Detail: Terrain and Environment

Detail: Terrain and Environment

Sam Rae Chu

Our initial idea was to make a terrain with mountains and water and a terrain park that you can do crazy tricks on. As usual we shot too high.

My group thought that it would be cool if there was no track and it was all just terrain. This was really hard because it is almost impossible to make a ramp with just being able to raise and erase the land, and we really wanted people to be able to get down to the ground. I had also started off thinking that the plateaus we made in unity that created almost a track shape would actually be the track, this way we would not actually have to make a track. Unfortunately if we did this, it would not look like a racing game, it would more look like a nice car driving around in the middle of nowhere. Another reason why we decided to erase the idea of the only plateau because we decided it did not look that real, we wanted it to look like a real place, so we decided to use some plateaus but also have mountains.

We had a ton of problems with the water, for instance when we exported the environment to the cloud it did not export it completely and the water never fully exported. When we opened it on my computer it was invisible and so was the terrain park. We decided to cut the terrain park idea because it was too much work and proceeded to fix the water, because that was the easier more essential fix. We figured out that it was the texture it was missing and the scale of the water was completely off, so we just had to use another water texture, and scale it to a huge size.

This was a minor problem compared to the track. Since we decided to make a custom track we first thought of modeling the track around the terrain, which turned out to be a time wasting idea. So then we went on to take the track that Nathaniel had made and fit it around the terrain, which turned out to be really easy, because all we had to do was add a few mountains under the track and it was done.. We later decided to make a new track that had a ramp down to the ground, and everything, but we could never export it from Rhino just right, so it looked like some parts of the track were always missing. This took us two days to figure out. To fix this problem Nathaniel had to build a whole different track, and he never got around to fitting the ramp down to the ground in.

Another problem we had with the track is the mesh colliders because there are so many pieces of the track so if we were to add colliders onto every single piece it lags the computer a lot. Eventually we figured this problem out,

Another big problem we had was the physics, for the first couple of days when we drove our car we always went through the terrain. We figured out that it was because of the mesh colliders that were on the terrain and wheels of the car were not right. But we also had a problem with the physics for gravity. Whenever the car hit a bump it went up and started to fly, which was really weird. Eventually it came down, but it took a while. We could never figure out how to fix this, but we definitely helped it by making the car have more mass, and making making it so gravity pulled down with more force.