Monday, September 20, 2010

Busy weekend for track building

Lately, I've been obsessed with getting the basics of the town and surrounding landscape roughed out. While doing so, i've been building some sneaky extra chunks of track that will build the backside track to Hicky's Ridge. It'll also allow me to build out some cool track variants once i've got the full track done.

Here are a few screens of where the weekend got me. They're scratchy shots out of the track builder, but they show how far i've been pushing things. These shots show the area where the end of Tornado Flats meets with Hicky's Ridge. I've been building out the basics of the town that starts right there as well as a newly designed backside to Hicky's that will allow me to make it all a circuit. All that's in these screens:







Monday, September 13, 2010

First shortcut

Spent some hours with beer and the track this weekend. I've got the basics layed out to the start of the first shortcut on Hicky's and i'm picking up speed. Hopefully i can get to the end of town by next weekend - we'll see.

Here's a screen from the track builder:

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Chugging along

As soon as i decided to get back to building Skoggit, i got sidetracked by trying to export the current track as DX files. That's an option in the track builder that allows you to export in a format (DX) that can be opened in 3DSimed and then converted to a 3D Studio Max format. From there, the track could be properly polished and some nice work on the terrain could be done - not that i'm going to take the time out to figure all that out now, but i just wanted to see if i could start the process. Sadly, the export throws a fatal error almost as soon as it starts and i haven't been able to get beyond it. I finally gave up entirely and started back into working on the track.

When i first started into the Hicky's Ridge portion of the track, i figured out that the texture blending tool does actually work and that i could make the terrain look a lot better than it does now. Or maybe i should just wait and work it over in Max... i'll figure it out later.

After i was finished being distracted with all that, i finally got back to actually building stuff. I've come to realize, now that i've been looking at it all for awhile - i'm  going to have to build the front side of the track and the back side of the track in tandem. They get extremely close to each other in one area and it's a chance to do some cool stuff with the terrain and objects.

So, i tweaked some of the front side of the track for a couple days and then started in on Hicky's Ridge. I've got the gas station at the start of it all mostly built; I just need to find some gas pump models. There's a gas station model i use at the beginning of the track that i was hoping would fit right in this spot too, but no dice. So i'm piecing one together with the wall tool.

Anyway - i'm hoping to start making solid progress again and stop fiddling with other crap. We'll see. In the meantime, here are some screenshots out of the track builder: