Interview with "Forza 3" game director Dan Greenawalt

Christopher Grant from Joystiq had the chance to talk with Dan Greenwalt from Turn10 about the upcoming sim racer "Forza3":


JQ: Tell us about this new car you guys are showing off in this trailer, the Bugatti Veyron.

Dan: Well, the Bugatti Veyron is kind of one of those Holy Grail cars right now. It's reported to be 1,000-horsepower, though it's actually a little bit less but 1,001 sounds really cool. It's all-wheel drive made by Bugatti with parts from Audi and Volkswagen amongst others. It's got a 16-cylinder engine with four turbos; it's all-wheel drive. It's about the size of a TT, so it's pretty small. And it's the current production car world-speed record holder. So it hit 250 miles per hour. It's a very fast car.

JQ: How did you guys get this car into the game? What process did you follow to build the model, to actually tune it and make it drivable? Did you have to drive it? Did you work with the engineers at Bugatti to duplicate it? How did that work?

Dan: Well, you know, first this car had come on our radar a long time ago and we had contacted Bugatti about it maybe eight years ago -- six years ago, probably. And they really weren't interested in being in video games. But since then they've changed their mind a little bit and become a really strong partner for us.

It's a pretty rare car, it's kind of hard to get your hands on it. But we found one through Bugatti in San Diego, somewhere in southern California. And we had this group named Acme that go in and they laser scan the cars. So the process is they go in and they put tape along the major creases and the major seams of the car and they basically outline all the really nice rounded shapes. And then they use the laser to actually scan those lines directly into a CAD drawing.

It allows them to get incredible level of detail on how they're scanning. And we also take thousands of photos of the car. We didn't drive it ourselves. We did talk to some guys that drove it in our reviewer community and they told us sort of how it drives and what have you.

And then we also spent a lot of time listening to the car and recording other cars on the Dyno, other types of engines, other types of noises in order to recreate the car's sound.

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