STACK September 2017 Issue 155

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We recently spent time with Slightly Mad Studios’ COO Rod
Chong ahead of the release of Project Cars 2. Words Alesha Kolbe
If you’ve seen any gameplay from Project
Cars 2, you could be forgiven for thinking
you were watching a real life race.
Everything in this new racing sim has been
designed to look and sound as authentic as
possible, to the point you may blur the line
between the game and the outside world.
This immersion is thanks mostly to the
realism of the cars
themselves. According
to developer Slightly
Mad Studios’ COO Rod
Chong, getting the cars
picture perfect can be
quite the task. Once the
companies have agreed
for their products’
likenesses to be used in
the game, it comes down to the process of
actually capturing the cars.
Chong suggests there are a few different
ways to do this. “First, it depends if the car’s
new, or if it’s old. The newer cars usually
have a CAD [design] file of some kind. Often
the CAD has been prepared for video game
companies, or companies that make model
cars, and they’ll provide you with this file;
they may have simplified it, or sometimes
they give you a really complex file that you
could send
to China
and make your
own counterfeit
version if you like. After that, you need to
photograph the car, and usually you need
800 to 1000 pictures or so. It’s all the little
details; the lights on and off, the instrument
panels, everything must be documented,
all the nooks and crannies – even under the
dashboard, facing up behind the seats, all
that kind of stuff. It’s a lot of pictures.
"Hopefully then you have a 3D reference,
and a lot of visual media, and then from
there the car is constructed," he continues.
"After that you have to make different
resolution versions of the car. If the car is
way in the distance, you only need a low
resolution version of it, right, so a little level
of detail. But for the cockpit view, you need a
very high res version. Following that, there’s
an extensive period of time doing the physics
programming, and then QA testing.”
Chong adds that for older cars, the
process is a little different. Often there’s no
CAD file, and in that scenario, it's required
to scan the cars themselves. “But that’s not
always possible; there may be one version
of a car in a storage unit in
Japan, and there’s no way
to get access to it – the
rich car collector that owns
it isn’t going to let you
get access to it. In those
instances, sometimes we
have to construct a car
from just photographs. We
have a couple of specialist
car modellers on our team
who can do that, but
typically it’s not what you
want to do, you want to
scan the car.”
Finally, once the car has been modelled in-
game, some manufacturers even get drivers
to take them for a spin to make sure they
handle correctly. But according to Chong,
companies only occasionally offer drivers, so
sometimes Slightly Mad must provide their
own.
“McLaren gave us a test driver, and
Porsche as well, as an example. Otherwise,
we sometimes try and find drivers who
race the car in real life; we try and get older
drivers who have raced a variety of cars in
their careers, and get them to drive the cars
and give feedback.”
010 SEPTEMBER 2017
visit GAMES FEATURE
Mapping out Long Beach
“We had to send a team of photographers out to Long Beach for
a week during the race.We had to get permission from the event
organisers for them to walk around the outside of the track, and
we did that for a week – not only during the day but at night too,
because the tracks all have 24 hours of lighting. In this case every
single building had to be captured at both times; what does it
look like at night, how does it light up at night? All these things
had to be perfectly replicated.”
• Project
Cars 2
is out Sept 22
We have a couple of specialist
car modellers on our team...
It’s all
details
in
the
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