iRacing Staff Member Profile: Technical Art Director Kevin Combs

For this week of the iRacing Staff Member highlight series, we’ve got one of iRacing’s OGs! Our guest joins us with an incredible background story, as a hobby and lifelong interest in motorsports and game development eventually led to his seat here at iRacing. Here’s more about iRacing’s Technical Art Director, Kevin Combs.

• Who are you, and what is your job title at iRacing?

I’m Kevin Combs, I’m a Technical Art Director here at iRacing.

• How long have you been working at iRacing?

I’ve been here from the start – nearly half my life now!

• What got you interested in working for iRacing?

I’ve always loved motorsports, plus I’m a computer nerd, so it’s really a match made in heaven. When Papyrus released IndyCar Racing, and then the IMS expansion that came with a paint kit, I was forever a fan. That paint kit, and editing those little .pcx files, fed the part of my brain that enjoys seeing changes and stuff I make in-game, that’s given me a dopamine hit since the first time I figured out how to change the explosion size of the bananas in the old QBasic game Gorillas in the computer lab in grade school.

Though I played everything from Papyrus, I got really into Doom WADs and Quake mods during my high school years. Then I got into creating mods for a great flight simulator named Fighter Squadron: The Screamin’ Demons over Europe. I made an Akagi aircraft carrier, with a collidable deck to try to land on, an A-36 Apache, and tutorials to help other modders. The developers of the game sent me a copy of the program they used to create models named Multigen Creator, but a new game had just came out that took my attention away, a game called NASCAR Heat by Monster Games.

I got really into modding that game. I released restools, with the help of the Monster Games developers and the producer for the game, and they happened to use this weird program named Multigen Creator for their tracks – it was kismet! I made lots of tutorials and guides and helped folks to mod the game and create tracks.

That’s where I met John Hughes, our Senior Car Artist here at iRacing, who has also been here from the start. He ran a site named High-Compression which painted cars and made season packs for NASCAR Racing 4 and NASCAR Heat. I painted Robert Pressley’s #29 Scooby Doo car that I had a little diecast of. John is a real art aficionado, so he invited me to post my paints on his site.

That email sparked off everything that would eventually lead both of us to be part of iRacing. I closed my awesome GeoCities site, and moved over to HC and painted tons of cars. We loved the Truck Series–I had been a big fan since the first super trucks season back in the mid-90s, so we eventually decided to create a Truck Series mod for that game.

Things got repetitive though, and I did eventually burn out and drifted off to a new game–Microsoft Train Simulator. Folks were mad at the time that there was no caboose available, so I got into modding that game and figured out how to get rolling stock and locomotives working. I released a safety caboose, a SW1200 Switcher, and some other things. I wasn’t a huge fan of trains but I always loved seeing Chessie System trains as a young kid in Ohio, with the cool orange yellow and blue color scheme, and the sleeping cat logo.

While I was off in train-land, the producer of NASCAR Heat had moved on to Electronic Arts, who acquired the exclusive NASCAR license and were about to release their first PC-based NASCAR game, NASCAR Thunder 2003. He contacted us to see if we’d be interested in doing a truck mod for that game, so that was a fun, new challenge, and I came back to help do that. They sent us the beta for the game, and it was all isimotor1 based. I had messed with Sportscar GT years before, so it was familiar and quick to do, however, I really didn’t like playing that game though. I just remember screaming at the AI that’d always brake in the tri-ovals at Daytona and Talladega.

Meanwhile, Papyrus was getting shut down by Vivendi, and with their final patch to NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, they wanted to sneak some extras in for the community–namely the Busch Grand National Series physics, Craftsman Truck Series Physics, and a Trans-Am style of physics. Since we were the truck series folks at the time, they invited us to join Project Wildfire to release some mods and tools for NR2003. I still have that little burned CD of goodies that Steve Myers sent, that included tools and source art for some of the tracks and the cars. I devoured all those samples to figure out how to work with the NR2003 engine and the Papyrus Scene Graph scripting.

That was the peak of enjoyment for modding for me. In addition to the trucks, I was making objects for Indianapolis Raceway Park, Mesa Marin, Mansfield, the improved damage mod to learn how the car scripting worked, the IROC mod, the Trans-Am Mod, and I also did the installers for the mods to try to make them as painless as possible for everyone to use.

I made trailers for our mods, of course with Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire as the song, in the days before YouTube or worrying about DMCA takedowns. I probably had a little too much creative freedom as I’d stick a picture of Natalie Portman in the background of everything at the time… something they had to specifically ask and make sure I wasn’t still doing that when we started creating future-iRacing content!

As PWF was winding down, I got an email from John Henry asking if I’d be interested in doing “this” professionally… and welp, here I am!

• What does your job entail, from daily tasks to larger projects?

I try to keep everything running by fitting into any role that we need. Helping our art folks or engineers figure out issues with our pipeline is my main priority. If anyone has a problem or issue, I drop what I’m doing to try to help fix that so they can continue to work on their stuff.

Kevin and his family!

I try to make tools to help our artists work with our engine, from maxscripts to reduce monotonous tasks, to applications to more quickly get their art into our game formats. I assist with managing the track team, planning assets, sometimes creating assets, creating terrains, night lighting tracks, fixing collision issues that pop up, and fixing bugs that our testers report.

Rarely these days I’m needed to help on the car side of things, but that’s always fun to dig back into, and are usually the most fun challenges to figure out. Stuff like the pitman arm mechanics on the Sprint Car steering, or its movable roof wing, or the mud flaps on the Pro Trucks. I’ve never had a boring day where I didn’t have 50 things that I should be doing, and another 500 things that I would like to improve.

• Are there any projects you’ve worked on that stand out above any others? Something you are proud of?

Oh geez, there’s been so many over the years. Most recently, for the rain in the iRacing Weather System project, our VFX artist departed for other ventures in the last six months of the project, which let me work with the fantastic Alberto Florea to replace all the VFX. It was really energizing to work with him as we were both learning popcornFX and seeing how far we could push our aging renderer! He did an amazing job.

The track projects we’ve done with NASCAR are always special. Chicago was really cool. I finally picked up Houdini and created an HDA tool that allowed me to quickly change walls and generate all the proper UV-mapping and collision information to get it in-game rapidly instead of needing to modify the entire track in our editor to test variations.

That Houdini experience has led to us changing how we do terrain models now, using Houdini’s incredible heightfield editing.

For the New Damage Model project, I was able to quickly create some tools in 3ds Max to generate the necessary collision hulls, mounts, and script information to integrate with the existing cars, so our artists were able to have all that ready before implementation by the vehicle dynamics folks.

Similarly, when we did the Rallycross, I made a cool little tool to map out the windshield wiper paths and generate necessary textures to let the shaders clear the mud and dirt. That’s the stuff I most love to do–taking a difficult or time-consuming task and trying to make it as trivial as possible for our team.

• Are there any future projects that you can’t wait to jump on?

The new renderer is going to be amazing with the capabilities it will open to the art team, so being able to address a lot of tech-debt in our pipeline will be my focus. It still feels to me like yesterday when Shawn Nash first hooked up normal maps in the engine, so being around to see what the folks are planning and already implementing on that development branch is really mind-blowing.

• What are some of your favorite car and track combinations on iRacing to participate in?

I’m a huge Open-Wheel fan, so I love to climb into the rig, with VR, and drive the Super Formula Lights around Mid-Ohio. I’ve also done an insane number of laps in the Mercedes-AMG W12 around Interlagos. I only play offline in developer builds though. I feel guilty when I race online and ruin a member’s race.

• Are there any other video games, racing or not, that you enjoy playing currently?

I finally kicked my PUBG addiction about a year ago. I’m still playing quite a bit of Vampire Survivors when I need a quick 20-minute breather from work. I get bit by the Factorio bug every few months and lose a weekend to that, and recently Space Engineers–it’s addictive to make giant mining machines.

My son has really goten into hockey, so lots of NHL on Xbox. I also still love flight sims, MSFS and DCS World especially, I moved my office six months ago and have yet to reconnect the flight stick and rudder pedals though. Hopefully I can remember how to start up the warthog!

• Outside of iRacing, what other hobbies do you enjoy?

I love playing with Unreal Engine 5, I have so many little development projects in various states. It’s so friendly and fun to just make stuff in that. It feeds that same need I have that modding always did in earlier years.

I’m a voracious reader, especially biographies and memoirs. I have a real soft spot for the Coalwood trilogy of books by Homer Hickam. During COVID, I got back into scale modeling, especially aircraft and racecars, though building stuff in Unreal has taken over for that one. I have a really good stash of kits for the next pandemic!

• What are some of your goals you hope to achieve, either at work or outside of it?

At work, I hope to continue cutting down the amount of institutional knowledge required to work with both our current and our future renderer to create amazing content for many years to come, improving documentation and tooling, and helping to continue to build the best racing simulator we can thanks to our partners entrusting us to be good, respectful caretakers of their licenses and our members for their supporting us throughout these years.

I’m forever grateful to be able to do what I did for fun in my youth as a profession now for 20 years.

• Anything else we should know about you?

I stealthily spend a lot of time watching iRacing streamers, especially Quirkitized and Heikki360es, and have fixed an untold amount of bugs from things seen on their streams or brought up in their chat, so thanks for doing what y’all do!

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