NHeat supports 2 ways of displaying damage on cars.

Vertex damage
One of those ways is "vertex damage" which is an option in options.cfg and can be switched on/off. If switched on, NHeat will dynamically process damaging to those parts of the car body's mesh that had contacted another car/wall/etc. The advantage of using vertex damage is that a modder doesn't have to care about anything - the game engine takes fully care about it. The disadvantage is it's cost of CPU load and that there'll never be any parts flying off a car - everything gets only squeezed on damaging. The textures will always still be the sames.

To set vertex damage, open the mod's options.cfg file to notepad and check for the line

• vertex_damage yes

• Hood.
• Front/Nose
• Front-left ender
• Front-right fender
• Left side, door
• Right side, door
• Rear-left area, fender
• Rear-right area, fender
• Rear trunk
• Rear
• Roof and interior
• Engine

Objects [1]-[11] make up the undamaged car body...
...while Objects >[11] are used for the modeling parts at certain damage state

Assuming the car type name is mycar.car, the objects' names would have to be as follows if there's damage modeling used on the car

Hood mycar[1] = Normal mycar[12] = minor damage mycar[26] = major damage mycar[41] = total damage Front mycar[2] = Normal mycar[13] = minor damage, center mycar[14] = minor damage, left mycar[15] = minor damage, right mycar[27] = major damage, center mycar[28] = major damage, left mycar[29] = major damage, right mycar[42] = total damage Front-left fender mycar[3] = Normal mycar[16] = minor damage mycar[30] = major damage mycar[43] = total damage Front-right fender mycar[4] = Normal mycar[17] = minor damage mycar[31] = major damage mycar[44] = total damage

Left side, door mycar[5] = Normal mycar[18] = minor damage mycar[32] = major damage mycar[45] = total damage Right side, door mycar[6] = Normal mycar[19] = minor damage mycar[33] = major damage mycar[46] = total damage Rear-left area, fender mycar[7] = Normal mycar[20] = minor damage mycar[34] = major damage mycar[47] = total damage Rear-right area, fender mycar[8] = Normal mycar[21] = minor damage mycar[35] = major damage mycar[48] = total damage Engine mycar[52] = Normal mycar[53] = damaged

Rear trunk mycar[9] = Normal mycar[22] = minor damage mycar[36] = major damage mycar[49] = total damage Rear mycar[10] = Normal mycar[23] = minor damage, center mycar[24] = minor damage, left mycar[25] = minor damage, right mycar[37] = major damage, center mycar[38] = major damage, left mycar[39] = major damage, right mycar[50] = total damage Roof and interior mycar[11] = Normal mycar[22] = minor damage mycar[40] = major damage mycar[51] = total damage

The advantage of adding damage modeling to a mod is that this way an individual, very detailed damage model can be added to each car type, with explicit damage textures and 3D damage. You can make parts of the car vanish on crash impact this way, too. It requires less CPU load, but probably somewhat more video RAM than vertex damage.

The disadvantage is the required amount of work to work out damage modeling - it's not just one car 3D model, it's 4, split up to a total of 50+ objects...and each has to be modeled and mapped... and if you're using explicit high/low res modeling, this will multiply the required amount of work even so...

Because of this, most mods (in any race sim) have neither any damage modeling nor much LOD modeling. Typically it's a sign for outstanding quality if damage and/or LOD modeling had been added to a mod. Even more, if that had been well done

[ Damage Modeling ]