Building a new world

Hello readers!

I had a few days off this week so I don't have much to tell about time management game's progress. Instead I want to talk about the process we used creating the Burnin Rubber 4 environments a while ago.

The first step to take is to create a so called 'mockup' of the environment or 'world'. This stage is very important, mistakes made here are hard to fix later on. The city mockup of Burnin Rubber 4 was done by creating a large flat plane with a basic roadmap texture on top. Basic box shapes were added to define some architecture and buildings. Simultaneously the environment was tested by driving through the mockup world. This gives a rough idea of what the distances are and what size of world we're dealing with.

For Burnin Rubber 4 it was very important that the road mesh was perfect. By road mesh I mean everything that has to do with the 'floor' or ground the player is driving on. It can be a real pain to create all those roads, there are more than you'd think there are. I created a so called 'construction set' to make this process quicker and more enjoyable as well.

These pieces all 'tile' with each other. Building the roads with these pre defined meshes saves a lot of time. And I really mean a LOT! Too often I see people trying to create something similar by creating such roads poly by poly. I agree it works, but it is really time consuming. Even if you're done with the modelling work you still have to do the unwrapping. Bye bye time...

The process of building environments or art assets in general using this technique is called modular modelling / modular design.

--Joep