Papercraft quest begins! Making Ferrari F14T!

I want to try out something different. I was always interested in origami and other papery things. I did a lot of Origami in my childhood which was fun. Now I want to make some papercraft! Combining my 3ds max knowledge I want to turn a 3d model into a tangible product. I never did something before. I mean I neved did papercraft before, just origami.

I started to work on my model and I started to study the program called Pepakura Designer. It's a program that can turn 3d models to papercraft templates. Very effective and easy to use. But I have no idea, what kind of paper will I need, how to glue the parts, how to print the parts on a stronger paper. Hopefully, I'll get help. Until that, let's see the model. Here is the current progress (the modelling is almost finished):

F14T - the beginning. Looks like a wierd vacuum cleaner... or a fly's head... fly's head? Really?

In Pepakura Designer

Finally, tyre texture!

Accuracy won't be perfect. I don't have perfect, good resolution reference images, and most of them are photos with perspective distortion, they are not 2D blueprints.

Double dilemma! Realism or fun? More details or simpler graphics?

As the title says. Double dilemma. What should I do? Make a game which is closer to realistic in term of physics or make it simpler but easier to play. Also what about the graphics? I tried out different approaches for making it nice and cartoonish, but which method is the best? Let's find it out!

New physics test!

Physics are getting better and better, but it's still very far from my expectations. I still think my tests were successful, however I'll probably rewrite the code that controls traction. As you can see in the video, the traction is low at low speeds and the car slips easily, but I need more slip. Actually it's pretty stable even when I push the pedal to the metal. A real world car like this would spin immediately in this situation from standing position.

Back from holiday...

I am back from a great holiday, it's time to get back to work on the project... and some other things. But let's talk about the project only. I have a car, a track in progress and a playable private apk file with configurable touch and tilt controls.

What should I improve? Well, the physics are pretty simple now, I need to program the tyre physics into a way more realistic one. Well, by realistic I mean still arcade, but more believable. Once I made burnouts, but it was poorly programmed, I need to upgrade it. It'll be good on a mobile device. Tapping the accelerator will be a good way to keep the car stable without spinning out in a slow corner. Maybe I'll use animation curves for setting up the tyre friction for different situations. Also I am thinking to make an indicatior that shows how much the pedals are pressed over the touch area. So the player could "feel" the pedals more. Of course it would be optional, but a helpful thing.

Maybe I won't release more public webplayer demo, because the controls are not really good of keyboard. Or if I will, I have to program a better keyboard control with speed sensitive turning like rFactor has.

That's all for today, I am planning to make a great progress in the following week.

Working on the background...

I don't usually share only one picture, but when I do, it shows some improvement in graphics.

Hand-drawn background just made overall look better.

Trigger based occlusion culling

Upgraded trigger based occlusion culling script is almost done. Good alternative to Unity Pro's Umbra Occlusion Culling system.

It works, just it needs more testing. It works pretty well using any cameras on the scene. It needs some manual work, setting up the trigger. select the game objects to hide, but now, it works with children too, so it's not needed to put all the objects one-by-one if they are parented. So the workflow is way faster than before. Combined with the basic frustum culling, it is a pretty good way to keep the triangle / draw call count low.

Also clever level design is important too. Placing objects that can cover other things can help a lot with the combination of this script.

Occluders

The pit lane is not ready yet on the current track I am creating, but garages and other buildings will be really good to cover a lot of other things.

Two of the tribunes and some trees are hidden as they are not needed to be visible.

It's that simple. Make a game object with trigger collider, place the culling script, set it to Occluder layer and it should work. Main camera needs an other object with kinematic rigidbody, which copies the camera position and when that enters the occluder, it'll hide the given game objects or game objects' children. Easy to setup and works pretty well. just good positioning of the occluder is important.

Low-poly tribune with fans

Tribune design for old school Formula 1 style racing game for Android. I overall, it currently has 6 textures including all ad boards and fans. Stairs are flat, and the whole object consists of 570 triangles. I made a low poly man character in 3ds max which is less than 500 triangles. I made different textures and poses for it, and rendered as texture. I'll make more with different cloth style also I'll need female fans too! 

Facebook - Racing game photo album

I made some little progress on the racing game project for Android. Here is the current screenshot album on Facebook. For more, please like my Facebook page!

Post by Adam Pajor's Workshop.