Part 1 - Preparations

Written by: Daniel Sefton
Time: 2-4 hours
Difficulty: Intermediate/Advanced
Requirements: Blender 2.40+

Note: This tutorial was written over two years ago. Since then, the software and techniques may have changed slightly. For now, please forgive any minor inaccurate guidance.

Introduction

You may have seen the racetracks I created on my 3D Graphics page and wondered how I did it, this tutorial will tell you how. In this multi-part series you will learn how to model, texture, and add final touches like lighting for the best possible realism in a low-poly environment. I will try my best to explain everything in as much detail as possible, however, I would advise that if you are new to Blender read my beginner tutorials, or any other beginners guide so that you have a good grounding ready for the more complex methods and features discussed in this tutorial.

Designing the Track

Obviously before we get going, we need to make preparations. To start you need to think about the design of your track, and create a reference image to work from. The following track design is the one I will be using for this tutorial; if you use it or not is up to you, although it would be nice if you could work with your own. You can easily follow from another design.

As you can see the design is fairly basic, I’ve gone with a more natural approach - I’m thinking more towards a countryside setting for this one. It also contains just enough curves for good practice with the bezier tool, which will be explained in the next part of this tutorial.

Importing the Design

Once you have your design ready and saved as an image on your computer, we need to import it into Blender. Open the program and delete the default setup. We want the image to display in the background, so, select ‘View’ in the 3D window toolbar and click on ‘Background Image’. You will see a small box pop up. Activate the ‘Use Background Image’ button. It should now look like this:

If you are wondering what the various settings are: ‘Blend’ applies transparency to the image, for blending it into the background, ‘Size’ defines the size of the image, and the X/Y offsets are used to position the image.

Next, click the small folder icon to the right of the ‘Image’ text. You will then see the ‘open dialog box’ which I explained about in the interface tutorial. Find the location of the image you want to use and then press the ‘Select Image’ button in the top right. The image should now appear in the background. Then click the ‘X’ to close the box so that it doesn’t get in the way. The rule you need to remember with image backgrounds is that they only display in a fixed, orthographic view, not in perspective and only in predefined views such as ‘top’, ‘front’ etc.

Conclusion

That’s just about all we need to do for preparations, you can now move onto the next section of this series which will explain how to begin modeling your track.