XeNTaX

Veegie, I know the situation.
smooth it, render it. show us. you got that?
with a polished material on and a contrast filled environment like an HDRi blue sky with white clouds on.
this is the critical test the geometry will have to pass for photorealism use. this will allow us to see just how critical it is.

Render from 5ft away in a low contrast environment and the problem is quite noticeable.
Though I don't really know what this accomplishes.
The error is known and has been noted.

Veegie, nice. thanks. some of it is probably just low poly count but there does appear to be some precision issue. maybe be forced to fix that if possible.
how about a full view from eye height? how bad is that

Problem areas are near the door and the wheel well.

I'm fairly certain that we need to scale the position (or maybe the offset values relative to the origin) by some unknown value present in the section header. That would make the most sense, because the only scale we use now is 16-bit floats, but the header floats are all 32-bit and would provide an extra level of precision...

Larger version: http://aj.uwcs.co.uk/f3/BMWNormals.png

As you might expect, normals are located in the 4 bytes immediately after the 2 Half4s. They're in the 11/11/10 format. There's some code here (adapted from the DirectX SDK) to extract the normalised vector from an unsigned integer: http://pastebin.com/1CRzBGQG.

Very nice man , does this fix the smoothing problem we were having earlier?

I'm not sure what it'll fix, if anything.

Still nice nontheless

The first 3 floats in the unknown 14 floats are a positional offset per piece. I must have some axes messed up in my render as I have to treat them as yxz rather than xyz, but nonetheless, it all seems to be in place. The car ends up with about 3 rear wings and front bumpers all in the "correct" place. The wheel is still at the origin (as there's only one). I expect there's either wheel attachment data in the file somewhere or in a separate file.

EDIT:

Object translation is done? Fantastic!

Confirmed, not exactly sure what to make of the flipped x y coords though :X For the wheels, there's probably some sort of wheelbase information since all you really need is width of car and length from center to front/back axles...

Here's my updated source with normals and correct positions aside from the wheel of course. I still need to work on selective exportation and getting the models to render properly...

Ernegien wrote:Confirmed, not exactly sure what to make of the flipped x y coords though :X For the wheels, there's probably some sort of wheelbase information since all you really need is width of car and length from center to front/back axles...

Here's my updated source with normals and correct positions aside from the wheel of course. I still need to work on selective exportation and getting the models to render properly...

Regarding the wheels, there should be a scaling part there too.
Typically the wheels in the back are scaled an inch larger than the fronts, but it seems there is only a single model.

What about UVs and Textures?

I'm working on textures now. We may already have found the UVs, but without the textures it's difficult to know whether they are in fact UVs at all.