Building a car variant database, photo guidelines
In response to feedback regarding this season's game, I've started working on tools that will allow us to track variants of cars in the Fantasy League. The end goal being you will know exactly which car is running on which track, a feature that the game doesn't currently support. But in order to build this database of car variants I need help from everyone in the form of taking pictures of your cars and uploading them to the web site.
These tools are still in the process of being made but that doesn't mean you can't start photographing your cars now in preparation.
We'll need photos of cars not already appearing in the game, however, I have lots of car variants already photographed that are not featured in the game, so there's no need for anyone to duplicate that effort. You can see my entire collection of photographs over on Flickr.
As far as requirements for variants photos, it's pretty straight forward:
- Images must be in JPG format
- Images must be at least 640 pixels wide (Whatever it comes out of your camera should be fine)
- Horizontal orientation please
- Center the car in the shot
- Don't crop your image. If you need to resize, keep it proportional
- Plain light background. White preferred but whatever you got will be fine.
- Cars should be placed at quarter angle enough to show the front, side and wheels of the car
- One car per photo only
Guide for photographing your cars
Example of car photo:
Know that all uploaded car photos will be screened and spot checked for "niceness" and to avoid any duplicates. The upload tools will be as simple as I can make them and the system will handle all the extra cropping and resizing for us.
Discussion
That looks great! Maybe just play with the distance/focus a bit but otherwise that's perfectly acceptable.
Here is a quick tool to check your photos. This tool DOES NOT save your photos or hook them into the game in any way, this is simply a way to check your photography. The tool will resize and crop your photo as the game would need and you can check how they look to know if you need to tweak your shots.
http://www.redlinederby.com/public/phot ... echeck.php
Let me know if there are any problems.
@JDC - Turns out they do have alphabetical ordering! Check out the Flickr set again and cars should be (more) sorted by car. Of course, this is assuming I was accurate and consistent with all my naming, which may or may not be true in some cases.
Of course, this is assuming I was accurate and consistent with all my naming,
I think even Hot Wheels is inconsistent in naming their cars.
Now, when a race is being held at one of us Host Tracks our own cars will show for the picks, and or if someone should go into cars and choose for example "Jersey Shore" the JS cars are what they will see, right? Now again, and I understand if you want things simpler but. Couldn't we add cars that aren't on the Redline Derby as our Host Track cars? Just curious.
You can add as many variant photos as you like...the more you can share and add the better! There is no limit on what you can add. However, you will only upload cars that exist in the Redline Derby Racing collection.
But a host track can only be linked to a single variant. You as a host can upload 50 photos of a car but you will only link one to your track, and that is the car that will show up during picks as you would expect.
Did you re-photograph that car or just up the brightness/contrast? I would still try to get more of the car in focus...just me though. Does your camera have a macro setting?
No I didn't take that photo. It's the same as the one above.
I was going to give some tips on post processing, but I ran out of time. I was trying to think how to get more depth of field...I assume that photo was taken on a Macro setting.
Too bad Flickr doesn't have an alphabetical sorting option so that we could see all the variations next to one another.