This studio, we were tasked with creating a driving game that could be played with our hands using some kind of motion controller. We started brainstorming about what we would want to accomplish, how we would do it, and who would do what. I was tasked with creating the track, and maniupulating an already created car so that we could animate certain components. I started working on the car first since I thought it would be much easier. All I had to do was ungroup, explode and export selected parts of the car to be animated. Turns out that it wasn't that simple. We would have to export each part on it's own plane, but with the rest of the car there it became difficult to find an origin point of a selected part. On one perspective, we would be dead center on the object, but on another, we might be somewhere else. We would have to find the correct origin point for the wheels, steering wheel, or gear shift because it would have to rotate around a certain point to look realistic. Like we experienced, if I exported the steering wheel with the center slightly off, it would rotate lopsided and look unrealistic. Same went with the wheels. When we tested the car the wheels would not rotate on the correct axis. Instead it looked like something out of James Bond. I didn't get it figured out before the end of the project, but it is something I look forward to completeing.

The track was a big mess. I knew how I wanted it to be shaped, but I just didn't know how to actually do it. I was able to get the overall shape down, but I wasn't able to use T-splines to shape the track how I wanted it. The best I could do was use the Loft tool to create downward turns and jumps. It turns out that when we tried to export the Rhino file into Unity, using the correct format, all of the turns I created using the Loft tool disappeared. I re-exported, tried to mirror the turn and mirror it back over, create less polygons, more polygons, everything. Eventually I had to just stop and create an entirely new track that would stay flat since Rhino and Unity wouldn't cooperate.

I also added a lot of aesthetic features to the track to make it more appealing. I added a tunnel around a wide turn, as well as pylons like you would see on a rollercoaster so that the track wouldn't look like it was just hovering over the ground. And since I had some free time, I added a Hollywood style sign that read "NuVu Studio" to the top of a central mountain. 

My job was almost done, all I had to do was add the textures, and that is when more problems arose. We simply could not add the correct textures to make it look like a good two lane highway. We tried .png, .jpg, .psd and it just wouldn't show up on the track correctly. I attempted to overlay it on Rhino, but when exported to Unity, it would just disappear like the lofted turns. After lots of attempts, just like with the lofted turns, we had to give up and add a Tron style texture last minute.