As I alluded to in my last blog post I will touch on the content creation process in this week’s blog.  I am going to be going over this at a fairly high level as I would have to write a novel to explain exactly how it all works.  We are also in the last stage of readying what will hopefully be a release candidate build for final testing so things are hopping around here.

I think the best place to start on how we create content is how we license it.  We have signed many agreements with a wide range of partners through the years and I can tell you that is a time consuming and often frustrating task.  Some agreements happen in a matter of weeks and some take years.  Our wonderful Divina Galica (who I need to convince to start a blog to talk about all the incredible experiences she has had in her life) does most of the heavy work on acquiring our partners and I will tell you that she is focusing her energy on international properties right now (cough, cough, Spa).  Tony Gardner and I also have a few other projects that we are working on domestically that will have a significant impact on our service if we can make them happen.  Nothing surprises me anymore with this whole process and the bottom line is literally nothing happens with content until the bottom line is signed.

Once we have a signed agreement in hand we evaluate what is in the content development pipeline already and where this particular partner may fit in our racing schedule.  The issue that takes the most precedence right now is trying to fill out our racing ladder to keep pace with the license level progression of our customers.  I know that some of you are frustrated by us announcing the signing of wonderful partners that you still have not seen in our service, but our content takes a significant amount of time to create and we need to fill out the license ladders first.  I think it’s probably fair to say that once an agreement is signed it will generally take three to six months before it actually starts its path down the development pipeline.

The development pipeline is constituted by many different steps.  The first step is obviously the laser scanning process done by a team which is headed by Dave Moulthrop and includes our scanner operators Reed Rundell and Kevin Iannarelli.  Scanning cars is pretty straight forward as they can generally be done in a day.  It really is only a matter of finding a car and an owner who does not mind it smelling like baby powder for a few days.  Yes that’s right, baby powder.  We use the baby powder on the cars to dull the finish as it is too reflective for the scanner. Scanning a track is a much different animal and is often an extreme undertaking.  We generally try and book scan trips to do three or four tracks at a time so the guys may be on the road for a month or more straight.  They often work at night as this is the only time that the tracks are not rented for racing events or testing and cannot work in the rain.  These guys are the unsung heroes of this company and the next time you take a lap around the Jefferson circuit you can thank this terrific team for dealing with a night of cows getting loose and making “deposits” on the track to bring this circuit to your PC.

Once the track scanning is complete the data makes its way to Greg Hill.  Greg is our VP of Art and Production and is responsible for managing the car and track content creation process.  Three specialized teams contribute towards making an iRacing racetrack.  The track geometry itself (the area you can drive on) is created by a member of the production staff who builds the racing surface from the laser scanned data with our proprietary tools.  The objects that surround the racetrack, such as the buildings, flag stands, and grandstands are created by one our object art teams.  The textures that cover the track, such as the grasses, asphalts, dirt, and concretes are worked on by yet another art team who specialize in these types of materials. At any given time we are usually working on four to five tracks.

Our car creation process is a little different than tracks because there is quite a bit more data collection required and obviously engineering support needed.  We still have multiple art teams that will take the scan and sometimes CAD data and begin the process of building and texturing the models.  The difficult part of creating the cars is getting access to all the data we need to build the actual physics models.  When we are working with a major manufacturer we generally can get everything we can dream of for data.  Unfortunately this is often not the case and we have to send Ian Berwick who is our Vehicle Dynamics Engineer to the race shop that houses the car and he goes through an extensive process of weighing and measuring everything he can get his hands on.  He also works with the manufacturers or teams to get tire and aero data if they have it but we also gather data ourselves by going to Calspan and the tire manufacturers which has given us a ton of data that we have barely scratched the surface on to begin implementing.  One of the last steps we do in creating a car is to take it to a dyno or track to record the engine sound.  We use the Aussie Greg Hill (we have two Greg Hill’s) at Soundwave Concepts to do the actual processing of the sound data and he really does a wonderful job of giving us terrific samples to plug into our sound engine.  Generally, cars take us about three months to create but this is entirely dependent on how long it takes us to collect the data we need.  For instance, we have had three data collection trips canceled or abruptly ended for the Daytona Prototype car because the car we planned on using was destroyed in testing or a race.  We actually had our equipment on a car once when it was wrecked…

Again, I just described an incredibly detailed and difficult process in 5 paragraphs which is really not doing any of the topics much justice.  Maybe down the road I can talk some of the people who actually do some of these tasks into writing their own blog on what they do.

Steve