- 11,308
- Marin County
Little back story: I was born and spent my childhood in the US state of Maine. For those of you unfamiliar with this little part of the world it is surrealistically idealistic. It's so pretty that it's actually bizarre. Couple that with the fact that BY FAR the largest city (easily double the size of the next biggest) has only 60,000 people and the result is a largely pristine, beautiful, and HUGE territory. Sprinkled throughout the coast are little fishing villages and harbors. Think Boston in 1740 and you get an idea. Of course because tourism is one of Maine's primary sources of economic viability, a lot of these towns are modified fairly significantly to be accessible for a lot of traffic. What ends up happening is you have these small little sea-side towns with dramatically radiused turns and wide roads, often to the point where they start to resemble race tracks. Boothbay Harbor, probably my favorite little town in Maine is probably the best example of this.
Here is a aerial view of the Harbor. The city proper is to the left of the main harbor.
Pretty, isn't it?
So with this in mind I started to look more closely at the streets and topography.
Its not really easy to tell the topography from an orthographic satellite view, but you can start to see the wide radius turns and interesting combinations of turns. So I started to draw some routes.
Seaside Run: (this one could actually go further than shown here, but this is the size of the image I composited)
The Warf:
Downtown Loop:
Boothbay GP:
So with a few rough routes in mind, I've set about building things. I have a fairly decent set of modeling, rendering, and editing skills after 7 years in the field of architecture. So the progress I've made so far is modeling all of the topography, the roads, and starting to make progress on the buildings:
Bare Topo:
Primary Roads (Still working on this):
Buildings (Ugly render, sorry):
(The above cluster is the "island" just north of the most southern corner of "The Warf" proposed route)
Topography with buildings showing elevation contours at 1m intervals:
Composite (it's a little off because I used an orthographic view on a perspective render, but it should give an idea about density)
Obviously I have a ton of work to do, and with my final (thesis!) term about to start, progress is likely to be excruciatingly slow. I'm also working in Rhino, because I know it, and so everything is in NURBS format at the moment, not sure how that is going to mesh-out when it's ready to be put in the game.
While there is a lot of buildings to model, the area is fairly small. The longest of the routes (Boothbay GP) is a little less than 2 miles which I think should be a fun little circuit. It'll be somewhat similar to Tsukuba I think, except a little longer with a lot more elevation change and a lot narrower. I'm not going for 100% authenticity because I'll drive myself crazy trying to get the buildings just perfect. Basically I'll try to model some of the more notable ones accurately (as accurate as I can) and the rest can just be sort of approximate. We'll see what happens. If anyone has Blender/Maya/3DS-Max skill/experience and wants to help out, I'd love a little help with texture mapping later on.
Here is a aerial view of the Harbor. The city proper is to the left of the main harbor.
Pretty, isn't it?
So with this in mind I started to look more closely at the streets and topography.
Its not really easy to tell the topography from an orthographic satellite view, but you can start to see the wide radius turns and interesting combinations of turns. So I started to draw some routes.
Seaside Run: (this one could actually go further than shown here, but this is the size of the image I composited)
The Warf:
Downtown Loop:
Boothbay GP:
So with a few rough routes in mind, I've set about building things. I have a fairly decent set of modeling, rendering, and editing skills after 7 years in the field of architecture. So the progress I've made so far is modeling all of the topography, the roads, and starting to make progress on the buildings:
Bare Topo:
Primary Roads (Still working on this):
Buildings (Ugly render, sorry):
(The above cluster is the "island" just north of the most southern corner of "The Warf" proposed route)
Topography with buildings showing elevation contours at 1m intervals:
Composite (it's a little off because I used an orthographic view on a perspective render, but it should give an idea about density)
Obviously I have a ton of work to do, and with my final (thesis!) term about to start, progress is likely to be excruciatingly slow. I'm also working in Rhino, because I know it, and so everything is in NURBS format at the moment, not sure how that is going to mesh-out when it's ready to be put in the game.
While there is a lot of buildings to model, the area is fairly small. The longest of the routes (Boothbay GP) is a little less than 2 miles which I think should be a fun little circuit. It'll be somewhat similar to Tsukuba I think, except a little longer with a lot more elevation change and a lot narrower. I'm not going for 100% authenticity because I'll drive myself crazy trying to get the buildings just perfect. Basically I'll try to model some of the more notable ones accurately (as accurate as I can) and the rest can just be sort of approximate. We'll see what happens. If anyone has Blender/Maya/3DS-Max skill/experience and wants to help out, I'd love a little help with texture mapping later on.
It says it right there in your OP. Anyways, good luck!
), i'm sure it will be one of your life works that you can be very proud of. Great stuff and a pretty location too 👍
