Making a car shell in PT2

Tutorial: creating a shell in Plaything2

Right, the reason you'd need to do this is if you want to include a shell with your car (there must be a benefit to this, otherwise it wouldn't have been incorporated into the game). You've modelled your car in CarEd, and you've skinned it in PT2. Now, you know that the shell has to have exactly the same skin... so you can't just open the shell that CarEd made and skin it again, b/c you'd never get it right! So, what we do is quite simple, once you know how:

• Open up your skinned car in PT2... you'll probably have saved it as an sdf, which makes things easier.
• The shell is simply the normal car, minus the wheels (and any other moving parts you may want to define in the grooves section of the text file).
• In the 'tree' of components, click FLPIVOT.ACT.
• Then, you have to move your mouse into one of the view windows (for some strange reason). While it's there, press the delete button (Del).
• PT2 will ask if you want to delete that part. Click yes.
• Repeat this process for the other wheels FRPIVOT.ACT, RLWHEEL.ACT, RRWHEEL.ACT, and any other components as mentioned earlier. (If PT2 doesn't respond to pressing Del, click another component in the list, and then click back on the one you want to delete, then move the mouse into the view window again).
• Now we must save the shell... click File-->Save As... and add SHELL to the end of the filename. Click save, and your files will be generated!
• 4 files were generated... carnameSHELL.sdf, carnameSHELL.act, carnameSHELL.mat, and carnameSHELL.dat. You only need to use the SHELL.dat file when you put the car's files in the data\cars\carname directory. The other files make it easy to open again in PT2.

And that's it! It really is that simple! No more messed up shells after skinning in PT2...