i've just realized that an engine that would really make the pigeon a torquey weapon is something like the 1.0L ecoboost i3. 150 ft/lbs from under 2,000rpm to around 5,000rpm, and more power than the pigeon would ever need! a v8 may be too much for it lol. especially without 4x4/3x3.
Fixed the horrible stretching from the wheel UV map, and did some work on a new tire model. Tire has plenty of stuff to be cleaned up, UV map and a stretched out version is also missing, but it looks surprisingly good with just the default tire material.
Probably a bit late to be posting these now that the mod is out, but here are some development snapshots of Lakeside Raceway's terrain and roads: First, here is the basic Lidar terrain surface imported as .fbx from CloudCompare: The road surfaces from the raw Lidar scan are a bit too noisy to be drivable (although the grass and dirt has a perfect amount of bumpiness) so I need to lay down a smooth road base mesh which will be rendered into the heightmap. I use a shrinkwrap modifier to project it onto the terrain level, and then a subsurf modifier and a smooth modifier to control the amount of smoothing (we don't want the road to be perfectly smooth, after all). Now that the road base is established I can add the real road mesh which will appear in the game. This gets shrinkwrapped (via modifier) onto the road base mesh, with a vertical offset of 3cm to give the edge of the asphalt a realistic height. As you can see in the image below it still clips through the raw terrain surface in a few places, but this doesn't matter since that part of the heightmap will be replaced with the smoothed out road base. I've aligned vertical imagery compiled from Google Maps to match the scale of the Lidar scan, and use it as a reference to place roads, buildings and other features. That's all for now, but feel free to let me know if you'd like to see more development steps for this project