Booster Course Coconut Mall Kinda Sucked... So I Fixed It!

ever since Mario Kart Wii coconut Maul has remained one of Mario Kart's most iconic and beloved tracks from its exhilarating music to the dozens of lively glowing storefronts this track has so much character but those of us who race through it back on the Wii remember something much more expansive and beautiful than what we actually race through what I mean by that is this crap is freaking disgusting turns out Graphics have changed quite a lot in the last 35 years however long ago this came out so now I got to get that awful feeling when I look back at this track Like where's the real Coconut Mall the one that doesn't look like expired oatmeal I could have sworn this track looked better than this but with Mario Kart 8's booster course pass this was about to change a new version of coconut Maul would be created and further reinforce the feeling that the real coconut Maul was still missing seriously what is this I don't want to undermine the work that went into it I do think that it looks great but is it coconut Maul the orangey color scheme the lack of textures the replacement of the escalators the Prototype looking floor pattern and my goodness the storefronts they're pretty much all completely empty sure the original stores looked a little interesting but that's what made them so great they were interesting there was something to look at something to ponder something somebody spent time making I won't stand for it a fictional shopping mall is in Peril not on my watch it may not be easy and it may not be worth it but here's how it happened here's how I fixed coconut mall debatably earlier this year I took on a similar project updating Toad's Factory it ended up looking pretty good and thanks to chirpy Luna it's working great in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe I'll have the link in the description to chirpy Luna's video where you can find the Mod download but anyways this project ended up being quite a bit more difficult than even Toad's Factory you wouldn't think it since I've got a new model to work with I won't have to put up with nacho like geometry or reinvent the Piston but I do have to detail an entire shopping mall and making a coconut that lives up to my Nostalgia was not easy but it was seriously fun this project was absolutely packed with my favorite kinds of 3D modeling work giving different rooms their own personality and filling them all with fun little details and the occasional everything blowing up and turning evil we'll get to that later let's start where all good things begin the models resource I went ahead and downloaded the BCP track model and scoped the scene the first phase of this project is going to be texture updates I do have names for areas of this track to make things easier but this update won't be like the sectioned out project that Toad's Factory was instead I'll be updating the whole building in several phases starting with basic texture updates I kept analyzing this new track model trying to figure out what all needs updating before I start I also explored the original track to understand what this has that the BCP version is missing well for starters I think that whoever got rid of the classic floor tiles should sit in the corner until they're ready to apologize these floor tiles are a definite part of this track's identity so I found found the original Mario Kart Wii floor tile texture this is what we'll be recreating I can't tell if that's detail or jpeg compression whatever it is I like it sadly however I've got to make a new version of this that looks a little less microwaved so I scaled it up in Photoshop and began haphazardly throwing squares next to one another in case you couldn't tell I'm not a professional I haven't taken any classes or anything on 3D modeling or Digital Arts so I really only know the things I've had to use which I guess is a good thing Checkmate College I made a squares floor and I didn't even need any help so now that this floor tile material is done I'm going to want to make a couple more textures out of this to make it look extra nice the first is a specular map a specular map is a black and white image that makes different parts of your texture more or less reflective I don't use these on every one of my textures since some materials are fine to just have one uniform level of shininess or at least that's what I tell myself when I'm too lazy to make a specular map but for this floor texture I want it to have a sort of splotchy reflectiveness like it's been mopped over and has that slight L uneven cloudy look so I did my best to make my own specular map by generating black and white clouds in Photoshop this ended up not looking great and I would eventually replace the specular map with one that I found in a different Mario Kart track but for now I'll move on to making the normal map a normal map is similar to a specular map but instead of just changing the roughness of an area it actually changes the apparent height of that area giving flat faces some nice texture that'll interact with the lights in your scene and the great thing is this map doesn't actually affect the geometry so you can keep the polygon count low while having tiny details on a Surface Checkmate atheists to generate a normal map in Photoshop you've just got to select your image and up here under filters 3D you'll find generate normal map then it'll tell you that you can well great I spent a little while updating drivers messing with Photoshop settings updating Photoshop but what ended up fixing it was to unupdate photoshop Adobe so Innovative that you have to unupdate their software to fix issues anyways after rolling back to version 25 the normal map is generating like normal like usual like it should now we've got everything we need to give coconut Maul its proper floor first I've just got to select it the whole thing this is when I realized that selecting specific geometry in a project that has like a million polygons and materials is actually pretty tricky I tried using the L key to select linked geometry which is usually extremely helpful but here the floor is made out of a bunch of separated squares so that makes things kind of annoying I also tried selecting by the material but there was a bunch of other stuff that used the same texture that I didn't want to mess with yet I figured that if there was a way to see unselected geometry laid out on the UV editor and select it from there then I could just select the geometry that uses this part of the texture and after looking around online a little bit Well turns out there's a button that does that thing that I just said if you press this button up here with the arrows it syncs the UV selection with the object selection meaning I can select something on the UV map and it'll select it on the viewport initially it looked like this because I was looking at all 200 something thousand polygons but after separating the material atal by selecting it pressing p and choosing selection I've got the material isolated now I can just select the geometry that uses this awful floor pattern and separate it off then I can put it in texture jail for its crimes now I can create a new material that uses my floor tile texture and it's horrible turns out the way that the floor was unwrapped worked for that old texture but not my new one so I had to re unwrap it in a way that works the easiest way to do so for a simple tiling texture like this being projected onto a flat plane is to bring the camera directly overhead and press U then select project from view this basically throws the texture straight onto what you're looking at instead of doing anything fancy which works perfectly for this floor but if you're trying to use this on say a cube you'll end up with one of those prospective art pieces that only looks good from one Angle now I can just scale the UV map up on the left which effectively scales the texture down on the geometry all right this is looking pretty good now I've just got to hook up the specular and normal maps for the specular map you can either drag the image in from your folder or you can make another image texture node and select the file path now you just drag it off onto the roughness and watch it not work that's because my specular map sucks and I had to use a mix node to get it looking right and I just ended up replacing it later anyways this is where that whole College thing would have come in handy the normal map setup is similar to the specular map but you've got to run it through a normal map node and make sure the color space is set to non- color and there we go a nice looking floor material would you be upset if I told you I need well over 100 materials well let's not get ahead of ourselves I won't be going into painful detail on every single material just the ones that have an interesting process most most of them I just stole from other Mario kart tracks and a lot of them were overlooked and updated at random points after the main texturing phase of the project it was too easy to miss things going through such a large and intricate model but something I wanted to get done right away was the glass material I figured this would be something very easy to set up and look nice that's right I'm already out of steam and going for the easy stuff here's how you get a glass material working in the eveve render engine make sure you have refraction checked under screen space Reflections up here in this tab then set the transmission on your material to one and set the blend mode to Alpha blend now this didn't work for me at first which was really confusing but that was because everything else was also set to Alpha blend so I had to go down the list and set them all to opaque one by one if you know how to change them all at once please tell me this sucks after that you can turn on Ray Trace refraction which I don't know what it is but it needs to be on for mine to work for some reason you can also mess with IQR and roughness and whatnot to get a different look and there you go that looks pretty cool this is usually the point that I realize oh wow I just spent several hours making a floor and glass and now I have to make everything else but I was determined to give this building the makeover it deserves I was willing to push through those first few boring steps to get to the real good stuff I decided not to do intricate wall materials right now and to instead just edit the color palette to achieve a new color scheme this way I can achieve the right look quicker and work on materials from there my main wall texture is going to look a lot better if it's already surrounded by the right colors so I opened the color palette in Photoshop and colored over some of the spots with blue blue and white tones from the original Coconut Mall the way color palettes work is the same as any other texture you have an image that you unwrap geometry onto in order to dictate how that texture fits over the object but with the color palette you aren't doing any finicky unwrapping to display a texture you just need the geometry unwrapped somewhere within the color on the palette but mainly by using color palettes you save tremendously on file size I mean seriously these things are usually about 200 bytes but you do end up costing yourself polygons since patterns need to be defined by geometry if they aren't defined by the texture so why in the world would this track be made mostly out of color palettes well it's because Nintendo hates us and thinks we all want to play Plato Crayola Duplo versions of these tracks well it's actually because this track was designed for Mario Kart tour a mobile game for people who like Plato Crayola Duplo tracks I'm just kidding I'm sorry so in theory the idea behind using color palettes in tour is you make the polygon count higher in order to shrink the file size most phones can run this track just fine with the extra polygons but ain't nobody going to download a mobile game that's 20 GB that's why we don't have nice highresolution textures and fun normal Maps here they would make Mario Kart tour into an unreasonably large download applying actual textures to these surfaces is a key part of making this into more than just a mobile game reimagining of coconut Maul so I got back to texturing starting with the pillars in the original track these pillars are made of alternating pink and orange bricks so we'll try and set up something similar creating the texture was simple enough I just made some squares generated some noise and and used an oil painting filter to get a rough concrete look but the real issue came when I went to apply the texture to these pillars cuz see these pillars are actually a pile of triangles and unwrapping a flat image of alternating cubes onto a cubic cylindrical pillar of triangles is a job for somebody with thicker glasses than me but alas I did figure it out I ended up using something called this sucks manually unwrapping this geometry uh and it worked it looks all right on this pillar this a few more but luckily I can just duplicate this unwrapped pillar and replace all of the old ones now that we've updated the very pillars that hold this place together I'll take on something a little more important the flowers instead of these two hideous flower boxes next to the escalator I want to bring back the original look of the long flower beds on either side of the railing so I separated and stretched the flower box and put a grass material in it this grass material is something I took from another Mario Kart track which is luckily how I'll be getting a lot of these textures it's also how I got the flowers that I'm going to put in this flower bed I downloaded the model of superbell Subway and separated some of these flowers which look way better than the BCP flowers I like this let's update the hand rail next since we've already done so much around them for the actual railing I decided to use a wood texture from the Animal Crossing Track and for the posts I created a steel material by selecting a grayish color and making the metallic High and the roughness low well that's pretty cool this area is starting to come together after adding a few lights to see how the lighting will add to this scene I'm starting to feel very good about this then I looked around the track at every everything else I need to update and started feeling pretty overwhelmed but the Toad's Factory revamp was very overwhelming too and that ended up turning out pretty good what why are you laughing so I ignored the Staggering quantity of work that lie ahead and stared at the ceiling cuz that's what we're updating next the texture was pretty much the same process as the pillars use the oil painting filter on noise to get a nice effect and with the normal map applied this looks shockingly good for some image that was completely fabricated in Photoshop using a couple filters the next thing I did Wasing bring those banners back that sit on the pillars I opened the new sign texture that this BCP version of coconut Maul uses I needed to make green and pink versions of these blue and red banners so I duplicated them and put color overlays on them then I put those banners onto cylinders with the steel texture and we've got some cool banners that I think bring back some of the character of the original track and after messing with The Flower Basket a bit I set up the camera to create a render to share my progress in a community post oh and if you're ever having trouble lining your camera up try using Control Alt zero and the camera will snap to your current view this room isn't done we've got all kinds of work waiting in each of these storefronts but what's important is that we've got that Coconut Mall look back the next thing I did was go ahead and update the handrails in the main room and by the food court since I've got the materials ready for those anyways then after updating the pillars in the main room I started working on the rocks and palm trees I started with the rocks and after setting up the normal map these are looking good I also deleted these little grass triangles sorry grass triangles then I gave the palm trees some bark which looks better aside from this seam in the unwrapping but don't worry it's not that bad these transparent palm leaf textures luckily worked great on this Leaf geometry then sticking to this relative area I started updating the fountain I don't plan on having water shoot out of this because I don't know how to do that but I'd like for it to at least look good after the fountain I went around the main room and worked on some things like flower baskets and wall materials then I used a wood plank texture here the main room is starting to come together but there's something I should fix real quick I am trying to make this track look more realistic but this 360 HDR image is a bit much I needed an actual Skybox so I got one from Hyrule circuit and set the shadow mode to none that way the sun can shine through it now that I fixed the sky I should go ahead and fix the escalators I'm somehow just realizing how unorganized this whole project was anyways I was in luck as I had already set up and animated escalators for one of my first videos in which I explored the original Coconut Mall and its hidden details the way this escalator animation works is you have two pieces the main set of stairs and then a single step for the down escalator you have the set of stairs animate downward until they've moved enough to let the top step pop out all the way then you reset their position in a single frame so that the animation Loops seamlessly and the stairs seem to continuously disappear into the floor and the up escalator is the same thing but backwards now that those are in place I can set up a nice render of the main room for Twitter if you want to see updates on my project that's where I'll be posting them and yeah it's called Twitter I have a two-letter minimum requirement for company names you can't go taking letters there's only 26 we made words so that you don't run out of letters I guarantee they're going to go for punctuation next anyways where was I all right I kept doing small texture updates in the main room I also created a clay texture for the flower pots by putting a brown color overlay on a concrete texture at this point I feel like I've got a lot of momentum going so I'll finally move on to something that I've been really looking forward to probably my favorite part of the original Coconut Mall is the shortcut through this store called Delino dream it's the reason that all of the other stores feel so real because you actually get to race through this one I would make some remark about how bad this stuff looks but I just love that I get to update it all but I guess we should start with the outside of the store first this weird zigzag thing ain't going to cut it so I threw the plank material on there and started making a Delino dream sign I'm not a huge fan of the aesthetic they've given this place it's got more of an outdoors hiking look as opposed to the raw premium look of the original so I typed out Delino dream in whatever boring aerial font blender defaults to then I converted the text to mesh and extruded it with the E key to make it 3D now I can use the Boolean modifier to cut this shape out of the sign next I put a red wood material on the doorway and some other areas that it feels like it fits I also made this merch display look a little more interesting by using the Skybox material to give it a glowing Sunny Sky background I spent a little while putting the red wood on the trim en counters and the handrail wood on some surfaces as well I also used area lights and these slots in the ceiling to get some basic lighting going in here now that we've got some of the Furnishings text Ted I want to figure out how I'm going to do the walls I started by testing basic colors to get an idea of what I want to go for I ended up leaning into the wood aesthetic and use the Planks on the walls this is sort of a risky material to use here I am writing the fine line between cozy and condemned but I think by the end it'll work out I also got rid of this weird abstract art and put up a smaller version of the Delino dream sign this is starting to look like something you might expect out of Mario Kart 8 and not a mobile game but that just makes these t-shirts look extra unacceptable now I could just use elements of the track sign texture and make these look passable that would be the smart thing to do since I wouldn't need to make any new textures and it would be relatively quick but screw that I want to make some T-shirts I started off by looking at some textures from other tracks I ended up making a couple Animal Crossing designs which is another reason I wanted to make my own t-shirt textures I also used the Mario Motors and Wario billionaires team logos I kept taking parts of textures and making t-shirts out of them focusing on variety of color this right here is why I was so excited to do this whole project I think what gives a track its character is the thought that goes into tiny decisions like these also this sure beats unwrapping triangle cylinder cubes after putting the shirt textures on the t-shirts I'd say they look pretty good I also used the T-shirt textures for these shopping bags well now there's some merchandise in here but I think we still need more so I went ahead and downloaded some Splatoon 2 drip and set it up I love that this project let me take things from other Nintendo games and bring them into coconut mall without looking at a place and after setting up a few lights and messing with a a few textures I'm ready to grab some renders and post them it's a little sad being done updating this shop since this is what I was looking forward to the most but there was no need to worry for most of the fun detail work was still ahead but first I decided to do some more of the basic stuff I actually went ahead and forged for some Textures in other Mario kart tracks that way I have more options ready to experiment with I ended up finding a way better wall texture in Mario's circuit one that ties so much better meaning you don't notice the seams where the image repeats I also found that better specular map I was talking about earlier the one that replaced my crappy floor tile map I went around and put this on all sorts of shiny surfaces like the escalator handrails and the glass and whatnot and after updating some flower beds and baskets in the main room I figured I should move on to doing the general texture work in the plaza room so I duplicated the retextured fountain over and started experimenting with floor options I ended up deciding that I definitely had to use the original floor pattern otherwise I'd need to be in timeout right next to whoever changed those original floor tiles but after some looking I couldn't find anything so I decided to try and upscale the old texture myself creating this texture from scratch isn't really feasible for me so instead I'm just going to try and work with what I've got I started by doubling the size of the image then I used a neural filter in Photoshop that gets rid of jpeg compression which cleared this texture up quite a bit and finally I messed with the brightness and contrast a bit and generated a normal map and there we go that's not too bad I pressed on updating walls and pillars and eventually started working on the ramp I decided not to bring back the original cheese grater texture they used here and to instead go for something a little nicer I used this awesome stone brick texture for the walls and the plank texture for the road after this came a bunch more simple texture stuff benches poles signs flowers Etc I even grabbed some new foliage from superbell Subway to put around the palm trees I also put some ivy on the ramp which really makes it look great I also ran back into superbell Subway to steal a couple of the vending machines they look way better than the BCP vending machines so that's most of the basic updating for the plaza I could move on to the food court section but that's it's going to be a pretty big undertaking and I'd rather start with something smaller so I headed to this store on the bottom floor of section one this is one of the few stores in this mall that's not just an empty window but an actual modeled store there was a lot of putting textures on cans and cups and things I also fixed these lights which were for some reason set up like an inch from the counter after doing some texture work I moved on to the shop right next to this one which really just needed the flowers and textures updated and while we're over here I might as well update this fireflower store too I ended up using this normal map from Mount Wario that would usually go on one of these advertisement banners but it works perfectly on whatever these things are called I want to do more to make these stores look better but this will do for now next I figured I might as well start fixing this toy store this toy store is awful first of all it's completely empty so I got some textures from ribbon Road and put them on some cubes now the store actually has stocked shelves including the ribbon Road Track itself but another huge problem with this store is the fact that they have an actual toy store brand in Mario Kart but instead they insist on calling this store get this toys so I deleted that crap and put up a toad toy store sign originally I was just going to have this be a flat plane but I decided to have it sort of mounted onto a wood block which I think looks cool then I decided to pursue the toad toy store branding further by using these cool red and green mushroom textures split red on the left and green on the right now for the interior I started with the floor looking for something that resembled carpet I ended up trying a white overlay on the grass texture and that worked way better than it should have then I decided to do some remodeling I split the back wall and extruded the right side to give the store some more depth and an interesting shape I also scaled this back wall down to create a forced perspective making this room look larger than it really is then I went around putting shelves in place and putting boxes on those shelves I also put up a sign in a poster as well as the checkout counter now this is a little closer to a toy store slight back room Vibes but I think it's still an upgrade just don't go in here at night if you want things to stay ukian after this I went back over to superbell Subway and borrowed a few expensive kitchen appliances that I'm sure they didn't really need these will go perfectly behind the counter here and are exactly what I need for the Food Corp plus dang the microwave looks crazy with the normal map on after that I went ahead and updated the cach register which I think looks a lot better now yes that's the microwave texture then I replaced most of the other cash registers around the mall this is a good time to explain how you can make this kind of stuff a little easier if you want to move things around the model without it being infuriating all I have to do is use shift s to set the 3D cursor to the destination register's origin then use shift s on the register I want to move and move selection to 3D cursor just make sure you have your Origins set to their geometry and this is a very handy way of moving things after all of this register business I went back to the toy store and enhanced it a little further I added a band of mushroom texture across the walls which I think makes the store a little less creepy then I did some more updating to the flower shop downstairs I put a checkout in there and added more flower displays inside and I put up a different version of the store sign above the checkout now that I've enhanced everywhere else so much I should go back and do a little more to the curry place I changed some textures a bit and made a little hallway going back to the theoretical dining area after a few details I think this is a slightly more convincing restaurant but there's actually a couple of stores that I haven't even touched yet the first of which is called Coco and the other is called or at least that's what I have to assume based on the sign this Coco store looks like a clothes store so it should be pretty simple considering I've already done Delino dream first I've got to give it a checkout counter and stop these mysterious rocks from poking through the wall I also updated a few textures and brought some of the new t-shirts in here I went to assign the steel material to the door frame and realized that this material should probably have a texture not just a solid color so I cracked into Photoshop and started on a steel texture I just want some vertical lines so I'll use the fibers effect and then I can plug it in and see how it looks well that's not quite right see that super obvious seam where the lines don't connect that's because I just made a picture and didn't actually make sure that it tiles so how do we fix this well it's a simple idea idea with a very complicated execution basically I want this image to have a top that blends into the bottom the sides should do the same but they already tile well enough so we'll just focus on the vertical tiling to start I put two of the image stacked vertically then I join them then I selected that horrible seam with the rectangle selection tool I right-clicked and used generative fill to let photoshop's AI figure out how this should actually look and luckily it did a decent job but I'm not done yet so I selected the original image resolution of 250 6X 256 to just get the top half of this AI layer that I generated which is actually the very bottom of the texture after separating it I selected what was left of the AI layer and brought it to the top of the texture now the top and bottom will tile but I still need to use the AI again to blend this new top onto the top of the original texture now that that's all done I can get back to updating the clothes store I went ahead and started making a new sign because I really don't get why they just called this place cocoa when they could have named IT Coco mode a clothes store from the original Coconut Mall now that we fixed that incomplete call back we can move on to remastering I think this is supposed to be a library but we've already got cik Bookstore over here that we've got to make so let's turn this into a cafe how about the Coconut Cafe I started off by remastering the original Coconut Cafe sign manually in Photoshop which ended up looking all right then I expanded the room a bit and adjusted the furniture after updating some textures I started making some seating I made a table in a chair and duplicated them around oh and remember that cool sign I made when well it turns out there's a way better looking Coconut Cafe sign already on the sign texture so that was a fun waste of time now that this shop is all done I can set up the camera and grab a render of it this time I'm not just making a tweet though I'm actually going to need this render for something see the original Mario Kart Wii version of Coconut Mall actually does something really clever with these shop Windows because modeling an actual 3D shop in each of these windows would be too much for the system to handle they instead use images that are projected onto flat planes that have been indented in the middle and I'm going to do the same thing here or at least I'm going to try I'm not sure how well this technique will have aged but it would be really cool to use the same method to make this version of coconut Maul feel less abandoned than the BCP version after cropping the render in I exported it and put it on a plane I also accidentally had the cash register floating but I didn't fix it because I didn't want to and it's kind of funny but once I put the plane in place shaped it and made it emissive this actually looks pretty good after using this method on another store I'm thinking this is going to work just fine so I've got the main section one stores updated and I have a few renders and some empty windows but there are a few of these upstairs stores that I'd like to make my own models for like kamik bookstore I started by making a cube and deleting the front face then I did a loop cut with contrl K ins set faces with I and used s to scale those faces in I went for a dark cool look with the materials and I copied the bookcase over from the cafe as well as the checkout counter and after setting up a few bluish lights I started preparing a new texture this is going to be one huge texture that contains any store details that I made make starting with the books I could probably get away with just keeping the color palette on these books but what fun would that be the whole point of this project was to have fun with these kinds of details and boy did I most of these books were simple squares with text and pngs for the Splatoon book I went to Nintendo's Splatoon 3 website and nabbed a bunch of their cool pngs and yeah I know this says squidling instead of inkling I fixed that later cuz apparently that's more of an issue than a floating cash register after finishing the rest of these book textures I applied them to the geometry I didn't really consider the front faces of these books but I figured it out I also put the texture on the Coconut Cafe books and I even updated this little picture frame using the sign texture I'd say this cix book store is looking pretty neat let's do this place next I got rid of its weird geometry sign and replaced it with this Dino Dino outdoor camping good sign I used the same room geometry and started swapping textures I want to make a tent to sit on display in here which should be pretty simple I started with a cube and scaled the top down to a point then I went back to photoshop to work on the texture I made a green triangle for the front face and another triangle for all the other faces I actually used a step from the escalator texture as the zipper then I started making the rods out of a cylinder at first the cylinder had too many faces so I lowered it in the initial creation settings down here in the left I also made sure to delete faces that are hidden anyways then I made a normal map for the store details and I even used that cloth normal map and comped it onto the tent face which looks really good and to finish the tent I added a loop cut and indented it on the sides a little bit to give it that tent shape now I want to put some kind of of little sign next to it that would theoretically have the price and info and everything so I took this sign from the Animal Crossing texture and generated a normal map for it then I used some basic geometry and reused a few textures to create the sign pole after the sign was completed I realized that I've got these things in the wrong spot they should be on this side if I want them to be visible to the racers then I set up some shelves shoes and hats I realized that the shoes are reach 2,000 vertices so I used the decimate modifier to bring the polygon count way down I also deleted back faces that aren't visible from the outside of the store now to do something with this weird glowing jail thing I deleted the bars and made a plane with this garage door pattern on it I'll have this shop be closed down and what better to be closed for the summer than a winter clothing store well that's pretty much all for the section one stores I want to update but right at the turn into the main room we've still got this little cafe to work on I moved the lights up off the counter and swapped the register out then I messed around with the cafe sign but decided to just use a flat Fountain Cafe sign then I set up a few textures and brought in the good old steel counter from Super Bell subway now this is more like it but we're still not done yet we've got to figure out something for the place next door it seems to be some kind of cosmetic store or something but by this point I was pretty burned out from all the store updating and I really had no clue how I was going to make something out of this shop but after a break I got myself to make this store work at any cost so I opened the sign texture looked for something close enough and said screw it anti-freeze that's probably what's in these bottles anyways after some texture stuff this looks good enough enough at this point I felt like I was ready to work on the Food Corp I started out with some easy texture stuff and set up a few lights I started putting some logos on these plastic cups I also put this mooo Meadows branding on the milk cartons and some other random brands on some other random containers then I set up the steel counter in the back so that they actually have somewhere to prepare food in here I'd say this food Court's looking a lot better let's set up this ramp in the exit section this was the same exact process as the plaza ramp and yielded equally great results I've noticed that the best way to unwrap slightly complex objects is to select basic components SL shapes and unwrap them individually and of course I had to put the ivy up too now that I'm over here I should update some of these Textures in the exit section the floor hasn't even been replaced and that's the first thing I did to this model after that I did some work in the sun room starting with the palm tree and foliage I also updated these benches and made sure to do so for all the other benches in the mall then I started setting up some nice Lighting in the sun room that is until the lights stopped working seems I've hit the 128 light limit and I've done almost nothing to manage them so I put all of the lights into several collections that are organized by location that way I can keep most of them hidden and only activate the lights in the section that I'm rendering now that this room looks nice I made sure that the entrance was up to date as well I revamped the flower bed and fixed some of the walls at this point I was feeling like I had done most of what I needed to do on this project but there was still plenty ahead like the parking lot I started with the palm trees separating and updating one of them to duplicate over the old ones and it looks like some of the old ones kind of got obliterated somehow whoops I made sure not to just delete all of the old palm trees at once cuz then I might forget where some of them were I also set up the distant low poly trees after the palm trees I put a normal map on the road and fixed how horrible I made it look it's still not great I'll fix that later for now I'd rather update these big brick blocks I decided to bring back the original shell brick cubes so I upscaled the texture in Photoshop and made a normal map for it that's pretty nice and these new cubes are 12 triangles instead of 450 that means I'm saving 1,784 polygons this way I also updated the cool shell wall texture from the original Coconut Mall it's something that I felt this was still missing I feel like I've made some real progress but I was past the point of being impressed earlier I got to a stage in the project that I felt like this was turning out really great but by this point I had been working on it for weeks and had sort of forgotten how the original BCP version looked but if I go back and look at the BCP version for a moment yeah this is an improvement for quite a while I went around doing pretty un interesting updates fixing some things in section one making a render for this window setting up exterior textures setting up some of the outof bounds but visible areas fixing more random spots that I accidentally deleted at some point and eventually I made my way to unwrapping the road this process was pretty bad as are the results it's mostly the transitions from one section of track to the next I think most of it looks a lot better after that I did a bunch more texturing out in the parking lot putting concrete on the stairs fixing bushes and flowers and setting up the outside entrance then I went back inside grabbed some renders of different stores and set them up I kept updating small things until I noticed that these gold rings looked really bad now I did update the gold texture but lots of textures look bad on this now I ended up just putting something on it that looked decent and hoped this issue would not show up again after a little more random work I ended up creating a new blender project I'm not really liking how this is turning out I think I'll start over well actually this is a project for creating and rendering new storefronts to put in some of the windows I just want to get the renders from here so I'm allowed to use as many polygons and textures as I want I started by taking some of the items from the mall that I know I'll need by using contrl C to copy them and contrl V to paste them into the new project but wait these cups look so bad now and again it's not the texture it's the geometry well it's nothing I can't just ignore for a little longer the first shop I set up was this princess Orange store I used the same wall normal map with green and orange colors then I rendered it and started working on the next shop this was nice it felt like I was back to working on the good stuff no more unwrapping roads or man ing a ridiculous amount of objects just designing and executing cool store designs based on signs my favorite was the supermarine world store I ended up making a fish tank and putting a starfish PNG in there from an animal crossing texture I found then I made some basic sand out of a cube that I Loop cut and reshaped a bit and this sand texture is actually just the ceiling texture after that I made some coral and brought in some fishes from Super Mario Sunshine I was going to download the model but instead I just threw the preview image into Photoshop and generated a normal map for it the nice thing is I can afford to do this since these textures aren't going to end up being in the final track instead everything's just going to be compressed into a single render then I added a few snorkel on the wall from Splatoon 2 and I modeled a surfboard to hang on the wall another really cool store to make was the record shop this was the perfect opportunity to hang up the album cover I made for a Mario Kart track details video and I made a vinyl record out of a cylinder with the Splatoon 2 outdoor hat texture on it which should not have worked I also used some Splatoon 2 headphones and brought in a speaker from Mar Mar Kart Stadium now I'm faced with a bit of a conundrum because this render needs to go in two stores Shy Guy records and Roy smooth sounds luckily they have the same color scheme but which sign do I put up I ended up just putting up this sale sign so that way this render works for both stores and we still have something going on behind the counter now that these renders are done I can put them in their respective stores this was really satisfying having all of the cool renders done and placing them under their Signs Now the main room has a little more going on so did the escalator handrail they broke two I can put up with the gold rings and plastic cups but the escalator handrails no that's the final straw I need to figure this out I was able to determine that it obviously wasn't the material because when applied to new geometry it looks fine I thought I might have literally decimated everything by accident when I used the decimate modifier at some point but the only thing that seemed to have any effect was to change the shading between smooth and flat they both looked terrible but this must be connected to the issue and as it turns out I was right when whenever I would update these textures I would separate the geometry and rejoin them to the main model after I was done updating them and through doing so one way or another their shading was Auto smoothed Auto smooth shading sets different faces to smooth or flat depending on their angle and probably some other variables this is supposed to make the object look better but it seems my copy of blender is a tad bit inebriated because this looks a little less than better heck it's far off from good nay I say it's right about terrible now this didn't make everything look bad but it definitely did go over well with the escalator handrail I tried for a while to revert this somehow but there didn't seem to be a way of restoring geometry to its original shading well there is one way I reimported the original BCP model into a new blender project and began separating the escalator handrails these have the right shading and after pacing them into the new Coconut Mall I can apply the texture again this wasn't the best solution but it worked and it wasn't that bad for just these handrails and then to my horror I discovered that there was a number of things that looked terrible and required replacement including all of the pillars you know the cubic cylindrical triangle pillars that that suck to select those yeah those ones those are the ones that I have to select all of them and move them over to a new project text yeah all my but I got it together and pushed onward doing all the little finishing touches I've said it before but this is probably the most dangerous part of these projects or any project really it's that last 5 to 10% that regrows elsewhere once completed an endless Chase for Perfection that is all too easy to be swept up up in not to mention the organizing side of this project well it didn't exist so I really just had to pick some point that was good enough lest I decide to redo major sections of the model anyways I fixed a few more oddly shaded surfaces and brought the pan back to the Coconut Mall sign this time he's in full 3d although he doesn't have legs tough luck all right now I have to hurry and start making renders before I see something that needs fixing of course I I did see things that needed fixing I added a fish tank under the stairs too I spent a long time on that but now rendering for real this is the stage where the bugs become features that palm tree texture it just looks that way because these trees couldn't handle the rad energy of this building or the organic antifreeze they water them with h that looks kind of weird and glitchy well what do you mean I set the roughness to zero that's your reflection the project ends when you're ready to say this is my work if you love it you love it if you hate it then too bad cuz I'm not fixing it this project was an uncoordinated Adventure towards a better Coconut Mall I knew it couldn't be perfect but just to make it better than something done by a team of actual professionals was pressure enough and there were plenty of times when I had to ask myself is this an improvement did I make something cohesive don't these colors kind of look like a public bathroom but after finishing this project I can say that the answer to these questions is yes now I kind of want to redo the color scheme but alas the project is done it's hard for me to be proud of this just because it's hard to comprehend this model isn't like Toad's Factory or Luigi's circuit where I can go yeah this racetrack looks better than that old one where I can say say that the gear room is clearly improved because in Coconut Mall it all kind of just Blends together into one chaotic but awesome model I think that the Toad's toy store looks better and I think that the floor tile looks better but it's hard to see it all as a better version of the same track that I originally started with I think it's because it isn't really the same track I've changed it so much visually that it feels like a new track and I think that that in itself is kind of an accomplishment that I haven't achieved with any of my other previous revamps but uh still watch those other ones because they're really long and they have a lot of advertisements in them anyways I think it's time to show off some renders I bring you Coconut Mall renovated restored revitalized and reopened [Music] [Applause] [Music] it may have turned out a little public bathes but I think overall it's a pretty big Improvement and it better be cuz that's what this is but it was also a total blast albeit an absolute nightmare I decided to leave the whole modding thing to somebody else because well this already took a couple of months to do and I think in another week my subscribers might fire me plus I know I'll botch it with my non-existent modding skills anyways and I figured there'll be some folks out there who would enjoy setting up a model like this I think that these videos are a really cool opportunity for a sort of open collaboration with anyone who wants to do stuff with these models which is a nice sounding way of saying ah someone else will do it I did set up things so that it'll be easy or at least hopefully possible to mod the track into the game and I really do think that there are people who would appreciate a decent quality model to make a track out of I know I certainly enjoy seeing the models I create turned into something playable anyways I hope you got something out of this video I think I'm done revamping tracks for a little bit I think I'll probably do another when the Andromeda collides with the Milky Way if I start then then it should be out sometime around the heat death of the universe but before entropy drapes over our reality and consumes the final breaths of this universe I'm going to do some weekly DS game reviews or something I've really missed manageable editing timelines and having an actual upload schedule well I think that's going to do it I'll talk at you guys later thanks [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Charlie's Café

Views: 59,508

Keywords: MK8DX, BCP, Booster Course Pass, Mario Kart, Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Wii, Mario Kart Wii, MKWii, Blender, 3D Modeling, 3D Model Timelapse, Mario Kart New, Mario Kart New Track, Coconut Mall, Mario Kart Mall, Get Coconut Mall'd, Mario Coconut Mall, New Coconut Mall

Id: wayWW1oBw38

Length: 41min 37sec (2497 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024