Fourth Week of October

This week I did several sketches of existing cars as practice for designing my own concept artwork, I began to realise how cars are an extremely complex shape. While my sketches looked proportional and accurate, when I tried to transfer the same idea's to a concept sketch, the result was less than pleasing to the eye.

Realising that drawing a car of my own was going to be a significant challenege, which furthermore would be shadowed by the much larger challenge of subsequently modeling said design in 3D. I decided to spend some time completing 3DS Max tutorials and reading "3DS Max 2009" by Kelly Murdock.

While doing this I moved the flash game up in the schedule to begin work on, it occured to me that modeling the basic map in flash prior to attempting the unreal map gives me a much better idea of what I'm trying to achieve in Unreal.

I followed a racing game tutorial which gave clear instructions on the process of constructing a flash racing game to get the general system working. However because of the nature of my game I had to make several significant changes, the first being that the car itself remains stationary on the screen with the race course moving in the opposite direction you would have expected the car to go.

This means that the racecourse can be an almost indefinate size, this was important for me because to include the differant racing areas I would need a large stage to work with. The original tutorial showed how to make a stationary racecourse and a mobile vehicle.

A further alteration was to change alot of elements of the control of the car to be adjustable via a set of easy to understand variables, this is crucial for the physics of the vehical to significantly change when the transformations occur.