It's a Saturday night, I've had a few beers, I wanted to work on something, so I threw together this test of a race track. The idea is pretty simple: you're a Hotwheels car, not an actual car. Idk what I'll do with this or how much I'll go with it, but I thought the super quick test models I threw together looked pretty cool, so I figured I'd show it to ya'll. Enjoy. It's even unlisted, so this is an exclusive sneak peak Excuse my disgusting driving. I like to pretend I'm good...
I think this could turn out pretty well as a Hot Wheels map. Maybe not as small as Mossy Dell, but still there's a lot of potential to be had here. Maybe some higher banking in the corners, and a bit of color here and there.
I'll probably be going through and adding some textures to it. At the moment, I just put together a fast blockout to see where the problems where and what was good/what wasn't. Texturing isn't a fast process, so I didn't want to get stuck in the details of doing that and end up creating something that isn't fun to play... I agree it needs higher banking. My thought was to have a bit of a raceway style vibe with some fast corners and some slower corners, but it doesn't flow very well. I'll have to mess around with the track layout to find something that works better.
Spent some time today trying out the walls and floor. It'll be an interesting challenge to texture everything... Stuff with graphics on it will be hard to achieve. Need to take a look at some reference games to see how they do it. If anyone knows some relatively modern games were you play as a miniature character, I'd love to take a look at them. Also tried out some lighting really quick to see what the problems would be. Found going for a late night play session in the closet looked pretty cool and helped solve problems with shadows from the overhead light.
I have experimented with things like this. They never came to anything worth uploading though. I look forward to seeing your progress, it looks fun
It's a fun little challenge and makes you rethink the way you create stuff. I've always love miniature stuff and the perspective is something that games are good at doing. it's also a weird exercise in that frame of reference stuff from high school physics .-. I know that my car isn't actually that size, but because the only stuff relevant to the size is the walls and track, my brain thinks it is. It's super cool in my opinion.
Created a really fast wooden blocks set to help populate the scene. I think I might need to add a few more, but it's super easy to do, so I'll only do it if I'm missing a piece. Tried moving the track outside instead of inside. Had some friends that gave feedback saying they liked the shadows of the first video i posted more and I kinda agree. the sun definitely produces the best shadows but this is also probably a result of not having the props for the track. I'll have to mess around with it. I think i'll put together another rough blockout of props and such to see how it looks with that.
The blocks look good, but it looks like the smoothed beveled edges are breaking the shading. If you're using Blender, there are some addons that allow you to edit normal strength (explanation on what that means: https://polycount.com/discussion/154664/a-short-explanation-about-custom-vertex-normals-tutorial). YAVNE is a good one, but I don't think it works with more recent Blender versions. I might also make the arch a bit smoother. This isn't a big level, so you can afford more polys on the curve. And finally, I would double-check the scale of the surrounding scenery. If the BeamNG cars are about the scale of Micro Machines, the planks on that deck should be roughly as wide as one and a half Wentwards are long. If we're talking Hotwheels/Matchbox scale, that Wentward should overhang the plank by a good margin. It looks like a fun track. Can't wait to see more!
You're totally right about the normals. I'll need to revisit the blocks in the future and fix that up. I was thinking of using weighted normals on them. Good tip on the scale. It's something I've been struggling with because accurate scale to a Hotwheels car is awful to drive, so it needs to be something that is smaller than a Hotwheels car. I'll grab the wentworth model and see about fixing it up! I need to do a bit of math to figure out what the scale should be proper and just use dimensions .-. I think the best way would be to set up blender so that the dimensions for the large objects use their actual dimensions. A alot of really interesting challenges with this project and I'm learning alot
Moved the track back inside because I didn't like the outside and fixed the scale for everything. Now the track is approximately the right size, the cars are about the size of micro machines, and the furniture and room are all right. Current size is 3mx3m relative to the player. In Blender it's only 73mx73m XD
