All I wanted to do was add a ceiling.

For some unknown reason, it seems that the 3D artists working on Goofy Speedway’s Kart Interior had forgotten to export the top plane for the ceiling. Alas, this entire time, there’s been a big hole where that ceiling is supposed to be.

I opened up the interior in Maya and surveyed around the interior to check for any more small corrections I could make. Unfortunately, this led me into a trap that I couldn’t easily escape from.

Take a look at this image I took of the Kart Shop interior:

You can see that the ceiling is missing, but there’s a little bit more wrong in this picture. Actually, no, there’s a lot of things wrong with this image, and much more about the interior itself.

You see, I can’t just fix one thing and let other visual problems persist. Some of these “small” corrections ended up becoming bigger corrections than I had anticipated for. After fixing the ceiling, I found myself re-vertex painting the room, filling in holes and gaps, and tweaking UVs. Here’s a list of the biggest sinners that I corrected from the original interior:

1) Missing Ceiling

This was a very simple fix to do of course, but it made me wonder what went wrong during the process. I had initially believed it was just an export oversight, but after reviewing the source model from Spotify, it had a missing ceiling, too. I could somewhat understand if the normals were flipped, such that the texture was facing outward instead of inward, but there just wasn’t any geometry for the ceiling at all. Really makes me curious to know further context behind this mistake.

2) Backface Culling Issues

This one was also another easy fix. All that had to be done was tag the geometry node to be two-sided. One thing I find strange, however, is that some areas of the display case were already tagged to be two-sided…

The missing 2D image on the bottom right of the display was probably caused by some guy or gal trying to flip the plane 180 degrees to make the 2D graphic fit the display better, but forgot to flip the normals of it.

3) Disproportionate Ceiling Plank

This one was just very, very awkward.

I tried debunking whether this was simply an oversight or a careless mistake. I mean, it could’ve just been a minor oversight since the interior’s geometry may not have been symmetrical with the floor plane…

By comparing the top ceiling plank’s proportions with the floor plane, I ruled out that the artist was erroneously using the ground as a line of symmetry.

To fix this one, I just selected both top and bottom planks along with the flags, and shifted it over a bit to the other end so that both of the pairs at the end were supporting the bottom plank.

4) Floating Ceiling Plank

I suppose this one could’ve been shrugged off as it’s a bit difficult to see from a player’s perspective. However, it still makes me frown. For this one, I went ahead and filled the missing top plane, then duplicated+shrunk some of the iron bar support geometry from below, and connected both ceiling planks together.

5) Floating NPC Counters

This wasn’t too difficult to fix, just snapping vertices together. I just wanted to make sure all four of the counters looked identical to each other at the end.

6) Flipped Display Case UVs

This one baffles me a bit on how this passed model review.

From an initial glance, things may seem okay, but in the display’s background, what the heck is going on in the bottom area?

There’s actually another instance where this texture is used outside of this model, located on the exterior model of the Kart Shop.

It looks like the the curtains are flipped upside down in the interior, so what’s going on with the UV?

Oy vey. The UV is flipped 180, and the shell isn’t within the texture’s proper bounding area.

I went ahead and looked at the original Spotify model for the Kart Shop interior to see if it broke during the build process, but it seems to appear that it’s broken within the original model file.

What is it with these broken parts and existing on the original Maya file??? Did nobody really go in and review these models??

7) Floating Wall Signs

This one felt kind of weird. All of the orange displays had supporting geometry that epoxied the wall. Why not the blue ones?

I know that there are some areas where the artists decided to make certain 2D-like images float off the wall to make it pop out more, but was only done where the player’s camera couldn’t see the image floating. However, the sides of this display are completely exposed, losing some support for that “pop-out” illusion. If a player can see it floating off the wall, then there should probably be geometry supporting it on the wall. Else it just doesn’t make any sense.

Other QoL Tweaks

While these aren’t necessarily visual bugs, I felt like the interior could use a little bit more pizzazz. For one, I went and gave the Kart on display some lighting on its front and rear-view lights.

• I also changed the color of the top ceiling plank to be orange instead of another yellow, just to help with contrast.

• I added in some drop shadows (and darkened some that already existed) for underneath the ceiling plank to give the room a little bit more depth.

• Vertex painted a lot of the geometry in the room to give it more shading; I also painted the areas near the screens on the walls a tint of yellow, just to give it a little bit of a “TV glow”-like feel. There’s not really any defined light sources in the scene, so I decided to use the screens to help out a bit.

• Vertex painted & twisted the banner flags coming from the ceiling so that they’re not just planes sticking out.

The End Results

I spent more time than I had originally anticipated on with tweaking this interior…. but I think it was all worth it.

In hindsight, I personally believe that the interior can use a bit more tweaking, like adding actual ceiling lights and moving the top edge of the ceiling banner somewhere so it doesn’t look like it’s randomly sticking out from the ceiling.

Fortunately, this refurbished version of the interior is live and accessible in Toontown: Corporate Clash! Feel free to check out all of the changes there if you’d like. :)