Animation - Creating My Track

While creating my track i came across several unique problems that others didnt have due to the nature of my idea, my track was to be like a micro machines or hot wheels track, and would be bendy and twisty in all different ways which made making the track tricky. My first idea i started with a flat surface with lots of subdivisions, extending each set of subdivisions in different angles which made for a really bad looking blocky stretched track, i think i actually deleted the file because it was so unusable and bad (would have been nice to comparison) but oh well.

Matt then showed me how to create a CV curve from a birds eye view then lower different sections using vertexs, which worked really well, he then showed me how to extend a shape along the line using the extrude setting, i then rotated and changed the extrude settings until i was happy with the result and it looked track like enough for me. The motion path was easy to follow as the track was made using a line to start with, it was only a case of keying the car to the right amount of frames to make it run at a realistic speed. The colour in the entire scene was one part i did enjoy as it did what i wanted almost straight away every time, the only trouble i had was with the chrome looking bin and table legs which took a few goes to get right. I was shown how to add reflectors and lights by classmates (Tom, Luca) as i hadnt really looked into that area much since i strugled on creating the base track but once i was shown i edited, messed around and found the lights and reflections and colour that i wanted. The textures were a simple case of texture wrapping and bump mapping which i caught the hang of early on but i think worked nice (floor and table).

Here are a few pics showing what i have evaluated.