Step 1

Open blender and press A to select everything, and press DEL on your keyboard to delete everything. Add a bevel curve (space > curve > beizer curve) and extrude (e) and move the nodes around until you have a track made. Also click the 3D button in the Editing Panel under Curve and Surface.

Step 2

Select the last new nodes and press C to merge them. Then adjust them to make them smoother. Then you can tweak your track to make it better, if one curve is to sharp or a piece of road isn’t straight, etc, fix it here.

Step 3

Deselect your track and add another beizer curve, this time in editing mode press V on your keyboard. Then resize it to make it smaller (note: you can add this curve anywhere since it will be deleted later.)

Step 4

Press the 3D button again, and make sure you are in top view. Then select the left node and extrude it upwards. Do the same with the right node. Then extrude them sideways, like in this image :

Step 5

Name this object anything you want, something short and easy (again, it doesnt matter what name it is). I am naming it “1″ in the Editing Pane. Now click your track and insert the name (“1″) here:

And if everything worked right, the object should follow your track curve and make a track with walls!

Step 6

Now comes more tweaking, fun stuff this time though. Your small curve you added last, re-size that smaller/bigger. You’ll notice the track also gets bigger and smaller. Adjust it until it’s right (e.x. parts of the track don’t overlap each other). You can also edit the track and make the curves different, longer, short, and raise the track up and down. Fun Stuff! Here’ s my finished track after editing it with these techniques:

Step 7

Now let’s texture! The fun part, since Blender gives you a painless unwrapping method. Select the track and press Alt+C and choose mesh (at this step you can delete that small curve I mentioned before, we dont need it). Go into edit mode, face select mode, and ALT+Select the middle faces. Then right click any one of the faces to de-select it, and then right click it again to re-select it. This step may seem useless, but it’s mandatory for the next step.

Step 7

Split the Blender work area and open up the UV Image Editor. The, back in the 3d grid view, press U and click Follow Active (Quads). Then choose Loop Average.

Step 8

Load up a road texture, press ALT+Z in grid view, and look at your sweet unwrapped, textured road! Looks awesome!

Step 9

The same technique applies to the sidewalk borders. Select them all with ALT+Right Click, and then ALT+Shift+Right Click to select more. Unwrap it with the same settings, load another texture, and click OK. So easy, professional result.

Conclusion

This track was probably made in under five minutes, but looks like it took a lot longer. You can create whole levels like this, and save a lot of time. It’s so fun, easy, and has a great look. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Step 1

Open blender and select your cube. Yes, select it; don’t delete it. Add a new materiel and use the settings I’m using:

Play around with the settings, you’ll get endless different results, trust me. Seed randomized it, each number is a different effect. Try it; raise the number up one or two, or lower it, the result will be way different. Same with Flare. Experimenting is the key here.

Step 2

Now let’s make a star background. I played around and got a really realistic effect. Go to the World buttons and set the background color to black. And then enable stars.

Set the size to 0.076. This will make it really small, and if you do a render you’ll hardly be able to see them, but let’s go on, thing’s get better.

Set the StarDist to 3.7. This makes the distence between stars less, and gives it that relistic look, more of what you see when you look up into the sky at night, or pictures on Nasa.gov.

Don’t forget to make sure your camera is centered, or the flare will be off-centered and the effect won’t be as good.

Examples

Here are several different renders I got, the first one what you should see, and the rest are ones I changed settings to get different results.

I want to credit Anfiniti from the BlenderArtists.org forums for making a really quick tutorial on how to do this, but it was harder to understand. So I wanted to make it into a video tutorial because this is an awesome technique. You can view his thread here.