I'm working on a race track level in Max and I'm coming across some hurdles. The two methods of making a race track that I know of are:
Lofting - Making the road by lofting a path and shape. It's pretty limited because you can only have up to 100 path steps. If you're planning to have a decent sized track, this is nowhere near enough. Plus once the road is done, you have to create the environment (hills, fences etc) seperately to twist and turn the same way on each side of the track. One very big pro for this method though is that you can control the banking for corners..
Path deform - Make a long straight line of road and add a path deform modifyer with a spline of a track. This method I like much more because you have one straight road, put your environment on both sides of the road, slap on the path modifier, and the road/environment will twist, turn, rise, and fall as you've outlined in your spline of the track. However, one very big con with this method is that there's no way to control the way the corners bank, so some corners are pretty near unplayable (especially when they are like 45 degrees in angle, and it's banking off a cliff-edge. You'd almost have to crawl just to get past that turn without crashing into a barrier). It would be *ideal* if the path modifier had some banking options, but it doesn't.
If any one has any ideas, suggestions or better solutions, I'd very much appreciate it!
A technique I have used before is to make a spline for one edge of the road, then another spline for the opposite edge. Use something like the surface tools in max to fill in the road. You can also have additional splines along the sides of the track to create areas for grass etc... Remember you will need to have an equal number of vertices in the splines, and also have splines that go across the track to break it into quads. This would probably work alright for a proper racing circuit, however if you are aiming for a track that is more similar to something like NFS, you might want to use something different.
Major Clod, it'll probably be a bit of an effort to keep the road the exact same width on every corner and turn with that method. And yeh, it's going to be like a NFS track, with dips and hills - not going for a flat race track.
I could do it piece by piece, but that requires so much more work than the path deform modifier method, but I might have to do it that way if I can't find a better solution.
Polygon path extrude I haven't tried before. I'll muck about with it - but if I don't quite get it, can you explain it in a bit more detail? Thanks
I worked on a few dirt track racing games and although they were fairly simple in terms of track length I imagine the principal would be the same. We used the lofting method. We would make a series of cross sections for the different banks and corners and then a spline for the path of the track. By using the 'create shape from edge' function it was pretty easy to make other lofts to create the terrain around the track. Make sure you create mapping co-ordinates for it too in the surface parameters of the loft.
I suppose to you could just split the track up into equal sections to get over the path step limit?
I've decided to go the lofting way, but I've come across another snag, this time with texturing. I've applied different material id numbers to each segment of the spline that's used for the cross section. The outer segments have grass texture, inner has road etc.. I lofted that with a race track path. I'm using multi/sub object material for the track, with matching material id's.
The problem is for some reason only one texture is showing up for the whole loft, and for the love of god, I cannot figure out why..I convert the loft into an editable mesh, and I can see that all the faces have the same material id number, and not the material number I assigned them in the cross section before I lofted.
you can also do a polygon path extrude souri if you are using max 5 thats if your in editable poly mode........ and its easy to map as well as usual it generates mapping coordinates.
chris.. [:)]