After watching the documentary I decided I wanted to do the same thing. How cool would it be to drive a vehicle that painted with its tires? What kind of artwork could I come up with?
Not wanting to take forever on the project, I moved quickly to create a gameplay prototype. The first problem I ran into, though, was that to reuse my existing 3D codebase would require more work than I wanted to spend on a prototype, particularly since I needed to integrate a physics engine to get the effect I wanted for the vehicle dynamics.
So, I took a look at Flash, noticed that there were a few 3D render engines and a few physics engines, and figured "why not?" Granted, I've never used Flash before, but I went to Adobe's site, downloaded the Flash 30-day trial, and went to town.
A few days later, and I have a prototype of CarPaint: http://www.gamesunplugged.net/CarPaint3D.html. If you check it out, be sure to click the Help button to see the controls and instructions.
It turns out that BMW also created an iPhone App off this idea - something I just found that out as I searched for the name of that documentary for this post. I'm going to download it and check it out. In the meantime, I'm going to let the Flash version cook for a little bit as I look at porting it over to a Windows-based application using my engine - and of course consider I'll consider the iPhone App route.
