- 2
- Jcryan3
So this is my first post in this forum, but I've been a lurker for a while and thought you guys might like what I did for my senior design project in college. Being a construction major and a total car nut, I wanted to incorporate my love for cars into the knowledge I've learned. I decided early on I wanted to determine the feasibility of taking an original track from GT that didn't exist anywhere and see if it's realistic to actually build. I was bummed to hear Apricot Hill wasn't going to be included in GT5 because I was going to have a race simulator set up and it was going to be a big plug for the new GT, but oh well I guess GT4 was going to have to work. Here's a little summary of what I did:
We first needed to determine the dimensions of the track, which was very difficult since there are no details on the track. The only information I had to go off of was the track map and the elevation change of 83.7 feet. I ended up tracing the track map onto paper and spent a lot of time driving around the track to determine the elevations and banking.
I used a program called Bob's Track Builder to be able to easily manipulate the track until I was happy with it. For those not familiar with BTB, its a program used for making tracks for PC-based racing games like Richard Burns Rally. This program allowed us to export the track dimensions as a .CSV (comma separated value) file, which basically defined the track as X,Y,Z coordinated that could be imported like a survey file into MicroStation InRoads, which we were using for the site design. Here are some screenshots of BTB and what it looked like in MicroStation:
Bob's Track Builder (sorry for the poor quality pic)
CSV in MicroStation
It ended up being 3780 individual points that I had to connect all together, but it made it easy because all the banking and safety barriers were included in there as well. We could then get those lines imported into SketchUp to give us this image:
The whole goal of determining the elevations of the track first was to determine the lay of the land that we would need. We found we needed rolling hills with a variance of 100-200 feet over a quarter mile. We took a few locations from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and used MS InRoads to drape the track over the topography to determine the cut/fill requirements of the soil. We wanted to have matching numbers so that no soil had to be brought in or taken out, while also trying to have the lowest numbers so that not much had to be excavated. We settled on a location in McConnelsville, Ohio that had a landscape that was nearly the same as in the game. Here's a rough overlay of the track over the topo. If you know the track real well, you can see how the low and high points match near perfectly.
We then used Inroads to fill in the gaps between the track and existing topography and moved it around until we had matching cut/fill numbers. Here's a pic of the track with the darker lines being the proposed cut and fill:
We also wanted to confirm that the safety barriers were at an adequate distance away so we did force equations to figure the stopping distance and how hard the car would hit without going over the threshold of 50G's that a person can withstand. Surprisingly, all the walls were the right distance away, but the tire walls needed to be deeper than in the game.
We had to display this project at an expo that The University of Toledo put on for all the engineering senior design projects so we put everything together by making a 3-D model out of foam board and brought in my TV and GT simulator I made to entertain the guests.
We even had dads get into the hot seat. It was great.
I hope you all enjoy this as much as I did and If you want any more info I have tons. I've also got that GT simulator in a SketchUp file if anyone wants to build it. It's a very simple 2x4 construction.
Cheers,
Connor
We first needed to determine the dimensions of the track, which was very difficult since there are no details on the track. The only information I had to go off of was the track map and the elevation change of 83.7 feet. I ended up tracing the track map onto paper and spent a lot of time driving around the track to determine the elevations and banking.
I used a program called Bob's Track Builder to be able to easily manipulate the track until I was happy with it. For those not familiar with BTB, its a program used for making tracks for PC-based racing games like Richard Burns Rally. This program allowed us to export the track dimensions as a .CSV (comma separated value) file, which basically defined the track as X,Y,Z coordinated that could be imported like a survey file into MicroStation InRoads, which we were using for the site design. Here are some screenshots of BTB and what it looked like in MicroStation:
Bob's Track Builder (sorry for the poor quality pic)
CSV in MicroStation
It ended up being 3780 individual points that I had to connect all together, but it made it easy because all the banking and safety barriers were included in there as well. We could then get those lines imported into SketchUp to give us this image:
The whole goal of determining the elevations of the track first was to determine the lay of the land that we would need. We found we needed rolling hills with a variance of 100-200 feet over a quarter mile. We took a few locations from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and used MS InRoads to drape the track over the topography to determine the cut/fill requirements of the soil. We wanted to have matching numbers so that no soil had to be brought in or taken out, while also trying to have the lowest numbers so that not much had to be excavated. We settled on a location in McConnelsville, Ohio that had a landscape that was nearly the same as in the game. Here's a rough overlay of the track over the topo. If you know the track real well, you can see how the low and high points match near perfectly.
We then used Inroads to fill in the gaps between the track and existing topography and moved it around until we had matching cut/fill numbers. Here's a pic of the track with the darker lines being the proposed cut and fill:
We also wanted to confirm that the safety barriers were at an adequate distance away so we did force equations to figure the stopping distance and how hard the car would hit without going over the threshold of 50G's that a person can withstand. Surprisingly, all the walls were the right distance away, but the tire walls needed to be deeper than in the game.
We had to display this project at an expo that The University of Toledo put on for all the engineering senior design projects so we put everything together by making a 3-D model out of foam board and brought in my TV and GT simulator I made to entertain the guests.
We even had dads get into the hot seat. It was great.
I hope you all enjoy this as much as I did and If you want any more info I have tons. I've also got that GT simulator in a SketchUp file if anyone wants to build it. It's a very simple 2x4 construction.
Cheers,
Connor
Good job man on the AH Feasibility Project!
