Looking for a tire tutorial

gannonroader

I hope i'm posting this in the right section.

I'm looking for a tutorial on modeling a tractor tire in 3D but in a way that could be used for gaming. There's some awesome tire tutorials out there, but they're pretty high, and don't really go into a good way to texture them or anything like that. A whole tractor tutorial would be ideal, but I'm pretty confident I can do the machine itself. It's the tires that are kind of stumping me. I don't know how to approach them. Some help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks guys.

Something like this http://www.dmmultimedia.com/case/case_016b.jpg would be fantastic.

Harryscary276

Well I don't know about tutorials but generally I want to say it is one of those things that is based on texture and mapping to get the effect, especially if you want it to be used in a game, so texture would be an important thing here

So just getting the basic shape of the tire would be most of the modeling you would be doing

malcolm

Mostly the way I have seen it done, and done it myself is to model a flat piece of the tread duplicate it a bunch of times and then use a curve deformer to curl it into a tire. Here is a link to the technique, scroll down to tire.

http://www.suurland.com/tutorials_newbeetle.php

frubes

the simple answer is basically follow that tutorial you linked gannonroader and then create a low poly (can pretty much be a cylinder with rounded edges) and bake the high down to the low. Check out poopinmymouth.com for baking a normal map workflow which will explain everything you need to know. Just make sure you model the high so that it translates well into your normal map. You can read about that side of things in the sticky normal mapping thread in this part of the forum.

Viola

Edit:

http://www.dmmultimedia.com/3dtips_09.htm

follow this tyre tutorial from the same website as the tractor then go check out poops normal mapping workflow.

gannonroader

oh I know how to bake normal maps and stuff, and I know how to do the flat piece and deform it to a circle etc, but with a tractor they have those nice big treads coming off.

glib

gannonroader wrote: »

oh I know how to bake normal maps and stuff, and I know how to do the flat piece and deform it to a circle etc, but with a tractor they have those nice big treads coming off.

Do nice big treads, then bend it? What about that didn't work for you?

Mark Dygert

Might need to adjust the placement of the pivot point if it bends incorrectly.

I've had trouble getting the right size of tire so I normally create a path the size of my tire then Path Deform a instance of the flat thread around the path. Then I can scale the original flat thread to make the two ends meet perfectly. Those are all 3dsmax terms but they translate to Maya fine, I just can't remember the exact steps and names off the top of my head.

malcolm

Yeah should work fine our vehicle artist just made monster truck tires like that for our game all fully 3d.