Games design - Building a car - MAYA

For this games design module we've teamed up with programmers who are designing a game that teaches concepts of physics to students between the ages of 14-19. The game engine they will be using is the free software, UNITY!

My team have designed their game that demonstrates the laws of physics by using different size vehicles to roll down a hill and land on a target. The idea is simple which makes it suitable for students in the age range    to learn these concepts.

My task is to create these vehicles. Using Maya, I will be creating a bicycle, car and a tank. The wheels should be able to move independently as the vehicle moves forward and back so to roll down the hill and gain momentum from its own weight (its weight would be programmed in UNITY).

To start with I began by building the simplest of these vehicles, the car. For this I chose a simple car design (fiat PANDA). I used simple extruding methods to create the shape and details for the car in Maya.

http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Rotating-Wheels-on-a-Car-Maya-Tutorial/24527

The next step was to work out how I could rotate the wheels of the car.

I used the tutorial above and advice from tutors, who suggested using locators in Maya to create the movement of the wheels. This works nicely in Maya, but found when importing the object into UNITY, the locators were there but had no effect. This wasn't a problem however, for the programmers, as they said the texture itself could be animated to spin as the car moved, as opposed to the wheels themselves. This I was told would be a more efficient method and could be done in UNITY.

The next step then for me was to texture the car. The model is fairly simple so the texture would be responsible for extra details. I had quite a few problems at first when trying to apply my textures. I found this was due to trying to add too many textures to one model e.g. the car body was one colour, but the windows were to be more clear and transparent. But the problems started when I tried to directly apply this using Maya's own textures. I discovered this cant be done in Maya, which is why texture mapping is vital for this.

With the texture maps, I would be able to create a texture map, which I can apply all the textures to. I used help from tutorials online and games design books to help work out how to move and sew textures together to create a flat, opened out layout of the car.

I could then import the map into Photoshop CS5 and build them there.