In 1999 I directed a team of nine artists at Mondo Media in creating thirty-eight real-time 3d car interiors for the EA game Need For Speed: Motor City.


The interiors were less than 1600 triangles each, but EA preferred high-resolution textures for working with their texture-packing tools, which they used to condense the textures down into one 256 x 256 texture page per car. This meant we had to keep features large and readable, and re-use textures as much as possible.

For instance, all the seat textures were really just a texture of one side, mirrored to cover both sides, front and back. The door texture was not only used on both doors, but usually was also carefully cropped onto the roof supports, the roof, and the shelf behind the back seats.

Special rendering features included alpha transparency, reflection mapping (for chrome), illumination mapping (nighttime dashes), and user-definable color schemes. The steering wheels and dash needles rotated in the game, and tops on convertible cars were removable.


I personally created two car interiors, working from photo reference provided by EA as well as my own reference gleaned from a local car show. The '67 Camaro (above) was created on speculation to win the contract, while the '71 Duster (below) was done towards the end of the project.