daydreaming about wheels...

[samsepi0l]

I was actually in a boring meeting at work today, looking at wheels for my truck on my cellphone and I thought to myself:

I wonder if there is a way to have more wheel choices in icr2 so we can have several wheel colors on the car?

sort of like in example, 1995.... The penske's had chrome wheels, the newman-haas cars had black and Jacques Villeneuve had gold wheels.

Since checkpoint10 was able to actually make a ice-cream truck 3do drive around the racetrack in a carset, is it easy/possible to incorporate different color wheels (other than your basic firestone/goodyear difference)

[checkpoint10]

One difficulty is that we are limited to the 2 tires and that the front tires rotate as they steer, and that movement (along with the spinning) I believe is hard coded.

I was thinking what if you made the tire object truly just the tire (i.e. with a hole in the middle) and then have the wheel be part of the car object, but in doing so, the wheel would be stationary at all times and would look wrong when the tire is spinning or rotating.

[checkpoint10]

I thought about it again, and one crazy solution might be to create a "tire" object that has: 1) a tire with a hole in the center, 2) black polygons that actually represent the gaps between the spokes of the wheels. This would leave you with a "see through" area.

Inside the tire, you would create a colored disc (in my example below, it would be a gold color to mimic Villeneuve's wheel). The disc is technically stationary and is part of the rest of the chassis. The disc would be slightly bigger than the hole, and somewhat deeper in the tire, so that it would always be visible no matter what steering angle the tire is at. The black polygons in the tire model will spin in front of the colored disc, giving the impression that the whole wheel is spinning. At higher speeds (when there would be a different tire model/texture) I am not sure how well this effect would work.

Anyway, each car can have a different colored disc even if we're still limited to a similar spokes pattern.