HUD Mockup: Winnebago Brave

As one of my biggest struggles with modeling the Winnebago in the first place was the complete lack of consistency in its builds, being essentially a long running series of plywood boxes stacked on top of old van chassis, I felt it would be acceptable to fudge a bit in the accuracy of the speedometer and tachometer layouts for my racing HUD.

Thus, I opted to go with some classic horizontal layouts, because nothing says a chunky square 1972 Winnebago like a nice, chunky square dashboard, with some faux wood paneling for good measure.

To complete the look, and match the aesthetic of my level, I added some patriotic banners for the timers, and some snazzy stickers to personalize. The result, I think, is a masterpiece of star spangled excellence worthy of my Winnebago.

Fort Mexizona - Alpha

Here is a video demo I recorded of my Fort Mexizona Alpha test! Winnebagogo baby.

Custom Particle First Pass

For my race level, to give it that extra patriotic touch, I thought I would add in a fighter jet flyover, with red white and blue trails.

While finding an example wasn't exactly difficult, I found it ironic that the most famous example of colored contrails like this is actually attributed to the French air force as part of a Bastille Day celebration.

As these jets and their contrails would be seen only briefly, I saw it fit to ignore the cloudy smoke effects for the moment and focus on the actual trails themselves, which I attained in Cascade through colored ribbons. As we had already gone through a number of Cascade tutorials previously in class, this was relatively simple to accomplish.

While I still need to adjust some things, particularly the rotation of the particles (which currently retain the facing they had on spawn, in other words meaning that as you approach them they continue to face your previous location)

Explosive and Turret: Mexizona Assault Helicopters

 The completed turret design for my race level. The helicopters are actually 2 separate turrets, a main body with the rocket launcher functions, and a small proximity-detecting machine gun turret parented to the nose.

Race Intro: Waluigi Stadium (Mario Kart: Double Dash)

One of my favorite courses in Mario Kart was Waluigi Stadium, as it brought the insanity and chaos of Mario Kart into a dirt-tracking setting, full of fiery rings and ramps and mudpits. The intro segment does a great job of very quickly demoing all of these obstacles before the race begins without breaking the flow of the game. While obstacles are nothing new to a Mario Kart race, every track has something new to throw at you, and these brief intro segments are the game's way of letting you know what you're in for.

Explosive and Turret design: Attack Helicopter

 

For programming class we needed to design a turret and a projectile, for the purposes of putting them in our race levels as well as, obviously, learning how to program projectiles and turrets. Fortunately I already had a helicopter modeled for my racetrack, which seemed to me like it would work perfectly for this assignment.

We also needed to program an 'exploding barrel', which in my case was a landmine that I adapted from my destructible stunt to apply damage to vehicles and function more closely to a landmine than the explosive springboard it was before.

Destructible Stunt: Bridge Bombs

For my race level, there is a bridge that is destroyed by a team of Apache helicopters. While the end result is not exactly going to look like this, the concept is generally the same.