I am loving this , have been wanting to learn to do this myself if I can help let me know
The real quick breakdown of how I did it:
1) In Blender 2.8 (my 3d program of choice) make a body, windows, tires, and chassis/interior. Then I use 3D Coat (but you can use Blender) to unwrap and create basic UV's
2) Exported my models as OBJ files to 3ds max 8 which has the PAS plugin.
3. Following the video from Burnout make sure the Unit measurements in 3ds max are in meters
4) Make sure the car and models are in the center of the grid, then if you need to clean up the normals use smoothing groups (reset X form on every model as well)
5) After tires are positioned copy them to the center of the grid and rotate by 90 degrees
6) Name each car part to your corresponding car part (example windows you would call the obj 'window' and the body 'body' or 'body0' (if making 4 makes
7) Create a box around the entire car and tires (bounding box) and called is 'bbox'
8) Create the 4 textures shaders in the material editor (window, body, chassis, tires) In Burnouts vid he shows the correct specular and gloss levels to set, once they are made group the textures in a sub group and assign each models material # to the corresponding texture # (for example body is 1 set materiel ID to 1) The textures you can just use the default BMP cup ones until you make your own
9) Export the scene as a PAS
10) As shown in Burnouts video use the default make_a.psg script open it up add in your model names and stuff for the exterior section along with the coordinates for the wheel position of the X. Y. and Z positions
11) Using a created bat file run the make a 3do tool which will take your psg and PAS model files and spit out a make_a.3do
12) In the psg script then make the output file to be make_a_ui (UI is what you see in the player info and opponent manager section)
And thats pretty much the basics. You just have a new series folder that is named to your series and have the cup DAT file extracted and copy over with your custom make_a 3do files along with any custom mips if you replace the textures. As far as tools go you get pretty much everything from Burnout's links in the video description and you own image editing/3d model tool. The only big thing is 3ds max 8 or older that works with the plugin
Cosmin invited me to his discord and there are some long videos in there where he shows things like damage and LOD's. I don't want to post those without permission since its a invite community though.