Digital Art Zone

I discovered the ACME plate site years ago. I make all of my plates in Daz. Just open a flat plane, rotate it 90 degrees, rescale it to the size of the car’s plate and in the surfaces tab, select it, then go find the plate pic. It almost always fits the plane perfectly. Here is a few I did in like 5 minutes.

Some plate pictures

http://www.scdmvonline.com/DMVNew/plategallery.aspx?q=all

http://www.turnerplates.com/US - Texas 03.html

http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/hp.html

http://www.michigan.gov/sos/0,1607,7-127-1585_1595_1598—-,00.html

http://www.txlicenseplates.com/

What really spawned my search for more accurate license plates, wasn’t current plates, but rather more vintage or era specific license plates, while the License Plate Maker site is great, it can hardly be used for some plates where the letters and numbers appear in different configuration, such as the old New Mexico plates that have two letters, smaller font and one above the other before the state script or dash and then the number in normal size font.

Also, I was wanting license plates that fit the specific era that a 1959 Chevrolet, or a 1929 Ford would be running in, which is usually around ten years after production, the car would be considered a common car on the streets, one of the issues I ran into with some of Schurby’s cars is that he uses totally upto date plates, while it is certainly possible to have upto date plates on an older car, that wouldn’t be a common practice, as there just isn’t that many older cars running on the streets in normal everyday traffice, so to populate a road with these cars, then to populate them with totally upto date plates kind of takes away from the scene.

This would be especially true with using Schurby’s Checker Cab, since Checkers haven’t been used in regular taxi service since they went out of business sometime in the early 1980’s, it certainly doesn’t fit to have 2010 New York plates on a line of taxi’s!

Well, I finally bought another of N7’s older models, when I purchased the 57 Chevy convertable I was greatly disappointed, the model came in as a prop, didn’t work well at all in DS, and it also didn’t work well in Poser, though it was made for Poser.

So needless to say I was a little apprehensive about purchasing anymore of their cars, when they released their 34 and 32 Ford’s, I couldn’t resist, had to give them a try, and with trial and error, made them work well in DS4, and now DS4.5 Pro, so have been happy with their cars ever since.

So today, I decided to get another of their older releases, while I was still a little concerned, I also now know how to deal with certain things, like parenting just about everything to the mainbody, and that sort of thing, so today, I got me another 57 Chevy, this time, I got the Nomad.

I can hear Music now, “There are plenty of free ones out there! Why did you buy one?” The primary reason is because I wanted a better mesh than can be found at Sketchup, and so far, I’m not disappointed, the car loads just fine, (remember that with N7 models, you must not have anything else highlighted in the scene, better to load their cars into an empty scene), on this one, you need to parent the doors, the wheels, (all 4), both of the rear gates, the chrome and outside parts, and the inside parts, and the gold parts, everything should be parented to the Mainbody.

The shaders work fine on this car, I used Schurby’s 65 GTO chrome for the chrome on the Mainbody, the doors, the rear gates, all the wheels, I used the Ultamate Shader Collection metals gold for the gold trim, and DZFire’s shaders for the bodypaint, the car turned out pretty decents.

WOOOOOWWW! Yup…gotta have this one. You gotta a link Betsy?

I can hear Music now, “There are plenty of free ones out there! Why did you buy one?”....actually there are very few 57 Nomads. I have only gotten one from Sketchup and had to fix the mesh on it. Holes all around the windows and such, you could tell it was the 57 convertible with a top added. So this one, I will buy.

Yep, here it is, http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/chevrolet-nomad-1957/88952

This is one of their older models, so it does have its limitations, and you will have to parent just about everything to the Mainbody in order to be able to move the car around, heres the list.

Each wheel, not tires, those are pre-parented to the wheels, so be sure you parent only the wheels to the Mainbody.

Each Door

Both top and bottom rear gates

Go into the scene tab, open the model, and parent the Interior Parts to the Mainbody

Chrome and Parts also need to be parented to the Mainbody.

Coloring the car is fairly easy, I didn’t do anything to the interior, as the Poser shaders seem to work okay for fabrics, but you will need to use DS shaders for the body paint and chrome, as well as each wheel and door, although for the wheels you will only need to make one materials preset, should work on each wheel, the car also begs to be fooled around with as well, it doesn’t come with a .obj file, but you can export the mesh from DS as a .obj.

Got it!...gonna play with this one. I love Nomads. Wish I could find a 55 or 56 too.

I know they are also available, but not for Poser or DS, the problem there is that those models are expensive, like Turbosquid expensive!

It all loaded fine in DS3. Everything is parented as should be and I was able to move the car fine. Don’t know why your cars are not. Here is a render right out of the box.

Might be on account of I use DS4.5 Pro, ever since DS4 came out, some of my cars I’ve had to completely parent everything!

And here it is with all the cool shaders applied! I did the interior also and I used an aluminum shader on the back fender inserts. I also tinted the windows more like the color of auto glass was back then, a tiny bit greenish/blue. Click the pic for a better view.

When I got that first 57 Chevy Convertable from N7, I was very disappointed, but I wonder if I can make it work in DS4.5, never really tried to use it in DS4, or Pro when I upgraded, as it just didn’t work for me in DS3 at all, I can probably go and redownload it though at Rendo, I have the file somewhere, but I also have so many 57 Chevy’s in .rar files, it would take me days to find the right one!

Well I did decide to give the convert a second chance, so instead of searching through my many discs of content, I just went over to Rendo and redownloaded it, the convertable loads differently from any of my other N7 cars, it doesn’t even show as a figure, it comes in as a prop, everything is parented to it, but shading is a little more involved here, since the colors the car comes in are somewhat strange, but when it loads and with the right shaders, the car is one Beautiful Five Seven.

Naturally Good Deal Dan is in on the act, he has his car dealership fully stocked!

You know I had to play with it, just a little!