The year is 1976... a different 1976

I’m a big fan of Activision’s Interstate ’76 and Nitro Riders (and a lesser fan of Interstate ’82). It combined only coolness. Muscle cars, guns, powerful women, bad ass guys, desert racing and stunts, funky music, you name it. If you're into retro games, you should definitely check it out.

I wrote two fanfic short stories (Bullseye and The Thing At Hidden Base) and started a longer one a while back, when I visited some fan website. I had the vehicles, the characters, a basic plot, but never finished it. More recently, I got completely obsessed with it again, for no apparent reason. I really cannot say where it came from, but suddenly I wanted to make a scene with the vehicles and characters I came up with. So I downloaded every effing car from the games that I could find in the 3D Warehouse, the accompanying guns and missile launchers, a bunch of peoples, deserts and buildings from the South West.

So first up, the models used here are not mine, though heavily modified (paintjobs, added turrets guns and other details). The only thing truly original is the landscape, which I made with the Sandbox tool. I always wanted to try that out.

Then I ran into my biggest pitfall… composition and lighting. I am not good at these things. Every single idea I had that looked great in my head, resulted in a terrible mess of flatly uninteresting image. But I’m pretty satisfied with the above result, given that there was no actual render used. It’s all straight from Sketchup, with added Photoshop post-processing.

A word on the image: The front car is a ’72 Dodge Challenger driven by the story’s protagonist Jimmy ‘Ripper’ Goodspeed (what’s in a name?). He is being chased by the story’s antagonist (aka bad guy) Sergeant Samuel Klein, a corrupt police officer and an utter car and gun freak. He’s driving a ’70 Chevrolet Chevelle SS ‘Police Special’. I couldn’t fit the two other good guys in here, but I’ll post their cars later (I don’t have any good 3D people I can use).

Anyway, now that this temporary obsession is satisfied, I can start preparing for NaNoWriMo!