by ZachC

The Custom Muscle Car and Custom Coupe arrived in world 2 weeks ago and were met with rejoicing. Something new for us to play with! I decided to paint the Muscle Car, which is, for all intents and purposes, a Viper. To put it mildly, I was sadly disappointed in the quality of this new model.  To be fair, There.com made the templates available for beta testing 3 months ago. I was busy in real life and never found the time to check them out. That’s on me. On the other hand, this model and template are bad enough, in my opinion, that There.com should have seen the problems even before they put them in beta. I thought they’d learned from the Scion tC debacle. For those that don’t recall, the original Scion templates were a disaster. The tC was arguably the worst model /template I’ve ever seen in There. It was sent back to the art house and redone and became what I would now consider the standard of what a good vehicle model should be. The Muscle Car doesn’t even come close.

A quick side by side comparison of the two templates provided by There demonstrates one difference right away. The artist who did the new Scion actually cared about their work. The Scion template is crisp and clear. The template on the Muscle Car doesn’t have a sharp crisp line anywhere on it. The graphics are muddied, and it looks as if whoever did it just wanted it off their desk as fast as possible. It looks like the person doing the work just took pictures of a Viper and forced them to fit the template with no regard to the diminishing quality of the original image as they proceeded. One of There’s members, Optimize, cleaned up the Muscle Car template and made it available for download. He removed both the graphics and the muddyness. You can easily see the difference in crispness in comparing it with the original.

My feeling is that members aren’t here to provide quality control for There. This should all have been seen and dealt with before the model ever went into beta. However, when asked about quality control in the forums, TheChaz responded that this isn’t a quality control issue. Examples of quality control issues would be things like a missing texture, an area mapped to the wrong texture, or a template that can't be submitted through Previewer. This leaves me to believe that it doesn’t matter to There that the template is pixilated, muddied, and stretches awkwardly. This is the default texture for a shop item, but apparently it doesn’t matter how it looks. Nothing’s missing, and it’s submittable, so quality control has done its job.

The Muscle Car in the previewer consists of four separate materials: paint, underbody, the hood, and the bumpers. Interestingly enough, the Scion also consists of four materials. The difference being the Scion actually uses separate templates for each of them while with the Muscle Car you submit the SAME template for everything but the underbody. You just load that same template three times plus the underbody. At least the underbody is separate and detailed well. Too bad the parts we actually SEE aren’t given the same care.

The Muscle Car template goes this route for what reason? There isn’t a logical one as far as I can see; leaving only that the person at the “art” house didn’t feel like making any more effort than he had to. I’ve blacked out the areas of the template that are used for the hood and bumpers. The template now shows just the body parts, and they’re close to the same size as the Scion tC. So what’s the difference? Why do you get a better result painting the Scion than you do the Muscle Car?

They could have actually stretched the Muscle Car body closer to the edges of the template, but that wouldn’t have really made a huge difference. The mapping for the windows could have been improved as well which would have helped some of the bleed over.  I personally prefer the layout of the Scion.  It’s logical, and easy to use. To create the two sides of the car you only have to do one, then flip it and move it up. They match beautifully. With the Muscle Car the sides are flip flopped with the top of the car down below them. It’s more work, and harder to match the color of the top.

So what’s the problem here? Let’s look at the model itself. I whited out the template and looked again in the previewer. The best way to see any detail when doing this is to change the lighting. I’m just learning to do 3d modeling, so I’ll leave a comprehensive analysis to others, but I compared it to the model of the Scion in the same light using the same white out technique. Even a novice like me can see the difference. The Scion is smoother without the dramatic stretching around the wheel wells for instance. No wonder I couldn’t get those to look the way I wanted them to!

Another quick comparison shows the Muscle Car in the previewer using the texture provided by There and the cleaned up version provided by Optimize. No matter how clean you make that template, and Optimize did a good job, the model is so poorly mapped and the made that it still looks far worse than the Scion. Beyond that, I’m running out of room so I’ll let the side by side comparisons speak for themselves. I believe the images speak eloquently to the differences between a good model and one that just gets by.

In short, while there are no dramatic changes in scale between parts on the muscle car template, which I do appreciate, you can’t place a crisp line anywhere on the body, the paint still bleeds into the windows, or vice versa depending on how you do it, and painting shine is virtually impossible due to all the weird stretching. Graphics, louvers, and scoops all suffer on this model for the same reason.

I’ve seen the Custom Coupe, although I haven’t tried painting one yet. That model appears to be much better done. That isn’t to say I’m going to go out on a limb and claim it’s good, but compared to what I’ve seen in the Muscle Car it appears to have been done by someone who at least cares about their work. 

I know the Muscle Car is now part of our world, for better or worse, but if this is the best quality work There can get for their money from this particular art house, I’d suggest talking with a few of our own developers next time a new vehicle is wanted. Have you seen some of the models Nex3d or Jinxed_Karma have created?