TRACKSIDE (2016 - 2021)

Tabcorp

Summary

Trackside is a realistic simulated horse racing game developed in Unreal Engine 4 by Tabcorp Holdings Ltd. The vision of the game is streamed live through Sky Racing - broadcasting to several hundred TAB venues across Australia 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This project is a remake of an older version of the game. The aim for the remake is to not only make it visually impressive, but to create a product that can be easily maintained for continuous future development.

My role involved in planning and the creation of all art assets (excluding character 3D models). As Unreal Engine 4 was relatively new at that time, I was also responsible for Unreal Engine training and consultation, providing insight on how the team should tackle solutions.

Responsibilities include 3D Modelling, PBR texturing, material creation, UI, and blueprint code development. E.g. level designer tools that automatically place meshes, day and night lighting system, weather system etc.

https://tabtrackside.com.au/watchlive

Programs Used:

-Unreal Engine 4

-Maya

-Photoshop

-Substance Suite

-SpeedTree

caulfield racetrack

Caulfield racetrack is used for thoroughbred racing and is found in Caulfield, Vic, Australia. Armed with my trusty DSLR, I was allowed to visit the track in person to take reference photos.

I’m responsible for everything in this level, from the creation of models and textures to lighting.

Flemington Racetrack

Flemington race track was a collaborative effort between me and another artist on the team. Unfortunately, we were not able to visit the track in person, so I had to resort to using Google Maps and Google Photos for references.

I was responsible for the base layout of the track, creating and painting the landscape materials and textures. I created all the foliage in the scene, this includes the grass, bushes, trees and flowers.

Fur shader

Creating the fur shader for the thoroughbreds was an interesting task to tackle. At the time, Unreal Engine did not have a hair shading model that supports anisotropy lighting. I relied on Substance Designer to create convincing normal maps to fake the effect.

Here’s how I approached it.

First I created strands of fur in Substance Designer. I want each of the strand to have varied normal intensity, faking that glistening effect that fur has when lit up.

Next, I created a controller for the direction of the fur. Horse fur in real life grows in a specific direction, depending where it’s located on the horse’s body. I achieved this by creating a black to white gradient mask that is aligned to the horse’s UV. With black being a rotational value of 0 and white being a rotational value of 360.

Unreleased features

Below are videos of my work done to uplift the camera and lighting system for Trackside. This were done several years after the 2017 release of Trackside.

I created a more dynamic, up close action camera system using blueprints and sequencer. The goal was to allow players to feel the speed and excitement of the race.

Changing from static lighting > dynamic lighting allows us to get away from “everything looks like the same shade of green grass’. Even though it’s the same track, having different lighting scenarios make the environment appear more varied and alive.

Here is where I showcased to the wider company the visual improvements of upgrading from SpeedTree v7 to SpeedTree v8. SpeedTree v8 supports the full PBR asset creation pipeline.

I created the trees, bushes and grass for the demo.

Runtime Virtual Texturing (RVT)

To create the streaks and colour blending for the grass, I utilised Unreal’s Runtime Virtual Texturing (RVT). The landscape’s material writes to the RVT sample, allowing me to re-use this texture to blend with other materials. Another benefit of this is that I can place a large number of ‘decal-like’ materials without the performance cost of a regular deferred decal, allowing more visual variation in the level.

Every year for halloween, we created fun & silly effects for special effects for a limited race. I created the jetpacks and the discoball horse effects in the video below