Second Week of April

This week I completed work on the off road section, decorating it with static meshes and some plant life to make it look a little more wild and exciting.

Originally I intended to leave it pretty empty, however rather than looking barren and inhospitable, it just looked half-finished and boring. So I spiced it up with some mostly leafless trees and ferns etc. Stuff that would only grow in harsh conditions.

First Week of April

This week I made a start on the off road section of the race course, an area which until now has been left untouched.

Originally I planned to have the track marked out with rocks and pebbles and other such natural debris, unfortunatley this proved to be very time consuming, graphically intense and made the boundaries of the track very undefined and obscure.

I used 3DS max to create a basic fence, the type which would be used simply to mark off an area rather than try to enclose anything.

The basic structure is formed by two uprights and a red and white tape connecting them, this has been used to frame the entire off road section to show where the vehicles should go.

Fourth Week of March

This week I began work on decorating the track section of the race course to make it look more realistic, the same way I did with the waterborne section not long ago.

I began by adding kerbs to the corners and sandtraps on the outer extreme of each corner.

Later I added tyre walls around the sand traps.

Third Week of March

This week I finally finished the cambered corner, this is the last planned model to be created for the map, but having got the hang of it now there is a chance I will add a few more if time permits.

I solved the problem of relative axis changing throughout the corner by building it 1 dimension at a time. Firstly I built only a normal flat corner, once this was complete I could forget about the X axis and work on the Z axis.

I raised the far edge up in the centre by an amount that would produce a cross-section angle of 30 degrees, and then gradually reduced it as the corner went both ways to meet the ground before the straight.

Once this was complete I finally worked on the Y axis and stretched the track away from the corner to make the steepest part of the ramp also the widest.

The final result is exactly how I wanted it and I'm very pleased with how it looks in the game.

Second Week of March

This week I began work on the cambered corner for the re-entry into the final straight, however I continue to have difficulty making it look right, I have been unable to find a reliable way to rapidly extrapolate the shape, so I am left with individually arranging each section using a set incremental value in the hopes that it will produce the correct shape, however so far I have had continued trouble by the slowly altering relative co-ordinates.

The fact that X co-ordinates slowly give way to Y co-ordinates as we turn the corner, the X and Y axis are relative only to the global scene and not to each individual piece.

Here you can see an attempt which began well but quickly became too wide and didn't turn sharp enough.

First Week of March

This week I began remaking the stadium in 3ds max. While the original version was graphically impressive and high detailed it was constructed in a way that was not compatable with Unreal. The model COULD be imported into unreal but could not be textured correctly unless I had a premade UVW texture made from 3ds max, which isn't possible unless you construct the entire model from only one poly which has been manipulated and extruded to make the exact shape required.

This took several attempts to get right because although it looks like a simpler overall shape than the ramp, it is in-fact much more complicated to produce.