Final Textures

Now that we have properly mapped UV properties for all of the cart components it was time to create some neat textures for the carts. In lack of other ideas, I chose to decorate our carts with one of the most popular (and oldest) Internet memes: Nyan Cat.

Nyan Cat!

When the UV mappings are finalized within Maya you can choose to export the mappings to a PSD map, which makes it possible to create textures with proper dimensions utilizing Photoshop.
In order to create a seamless texture, it is important to fit the texture images into the UV maps by using some of Photoshop's available manipulator tools, such as perspective and skew.

Down below are some of the most prominent textures created:

Textures for the back carts

Textures for the front cart

 And some textures for the smaller components of the carts can be found below:

Textures for the front cart magnets

Textures for the cart wheels, created by using a seamless plastic-like material

And here is what it looks like when all the external textures are applied in Unity:

External textures of the cart

Cart UV Updates

A UV mapping has been created for the shell of the front cart. The layout of the UV mapping for the back cart was updated as well to be more similar to the front cart's mapping.

The UV mapping for the front cart shell.

The new UV mapping for the back cart

New Track

A new track was created to make a more exciting roller coaster. The track was created by extruding the three rails along a curve. The supports between the rails were added afterward, using an animation snapshot (like the original technique we used) along the same curve.

The new roller coaster model, imported in Unity.

The track was imported into Unity and the carts were added to see how they would move along the new track. This did not work very well, however, as the carts failed to gain any momentum from the steeper fall in the track. To mitigate this, a script was created which gives the carts a target speed. Triggers were then put at different places on the track which changes the target speed.

Triggers on the track that changes the target speed of a cart.

After this, the Animation worked well. While the movement of the carts is still physically based, it is slightly modified at specific key points of the track to get a more natural animation.