Introduction

We are now moving onto the second part of the modeling section. We will now be converting the curves to a solid mesh, creating the landmass and optimizing the model to run smoothly in-game.

Converting to mesh

To start off we need to convert this track from curve to mesh form. Just as a backup or if anything goes horribly wrong - duplicate the track (SHIFT+D), scale the copy down and move it out of the way. To convert your curves, all you need to do is select the track, press ALT+C and select ‘Convert Curve to - Mesh’. Next, select the solid shading type in the 3D window header:

You should now see a grey shading of the track and when you switch to edit mode you will see a solid wireframe of the mesh:

Mesh cleaning

Now that we have the track converted we can start to fix the track up in a lot more detail. As you can see if you look carefully there are a lot of purple dots, these are just simply the vertices of the mesh and for now we will be adjusting these.

Zoom right into where you see a glitch in the track like overlapping, all you need to do to fix it is select and move the vertices in that area until you are happy it looks ok, they turn yellow when active. If by any chance the vertices are hidden under the mesh (due to overlapping) you can switch to wireframe mode (Z) and you will be able to see all the ones behind. Below is an example of a quick ‘before and after’ of one of the corners:

Once you have finished cleaning up all the minor glitches I will show you how to close up the gap in the road. To do this you need to select the vertices/edges you want to close (either a tri or quad shape), and then press ‘F’. Once you have done that it may look a bit strange, again just fiddle about with the vertices until you are happy the shape blends in:

You can now use this technique to remove poly’s as well for the straight parts where a large amount of is not needed. Just be careful you don’t remove too many around the major elevation points. Select the vertices you wish to remove, then press DELETE on your keyboard and press ‘Erase - Vertices’ and join the two remaining sides:

Next it is time to begin closing up the track to add a bit of ‘landmass’. There are several techniques for doing this, but I am going to show you my methods. This is probably the longest and most tedious job in track building but it is worth it. To begin, just start filling the smaller enclosures as they will only require single face filling. Again all you need to do is select the vertices you wish to close (3 or 4) and press ‘F’.

For the larger enclosures you need to use a special method which ’splits’ the poly’s for easy filling. First of all you need to select the vertices you wish to perform this method on (you can only do this to each enclosure individually) then press ‘E’. A popup should appear, select ‘Extrude - Only Edges’ and then press ‘S’ to size the extrusion inwards.

After you have done that you will notice that the area around the extrusion looks a bit ‘busy’ and quite difficult to close. We need to split the vertices into tri’s, delete every second vertex and begin to fill the poly’s as shown below:

Another method of filling if a clean quad doesn’t fit is to fill triangles around a point. All you need to do is extrude a single vertex to the center of the extrusion area and begin to fill triangles around it, and it should end up like this:

You can continue using the same method throughout the entire track, extruding, splitting and filling. Once you have finished, it should look something like:

That just took me around 30 minutes, so it’s not my cleanest of modeling but this is what you should be aiming for, and as you can see I have used the same methods as I mentioned all the way around the track. It may take some time but eventually you will become faster and produce a much better poly flow. Practice makes perfect!

Finally as you may have gathered, the outside also needs closing. Again, use the same splitting method as mentioned previously, until you have extruded it outwards multiple times. Make sure you pull it outwards quite far and elevating higher each time - you don’t want to see over the edge of the track! Here is what my model looks like with a completed mesh. I used the splitting method multiple times when extruding outwards. Remember that the further away from the track, the lower the poly count:

Conclusion

Once you have perfected your mesh and adjusted the elevation, the modeling of your track is complete! I know it looks dull, which is why in the next part we will learn how to add some textures.