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| Overview | Camera/Light | Parts | Surfaces | Dummies | Colors |
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Overview |
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What is FCE Finish? Just to anticipate: FCE Finish is no modeller. You can't build up cars from scratch — you can't even edit the geometry of the car. FCE Finish was designed to finish your NFS car just before publishing. In this first release there are four editors that allow you to edit parts, surfaces, dummies and the default colors. The essence of this program is the surface editor, that provides very easy using tools to manipulate the normals. As you may know, every 3d renderer (incl. NFS) uses normals to calculate the light reflections on 3d objects. The behavior of the light is one of the most important factors that make up the appearance of 3d objects. Highly detailled modelling is for nothing, if the normals are not right. On the left you can see the influence of the normals on the appearance of a car model. All three pictures show the same mesh model! The first two ones have normals generated by FCE Tweak. The normals of the third one were generated by FCE Finish just by dragging the smooth control slider! |
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The Editors FCE Finish is devided into five editor pages:
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File Menu In the file menu you'll find the standard I/O functions for opening and saving your NFS4 fce file. Important: FCE Finish saves extra data of the surface editor (e.g. the smoothing groups and smoothing angle limits) into unused space inside the fce file. So you are able to continue your work when the file will be reopened. If you want to work on those fce files with other programs, it is recomended, that you first make a backup copy. The other program may create a new file when saving and this will cause, that all groups and smoothing data will be lost! This has no meaning for the look of your car until you want to do further surface editing with FCE Finish. In this case all normals will have to be reinitialized! The best way is to use FCE Finish as the last program in your production process! |
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Undo/Redo FCE Finish supports 64x Undo/Redo. Since all editors work on different parts of the fce model, each editor has it's own undo/redo management. Unfortunately this behavior brings one restriction: if you switch to another editor, the work of the previous editor cannot be undone! |
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Rendering Modes FCE Finish uses it's own software rendering engine that supports wireframes, goraud shading, textures and transparency. The renderer can also display normals and other editing objects like coordinate systems and the light vector. Select the desired renderer by clicking on the appropriate button or choosing from the view menu. In the view menu you can also switch between different display modes for all transparent polygons. In some cases it's usefull to hide those polygons, e.g. if the car's lights are covered with glass... |