More modelling

Spent a lot of last night making the track but blender then crashes after an hour and I lost all my work (teaches me not to save my work often). After starting again from scratch, I made the track by using one plane for the grass, and another for the mountains. The mountain plane was subdivided around 5 times, and one of the edges was pulled downwards to form a cliff-face.

The road itself was just another plane, which was continuously extruded into the shape of the track (using the earlier design as a background image for reference). To make the valley, I selected all of vertices of the track and extruded them upwards to form the track, but with a thickness. Then using boolean intersect, I selected the mountain plane and then the track and removed the difference. I then went ahead and deleted the extrusion of the track again so it was once again a flat plane.

From doing some digging around on the internet for some creative common models I can use, I came across a nice set of pine tree models, complete with textures at the site below.

http://www.sharecg.com/v/38106/3D-Model/3-pines-versions?division_id=11

Since these were lightwave objects, then first needed to be imported into the blend project. The textures were attached and then the models werw placed into the scene. Something I did notice however was that the blender scene took a lot longer to render with the trees, which brings up my concern into how the framerate will handle once I import the track into the Unity engine. The track so far can be seen below.

Change of engine

After reasearching different implementation methods, I have decided to change the engine from XNA GameStudio to Unity. The main reason on this decision is that in order to implement all the things I need, I would need a program that would provide alot of functions out of the box, such as rendering objects and handling variables. By switching the engine to unity, the development time would be cut majorly as I would not have to worry about programming an engine myself and could spend more time doing the development that mattered more.

Another good thing about unity is that it can handle .blend files directly without having to convert my models into another format first, its just a case of importing and dropping straight into the scene. The fact that unity can also take game projects and compile into an exectional file is also an added bonus, as well as the reduction on the amount of programming needed to be done.

Dean.

Modelling Update 2

At the moment, I'm pretty close to finishing off the dune buggy model. I managed to save some time by taking most of the components such as the bars and side panels, duplicating them and mirroring them to form the other side of the dune buggy.


Although I would like to put more time into the dune buggy (such as some nice looking tyres), I need to start modelling the track to keep on scedule. I have also not put any suspension on the dune buggy yet as I do not know how the unity engine will manipulate the wheel movement (such as the wheels moving up and down but the suspension remaining stationary).

For the track, I am basign it off the design I made earlier, where half of the track is in open plains/woodland and the other half in a valley where the player also drives through a tunnel.

Modelling Update

Just an update on how my modelling is progressing. Modelling the dune buggy is relatively easy, but there are problems when trying to model parts of the dune buggy that are not shown in the background images. Another problem is that there is not a background image that shows the dune buggy from above or below, which makes it difficult to get the rotation of some shapes correct.

The dune buggy is pretty much made by building the main chassis piece by piece from prefabs. The metal bars are made from extruding circles/cylinders using both background images to get an idea of where they should be placed. The metal panes were made by placing vertices on their corresponding places of the background image, and filling them in to form a plane using a fill.

The problem with using a background image as a viewpoint however is that the photographs of the dune buggy are taken from a perspective viewpoint, in comparison to the orthographic viewpoint in which I am viewing the background images from. This causes problems since I have to take depth into account when sorting out the placement of some components. The model so far can be seen below.

Start of the Modelling

There are two main things that I will need to model for my game, the Dune Buggy racing car and the track that they will race on. I am using blender to model both (since I know how to use blender more than other alternatives) and will import them into Unity when they're done.

Befor I began to model the Dune Buggy, I first needed some reference photos so that I could get the model as close as possible to the actual thing. What I needed were some perspective shots of the front, rear, top of the Dune buggy so that the scale would be constant throughout. In the end, I found some nice images from the website

http://www.emrockatv.com/product_info.php?products_id=612

The final images I have imported into unity (and set as a background image) are included below.

Progress

Now that all the designs have been done, I will start start to look on how to implement these ideas into a working design. I am looking into the XNA Game Studio for the core programming of the game, Blender for the models and Audacity for editing audio.

My reason for using these programmes are that I have used them before, and am relatively comfortable with the interfaces. The next stage will be to try and find reference pictures for the dune buggy model, as well as try and find any tutorials on making a 3D Racer in XNA.

A bit behind scedule at the moment (since I made a mistake on my timetable which caused me to take an extra module in the first semester) but will try to catch up.