Project Progress #1

After a week of trial and error I have been trying to recreate core assets from Rush 2049 for use in my project as placeholders. Because of the scope of the project, there isn’t much time to model everything from scratch. It is paramount that I get certain models for references and scaling (which I presume would be available to an actual team if they were to attempt this).

So, after many, many attempts I finally managed to extract a core asset from the game!

I tried Dreamcast emulation, PlayStation 2, Nintendo 64, all to no avail. But then I made progress via GameCube emulation. It turns out the game was re-bundled into a collection and made available on each of the aforementioned consoles.

Once all the software was setup, the process started by ripping a game scene. Doing this creates a snapshot of all the meshes in that scene, I then had to sift through a very confusing scene to find objects I need:

(Here you can see many vehicles on top of one another)

I then export a specific mesh and then start to "clean" it up. by this I mean correct face alignments, out of place / duplicate vertices etc:

(Mesh is now clean, originally had many extra faces)

After it is satisfactory, I can then use it as a template and add more details into the mesh and improve its overall quality: 

(Improved face count through tessellation and then realigned stray verts to appear cleaner and added some model detail)

Although not complete, here is the progress so far:

(The model is now at stage where I can add a lot of detail and then unwrap & texture it for use in my project)

This post marks a milestone in my progress, because if I were to model this from scratch and any future models it would take days. Now I can rip anything too complex to model and improve them, which is much quicker.

This model is the most important as it’s the main vehicle that is going to be used and as such I wanted it to be as exact as possible.