The first car I decided to model is based on my real car. Known as a Ford XR4 here in Australia, it's called a Ford Fiesta ST in Europe, and yes, mine is red with the overhead stripes and everything, though we don't get the side stripes here in Australia, probably because they've got "ST" written on them. Funnily enough, lift the bonnet and the two litre engine that's been shoe-horned into the bay still has "ST" proudly emblazoned across it.

This is what it's supposed to look like:

And this is the result:

It turned out quite well, though it's not yet finished. I'm planning on making the windows transparent, or at least semi-transparent. The hatch, doors and bonnet are all detachable for those little "accidents" that happen all too frequently during a zombie attack, though I'm going to have to come up with a simple way of telling the engine that they can be removed. I'll probably fall back on my old standby of setting the vertex colours to bright green for the parts that are detachable, then implement something similar to what I've done with the buildings, except without Bullet Physics, because that'll chew up too much CPU.

This is the first low-poly car model I've done. My previous experience involves a few high-detail car models created when I was learning Blender. Having said that it still took over six hours to create... but that's usually the way. Creating the first one is always the most time consuming. Once I've got the system defined, I'll be able to create new models at a quicker pace.

Overall, the model weighs in at about 150 triangles, excluding the wheels which are 28 triangles each.

I'm getting the feeling that I'll have to implement vehicles as objects rather than sprites. A quick test showed that sprites really only work with objects that are tall and thin because large objects, when passing each other, as cars do on roads, look pretty bad as sprites. The reason for this is that the sprites are simply rectangles that always face the camera. If two car sprites come close enough to each other, then at some point the one in front will suddenly pop behind the other, which doesn't look very realistic.

I decided to do a car model to make sure that the road in particular was sized correctly. I was a little worried that there wouldn't be enough room to fit two cars passing each other without significantly shrinking the human model so that it wasn't too big in relation to the car. I did have to shrink it a little, but so much as too affect anything else. I am going to expand the width of the road a little anyway. The curb is currently part of the road texture, but I'm going to make it part of the pavement when I get around to adding it, so that will give the road another 10 pixels or so on each side, which will help.

Without further ado, here is the video:

Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site