go-kart model

An item box. Click for animation

[Blocked Image: http://marshmonkey.googlepages.com/boxshot.png]

delicious is a good adjective for what I am aiming for. I'm not using source, so far the stuff we have done has been in ogre3d. Next I think I'm going to to a snowy/winter level.

[Blocked Image: http://marshmonkey.googlepages.com/chillshot.jpg]

I like creating little dioramas with a starter set of textures and props before I go all out modeling the actual layout of the level. It helps me get a feel for the character of it before I commit too much, and it makes later construction more fun when you can texture and populate while you go. This course is going to be called "Chill Mountain" and a couple of the ideas I have for the course are:

river w/ stone bridge

cabins

wooden fences

road signs

trees, boulders

mountain tunnel

telephone poles

frozen lake

*edit* just noticed I forgot to scale the texture on the stone chimmney, don't mind that

nothing too pretty this time, spent most of today blocking out a base for chill mountain after figuring out the layout I wanted.

[Blocked Image: http://aycu40.webshots.com/image/22999/2004671644998947034_fs.jpg]

I am by no means an expert at making a track, this is only the 2nd and I am still learning the process. Some kind of time lapse video would be kind of neat though, I will try to remember to set something like that up from the start on the next track. I can at least describe the process I have been using so far.

1. decide theme

2. collect reference photos

3. create base textures

4. decide on a shape and what kind of features you want in the track

5. create the shape of the track in illustrator

6. using the illustrator image, trace the shape of the course in maya with the curve tool

7. push and pull the curve until happy with the heights and curves on the track

8. extrude a line along the curve to create the track shape

9. start pulling geometry off of the track piece to create the supporting landscape

10. I usually skip around to different pieces of the track and only start building it out if I can feel a glimpse of what it should look like in my head. I sometimes put large pieces of placeholder geometry to help arrange where I want large features.

11. Once the main landscape is done then I start creating and placing props, as well as tweak smoothing groups and uv maps.

12. After the final geometry is in place then it's on to lighting. I set up a rough lighting model in mental ray and tweak it until I am happy.

13. I bake the lighting into the vertexes of the level

14. I go through the level bit by bit, refining the lighting with the vertex paint tool, removing hard edges and adding in key lighting.

Thats the basic process, there are a couple of things I would like to do differently on the next track however. There are a lot of fun mario kart tracks that have almost no curving track geometry and are just made up up regular geometry or objects (bowsers castle, tick tock clock, etc.) I would like to do something like that where it's not a track shape from start to finish.