Simbin Art Test

[Mr-Brett]

For those that may not know, Simbin seem to be one of the few developers that have a publicly available art test (can be found here).

I'm doing the track one at the moment although I may do the scenery one afterwards. I've just started and I've got the basic layout down:

(Slightly modified) layout from the art test:


My mesh so far:


I've worked on a driving game but the terrain and roads were mainly done when I started so I've not done this before, also it wasn't track based. So any input would be welcome.

[mmcleo11]

What are the requiremnets/restrictions that come with it?

Looks straight forward enough. A tileable texture on road/gravel/grass and I'd bake down the curb, guardrails, tyre walls and anything else that has details.

[Mr-Brett]

It's pretty open:

As a track layout artist you should be a skilled modeler and have a keen eye for overall important detail around a large track stretching. There is a huge amount of details that make up the racing track so including and pinpointing things that are important for the overall feel is a necessary skill.

Task: We want you to finish a small fictional trackpiece by modeling and to your abilities texture what (track\Layout\track_layout.jpg) depicts. Remember to get texture transistions between surfaces as natural as possible and keep the mesh solid whenever possible. Working with xrefs or instances when duplicating/placing objects is prefered.
Standard max shader techniques with diffuse texture(s) is enough.

[thekillermiller]

I would recommend making your track a separate mesh and stitching it in later. You will save yourself a lot of headache by making your track with a uniform number of spans for easier UV'ing. Then optimizing it after the fact.

What program are you using to model?

Here is a tut for max, I'm sure there are similar out there for maya if you look for them.

[Mr-Brett]

Thanks thekillermiller, that's a really useful tutorial and I'm using Max.

[Mr-Brett]

I've been working on a tyre asset for the tyre walls. It's going ok but my only concern is the curving of the tread on the edges, it's happening because of the projection but I can't think of any way to fix it other than manually in texture which would be practically impossible to get right for multiple textures.

[mmcleo11]

That bending stuff is caused due to the lack of geo in your low poly. I'd suggest adding in some more loops to maintain a better round shape and your bake will come out with less bends.

Then once you have done the baking and go to construct the tyre walls start optimising the object. I'm assuming it'll be comprised of stacked tyres so just delete faces that will not be visible and merge edges where possible.

[Mr-Brett]

I was hoping there would be some trick that didn't involve adding more polys but I'll just have to accept it

[mmcleo11]

Is this 120 tris or polygons?

Do you have a budget?

[Mr-Brett]

Tris, I have a bit of a habit of calling them polys. No budget specified:

We will not explain exactly how you should acheive a good result but the usual rules of any realtime environment applies. Keep the modeling clean and smart, to the point and show your skill!.

This one is 192 tris: