Alright, let me tell you about this weird little project I did. It started kinda randomly, just messing around with ideas, you know? Somehow, the image of a NASCAR race car being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex popped into my head. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I saw a car commercial followed by a dinosaur documentary? Who knows. But the idea stuck.
Getting the Bits and Pieces
First thing, I needed a car and a dino. I wasn’t about to model a whole NASCAR stock car from scratch, not for this quick thing. So, I went hunting online and found a decent-looking, free-to-use generic stock car model. Good enough. Then, the T-Rex. Found a rigged one too, which saved a ton of work. Rigged just means it has a basic skeleton so you can pose or animate it.
I pulled both models into Blender, just my go-to tool for quick 3D edits. Didn’t do much. Cleaned up the car model a tiny bit, maybe scaled the T-Rex so it looked appropriately huge next to the car. The goal wasn’t perfection, just something recognizable.
Putting it Together (Sort Of)
I decided to use Unity – it’s just what I often tinker with for these small game ideas. So, I imported the car and the T-Rex models. Easy enough. Then I grabbed a basic oval track asset I had lying around from another experiment. Just slapped it into the scene.
Making things move was the next step. I got some simple car controller script working. Nothing fancy, just basic acceleration, braking, steering. Getting the physics right, even basically, took some fiddling. First few tries, the car either wouldn’t move or it would just spin out instantly. Classic game dev stuff.
Then the T-Rex. This was funnier. I didn’t need complex AI. I just wanted it to basically follow the car. So I wrote a super simple script: find the car, turn towards it, move forward. I hooked this up to the T-Rex’s running animation.
The Chaos Phase
This is where things got predictably silly.
- The T-Rex’s movement was jerky at first. It would snap instantly towards the car. Looked really unnatural. Had to smooth that out.
- Its running animation didn’t quite match the speed I made it move, so sometimes it looked like it was gliding or moonwalking. Took ages tweaking speeds to make it look vaguely right.
- Physics interactions were a nightmare. Sometimes the T-Rex would just bump the car and the car would fly into orbit. Other times the T-Rex would get tangled in its own feet and fall over. I spent a good while just disabling collisions or making them super basic so they wouldn’t explode everything.
- Getting the camera to follow the action reasonably well also took a few tries.
It was mostly trial and error. Change a setting, hit play, watch the chaos, stop, change something else. Repeat. Lots of head-scratching, but also quite a bit of laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
The “Final” Product
So, what did I end up with? Basically, a very simple scene. You could drive the NASCAR around the oval track, and this giant T-Rex would stomp along behind you, trying its best to keep up. Its movements were still a bit janky, the car handled like a boat, and the physics were barely holding together. There wasn’t really a ‘game’ there – no score, no objective other than ‘don’t get stomped’.
But honestly? It matched the dumb picture I had in my head. A NASCAR being chased by a T-Rex. It looked pretty much how you’d expect: completely absurd. I showed it to a couple of friends, and we all had a good laugh.
It wasn’t some grand project, just a weekend diversion. Sometimes you just gotta build the silly ideas, you know? Cleanses the palate. Didn’t change the world, but it was a fun little exercise in making something, anything, work, even if ‘working’ just meant ‘it runs without crashing immediately’. And that’s the story of the nascar t rex thing.
