"Great driving. You've qualified to roll"

In a prior racing adventure, I used modular track segments-this proved more complicated than it would seem. As such, I drew a course in a vector graphics program and imported the SVG file into Blender. Solely for proof-of-concept purposes, I based it on the Fujiyama Speedway as depicted in Namco's "Pole Position II".

In Blender, the file showed up as a coplanar vertices and edges, so getting two additional dimensions required 

1. Converting the path to a Mesh, so that I could work with it
2. Extruding the mesh vertically, creating a set of zero-thickness faces in the shape of the outline 
3. Solidifying these faces, making boxes of varying length and orientation, but uniform width and height

The "solidify" operation, BTW, helps one avoid the "front but no back" problem when the game engine has to render a side of an object

There came other artistic challenges, and matters with the Navigation Mesh, that led me to separate the walls from the roadbed.

The next step was setting waypoints on the roadbed so that the engine's pathfinder ("movement AI") would always move in a forward direction. This made it easier to set an AI destination that was ahead  of the player.

I ran into a problem when the camera ended up outside the course, but was aimed at the car, and got around it by making the walls chain-link fences with transparency.

So far, I think highly of the Universal Rendering Pipeline, as I seem to get higher framerates with the graphics chip dealing with rendering.