".




Now you can go down to the "group id" or "instance id" boxes and change the number.

picture dat 202.JPG missing


Here is the blue golf tutorial car in the game.

[Randomuser2349]

THIS IS GREAT!  Thank's!