Our project made use of various techniques from the different CS 418 labs done throughout the semester. The various methods used include [but not limited to] animation (linear, rotory and periodic motion), cameras and perspectives, hierarchical modeling (polyhedra and parametric models), surface building (texture and bump maps), and surface lighting.

Starting with the road and grass, we came up with various volume texture mapping equations which gave our surface the desired textures of grass, blacktop and road markings. The billboards that litter both sides of the raceway were images acquired from CorelDraw clip-arts or different websites on the Internet. Using Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, these images were cleaned/altered to suit our need.

Various objects of interest include the cars, the helicopters, the start and the finish line. With the exception of the license plates (which are imported image files), the cars are made up entirely of CSG surfaces. The base of the car is a sphere cut to look like rectangle with four ellipsoids subtracted from it for the tire wells. Headlight and taillight wells are subtracted from the base of the car as well, and are filled in with simple spheres to represent the lights. The top of the car is composed of an ellipsoid for the center, and two cones with the tips chopped off for the front and rear. The windows are created in likewise fashion, but modified slightly to protrude out strategically from the original colored shapes. The tires are chubby black toruses with silver cylinders in the centers to represent hub caps. Our helicopter was cannibalized from lab #3 with slight modifications on the its positions (scale, translate, rotate) and sequencer timing.

The entire scene is strung together by various complex kinematic motions. The start line consists of a welcome banner flapping in the wind along with the cars lined up all ready to go. One the count of three (flashing of red light, yellow light, then green light), the cars take off,  fighting an  intense battle to win the race as a helicopter weaves about in the air,  monitoring the race from above. Near the end of the race, the behind-the-view perspective changes when we bring the camera about the the finish line. There, it awaits for the winner while viewing the race from two different angles (one from the Jumbtron giving the front perspective and the other 'normal' view on the sidelines).

In a uniquely timed fashion, everything was put together on one sequencer (and in one file) to make this project possible. The introduction and conclusion were different mpegs and merged together with special CorelDraw tools.

Here are the following files necessary to view run our program on Data Explorer:

race.net
race.cfg
project specific files (unarchive with pkunzip to preserve long filenames)
other dx macros (unarchive with pkunzip to preserve long filenames)