Swamper's Garage

[Swamper77]

Pumper 3 exists only as a prop at this point. It is a precursor to the existing Maxis fire truck, estimated timeframe is sometime from the 60's to 70's. I never got beyond importing the model into GMAX to have a look at it. It has a lot of small details that stopped me from converting it to automata. Also, since most people are doing 80's to modern times for their CJ's/MD's, I didn't really see a point in converting it to automata. It will look really old compared to most of the Maxis automata.

I am considering making the "Pumper 2" automata model, by making alterations to the existing Pumper 1 model. I'm not sure how I will release it yet. I could either update my existing set of American emergency vehicles, update my Fire Support vehicles set to include it, or make it a standalone release. I'll probably figure it out when I get around to releasing it.

Speaking of releases/updates, all further updates releases will be on the BSC LEX only. My files on the STEX are "as is" and will not be updated at all.

-Swamper

[nerdly_dood]

Okay, so I'm not missing much with Pumper 3... But of course, Pumper 2 will be appreciated, and I'm looking forward to it.

And speaking of tweaking existing models, I'd like to see the front end of Rescue Unit 2 slapped onto the back of Pumper Unit 1, like this:


The roof of Rescue Unit 2 slopes up some, but I think it would look better flat when used as a pumper truck. (Hey, that could be used as Pumper Unit 3½ or 4 instead of pumper 3)

[Swamper77]

@Nerdly: Your image is not showing for me. Looks like the link is broken...

I took some time tonight to work on another Crown Victoria police car model:



This one is based on the ones used by New York's State Troopers. They use a navy blue/yellow paint scheme with red light bars. burgsabre87 made a request for it in Nerdly's thread regarding reskins of emergency vehicles. I decided to take a crack at it after an online discussion with burgsabre87.

They are fully functional with headlights at night and rotating red lights in the light bar. The prop versions of the cars appear in place of the Maxis police car when the "Replacement" file is installed. An additional prop file is also required for the models for the replacement props.

This particular model was an exercise in several areas of automata creation for me. I spent a few hours in PhotoShop CS and GMAX, trying to get the stripes and logos in the right places on the car. I now have a "Template" on my system for doing some of the other police cars on my to-do list as they also have stripes.

I won't be making police cars from various departments like Nerdly has. I chose the NYST police car to further my projects and to expand on my skills, not to take projects away from Nerdly. I'm not interested in competition between the two of us. I'm just interested in modeling automata and furthering my projects. It just so happens that one of Nerdly's requesters had the perfect project for me to do so.

-Swamper

[Pat]

Jan those are simply sexxie!!! WOW!!! great job on the New York's Troopers car...

[nerdly_dood]

WHOA! That is AWESOME!

And welcome back from your vacation, too.

I'm not considering this to be competitionbetween me and you - if anything, your work with these police cars provides the SC4 community with some excellent new mods as well as providing me with more colors to base any re-skins of your cop cars to do in the future on - but that won't happen anytime in the near future due to some aforementioned computer problems. (I mainly need a white car, a black car, and a colored car, preferably blue, to base designs on - that way i can manipulate existing colors with the least amount of effort to get the design I want)

Here's that image that didn't show up:


EDIT: Something told me that you had done a dark green NYSP car... so I went and got you a link to this which is most all the pictures of New York State Police you could ever need... but you made them blue like they actually are so I'm wasting my time. (Not quite, actually... I managed to find a minor problem with your model (or is it the skin itself?), and that is that the real NYSP car has the words STATE POLICE in a gap in the stripe over the front wheel in the same color text as the stripe)

[Ryan B.]

Jan, welcome back from your vacation!  The models & props look amazing.  Thanks for taking a crack at them!

[Une_ame]

Always nice too see CV with new paint scheme (an endless job...).

I hope you'll have the time to make a lot of different kind of Simvehicules .

[Meastro444]

very nice Jan, keep it up!

[Swamper77]

@Nerdly: The real world car does have "State Trooper" in the front part of stripes. Since the one side panel is used on both sides of the car, I omitted the text. It would have been really small as well, and therefore a colored smear on the skin. I had a hard enough time getting the stripes on there. I did put the "State Trooper" text on the trunk lid though.

Thanks for the link to the photos. It gives me a few more ideas for vehicles, including some to replace that Maxis police van with. The game's van is rather small to be used for anything useful. I could probably repaint my EMT ambulance to be a mobile command center, too.

As for your fire truck idea, it's a good one. It will take a little modeling, but I should be able to make it work. It probably won't be an extended cab like the one you showed, though.

@Ryan: Enjoy your new ride

Une_ame: My time is limited due to real life and my other commitments. I get bored if I work on SC4 all the time, so I vary what I do at my computers. I do have ideas for other paint schemes, but I either need to locate photos online or take some of my own to do them. It's looking like making packs of police vehicles to either replace or add to the game's police force. Replacements will include police vans or trucks to replace that Maxis police van.
I'll start working on vehicles again soon. I'm just taking a break from modding SC4 to play the game and to play some of the other games that I have. You'll know when I'm back to making vehicles

-Jan

[nerdly_dood]

Oh, no problem with the photos. I can recommend a website that shows THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of police car pictures etc. Just google "police car web site" and that should take you to it... or perhaps this link will. It is my one and only source for finding police car pictures, except certain smaller towns near where I live that I'm using to make skins for SimCity mods.

And yes it is true that unless you use a very large texture, small text on cars' skins shows up clear as mud. But since people don't often make a point to try to get a really close up look at them, I try to make text on my cars as close as possible to the size it is in RL, and to omit as little as possible. So a lot of times text on my cars shows up... clear as mud. Take my Virginia state police car for example... and the Georgia state patrol car I'm working on is even worse:


And about replacing the in-game police van: You could probably just use the front end of your EMT-EMS ambulance and adjust the "meat 'n potatas" of your Euro Mercedes Sprinter ambulance to fit on that to make it a Ford E-series van, and then add an ambulance top to that with a light bar and that could be used as a police van or an ambulance. Pictures of those are also available at the website I linked to.

[art128]

very nice automate Swamper77   

[Swamper77]

@Nerdly: Thanks for the link. It turns out I had it saved from a couple of years ago, but at their old address. I've updated my bookmarks to point to their current location.

I've made a new police car that replicates the ones I see in the city that I work in daily, Seattle:

Full police car replacement file in effect


Closeup Detail

So far, I have made just the replacement files and a static prop. However, the prop file is required for the replacement mod to replace the Maxis police cars. The additionals will be made later, after I make the replacement for the Maxis police van. The Maxis vans that are used as emergency vehicles are Ford Transit vans. Small and not very useful. So, I'm going to replace it with something a little more useful, and more American. Ford Tranists were only made in the UK and/or Australia to the best of my knowledge.
I can't find a suitable model for what Seattle uses for a van in their department anywhere online. Well, I can, but I'm not in the mood for paying money to get the models. So, I'm actually modeling it from the ground up. Here's the start of the Chevy Astro van:



This is just the bottom half of the van body so far. This section comes up to the bottom of the windshield opening. The top half will contain the windshield pillars, the roof, and the rest of the upper body. I found the blueprints for the van on The Blueprints Website. I cut apart their images in PhotoShop so I could make the appropriate reference images for use in GMAX. There are 4 images total: top, side, front, and rear (The rear one is not visible since I am looking through the backside of the plane it sits on). The far side is not visible as the backfaces of the model are invisible, but it is there.

This is a work in progress, so it will be a little while before it starts looking like a Chevy Astro van in 3D. I'm making it a panel van first, and then I will make the passenger version which will have windows on the sides. This is one of 3 van models I will be making. The other two are a Ford Econoline and a Dodge Ram Van. I have the front of the Econoline already, as it is part of the EMT ambulance models I released awhile back. I will just need to build the main body for it. The Dodge Ram Van will require a little painting of an old skin that is hiding in my hard drive, probably in a dark corner somewhere.

-Jan

[nerdly_dood]

Wow! That Seattle police car is (as usual) AWESOME! I was hoping to make it for SC some time or another though... But yours is better than I could have possibly made mine, though. Maybe I'll just have to settle with Prince William County, VA...

And about the police van thing: It seemed to me that the original Maxis police van was already a Chevy Astro (or is it a GMC Safari?) which, although it is rarely used by police vans around here (since the Chevrolet Express and Ford E-series vans are bigger and more versatile), it could definitely be used as a police van. My only problem with that model is the way that the lightbar is arranged - and if I try to fix it by extending the colored portions in the texture file, it just gets ruined:


Oh, and another thing - I have a little bit of an update in our collaboration thread coming in the next couple dozen seconds.

[Swamper77]

@Nerdly: Looks like Maxis did a bad job with their UV mapping for the lightbar on that van model. I've done some comparisons with van images on the internet, and the Maxis police/ambulance vans are indeed Ford Transits. Maxis probably chose them for their small size and the ability to fit on the narrow freeway lanes.

I've put a few more hours of work into the Chevy Astro van. The main shape of the body is in place. I may pull at a few more vertices here and there, but the shape is pretty much the way I want it. And, yes, I know the smoothing is off in a few places, but this is a WIP (work in progress).

The fun part begins soon, punching holes through the model's body. I'll be starting with the wheel well openings and windshield first. Later, I'll get the lights and front grill assembly in place. When I have the basic panel van style done, I will bunch a few more holes for the passenger version. Once both are done, then I will start adding the light bars and making the automata versions.

Anyone interested in a bunch of civilian versions of the vans for your Sims to drive ?

-Jan

[nerdly_dood]

Nice progress!

Yeah they're mostly civilian minivans around here.

And ya know... with the right skin tweaks... I (or you or someone else) could make it resemble a Ford E-series pretty well. Sure the dimensions aren't perfect, and the windwhield isn't quite as steep as on a full-size utility van, but it's pretty close.

[Swamper77]

Nice progress!

Yeah they're mostly civilian minivans around here.

And ya know... with the right skin tweaks... I (or you or someone else) could make it resemble a Ford E-series pretty well. Sure the dimensions aren't perfect, and the windwhield isn't quite as steep as on a full-size utility van, but it's pretty close.

Oh, no, no. I'm not just going to wrap images around this. This is going to be a detailed model with the lights and such modeled in it. I'll be modeling in the tiny details, such as the sliding door track and the door handles, on this model. I'm not taking any shortcuts with this project, or future ones.

The Ford Econoline van will be another model I will be doing a detailed model of. I already have the front end and will just need to model the main body of the van. I will be making both a panel van and a regular passenger van of the Econoline as well. Making two versions of each van gives me plenty of options of how to reuse the models for later projects.

All of my previous "3D modeling" was just "3D manipulation", so I'm changing my ways a bit and facing my fears of 3D modeling. I always assumed it to be too hard, seeing the detailed models with thousands of polygons. I'm quite proud of this attempt and my model so far.

-Jan

[Pat]

Jan that astro is bringing back memories of my first van I used for the fire department lol.... Looking like an astro if I do say so, the bad thing about them is the trannies on them go to poop to easily... I cant wait to see devolpment on the E150 or 2 or 3 which ever one of the Econolines you use...  Ooh if you need pics of Astro or Econo's lemme know and I will be willing to track some down for you!!!

[nerdly_dood]

Going all-in, are ya? Seems like this thing is going to turn out in a very interesting way... And its a good thing that you're making the econoline because I think the E-series is much MUCH more usable as an ambulance than the Astro - considering that although I have seen a rare Astro police van, including one used by the Roanoke police department where I live, I have never seen an Astro ambulance.

[Swamper77]

@Pat: Stop giving me more ideas for my models You've brought my possible uses of the van up to 5 or 6 now. As for which Econoline version, I have no idea what the numbers are on it. I do know that I am stealing the cab off the detailed EMT ambulance model I got from Ripptide to use as a starting point for the Econoline van models. Like this Chevy Astro van, I will make panel/cargo and passenger versions of the Econoline van in addition to the emergency versions.

@Nerdly: While I haven't seen a police Astro van myself, there are photos that confirm that Seattle does use them. It's probably only used for events or incidents where they will need extra equipment that the patrol cars won't be able to carry. I highly doubt they were ever used as an ambulances, but I could be wrong.

I've made some more progress on the Chevy Astro van. It now has a fuel door, tail lights and backup lights, wheel well cutouts, and two back doors. I have GMAX displaying the edges of the polygons so you can see what the shape of the vehicle really looks like. The model has a green material applied to it with 50% opacity so I can see through the model to the drawings that surround it. The rear lights also have materials applied to them. The red ones are set to 50% opacity as well, but the white ones are completely opaque.

I started with a couple of boxes when I began this model, and have sculpted them to represent the van fairly well. Based on the spacing of the lines across the model, this will not be an ultra detailed model like the ones that Ripptide gave me in the past. This will be a detailed model, but will be considered "low-poly" by most professional 3D modelers. Hey, you have to start somewhere...

I have a shape for making the openings for the rear windows made. It's just hidden while I am working on the rear doors. The left rear door is just temporary to see if the doors fit the back of the van properly. I'm going to be detailing the rear doors, starting with the right hand one. Once I get the window and basic detailing done for that door, I'll mirror it over to the other side. Then I'll add the opening for the license plate housing and install the rear door handle assembly. I'll put on the hinges at that time as well. Then I will move to another area of the vehicle to add more details.

-Jan

[nerdly_dood]

Hinges?! I have to be at most about 40-50 (i think) feet away to see the kind of hinges used on these doors... That's a little TOO detailed if you ask me

OFF-TOPIC: I need as many people's input as possible - i have a thread here explaining why.