Track Model Progress

Some more work on the roller coaster track has been made in Maya. It was made continuous by connecting all the separate models. This created the following model.

It looked ok, but not perfect. As one can see in the image, the track seems a bit crooked or jagged. This happened because the track piece we used was too long on its own. Manually fixing the crookedness would take a very long time, therefore a smaller piece was created which only was big enough to have one pair of beams going between the three cylinder shapes.

Using this new piece, a new track was created through another animation snapshot. Then the track was made continuous by connecting the pieces with curved "bridges". The track now no longer has any gaps and looks much smoother.

Further Cart model Progress

Further work has been done on the cart model in Maya. The handlebars for each row in the cart was made with a simple cylinder form that makes up the soft foam grip, connected to a curved pipe that was created from a CV curve. The pipe was modified to fit well into the model and to make sure that the handlebar is placed a reasonable distance from the seats. 

The handlebar for the cart

The seats were created from two cube primitives, one for the horizontal seat area (seen in green in the figure) and one for the back of the seat (seen in white in the figure). Subdivisions were first added to the cubes in order to modify the basic shape as we wanted and then the Smooth functionality in Maya were used on the low polygon count model to add even more divisions to the model, making the edges and corners look smooth.

The basic polygon model for the seats in the cart, together with a smooth version of the same model.

Two rows of two seats each, four in total, were added to the cart. We decided to place the front handlebar on the inside of the cart (in contrast to the cart template shown in the first blog-post). This is the current design and progress on the cart model.

Current cart model

The next part of the cart is to create the the undercarriage and frame that will connect the card to the track.

Progress in Maya

As we have finalized the design of the rail segment and determined the foundation of the cart, we have started to implement the models in Maya.

The rail system in its entirety was created with an animation around a CV curve, where the included meshes are created by utilizing animation snapshots. All the segments will be properly combined at a later stage, to achieve a continuous roller coaster track, which can later be exported and used in Unity.

Main foundation of the rail tracks

The cart image found on the internet was imported into Maya and used as a template to work with when we created our cart model. The cart model's current stage can be seen below, as well as the rail tracks.

Current cart (rough model)

Initial track modelling and cart design

Today's focus has been shifted towards modelling the main tracks. We have tried various implementations of sub-track constructions that could be considered to be interesting from a roller coaster rider's perspective. The underlying purpose with this is to include constructions of the tracks that makes the gravitation and main force more challenging to implement; such constructions could be an elevation in the track or loops. The rails of the main track design is based on a real existing roller coaster, 'Jetline', which could be found in the Gröna Lund amusement park here in Stockholm. We believe that this rail design would suffice for our roller coaster implementation.

As for the roller coaster cart itself, we decided early on to base the cart design on a cart existing in reality. We could of course design our own cart from scratch but it does not really give our modelling process any goals to achieve; when is the cart design considered to be done? To help with this, we found a real cart model to utilize as a founding template (see image down below). The image is of high quality and the cart design is complex enough for this project.

Our cart design template. (source: http://www.coastergallery.com/2009/LaR60.html)

Rails of the 'Jetline' roller coaster, found in Gröna Lund, Stockholm. (source: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7449/15948648393_96503efc2a_b.jpg)