I am glad to find so many car enthusiasts working in CG field!
Well. Here is a model I built for a personal project. It is Porsche 550 Coupe. Only two cars were manufactured by Porsche for 24 Hours Le Mans race which took place somewhat in sixties. As I know none of those cars survived till now. So I used few photo-references to recreate this car digitally. I also used a blueprint of 550 Spyder model (which is essentially the same model as Coupe. Except Spyder was convertible).
As a light setup I picked a studio lighting. I will post an image showing where I am at this point. I hope you guys will like it.
Here is a test rendering.
I comped/photoshoped it on top of the photo-picture I grabbed from Internet.
The car behind is a real one. The car at the front is CG. Only the body paint I consider to be finished at this point. Everything else wasn't worked out yet.
You could see that some parts are missing (like turn-signals and etc).
I am going to work on headlights now. I am getting a lot of artifacts from refraction shader. And it slows down a render time a lot. One of the main goals is to keep a render time to minimum. That is why I only use "traditional" lights: point, spot, area and etc. No HDR lighting. From what I experience HDR light is too slow. I can't imaging using HDR light rendering full res image with motion blur, high anti-aliasing and heavy geometry...
But i think that it would carroceria it of the car is a little wider and longer. I do not know, to little is this the impression that I have, at least between mudguards the body it seems more longer.
the renders look nice, but based off of this picture it looks like your front fenders arch up too much. Check out the pic...you notice how the tops of the fenders seem to slope gently downward? Yours arch up and then arch downward, giving you a hump in there when it should just be straight. Great looking car though, man!!
You are right. I've probably just got too excited by S curves of this car!
Now I see I did exaggerate front fender curve. I would need to flatten it a bit. Thanks for pointing out!
One of the difficulties I faced is that every reference I used is slightly differrent from each other. Let's say a blueprint I downloaded from the Internet shows that the top line of the door slopes down. While the door on a reel car has a straight line.
Here is the first test on a headlight shader. It took healthy 43:03 minutes to render this image with the decent anti-aliasing. It is 4 times more than whole car! I will try to get some faster alternative. At the same time I don't want to loose any quality. I would appreciate any info on what shader you guys use for the headlight using Maya/Mental Ray.
I also would be very interested to know what technique is being used to render stop-lights, turn-lights. Is it just a plain texture. Or do you guys use bump/displace maps with some form of glass shaders? I just hate to believe those little things on a car model would take more time to render than a whole car itself!....yes...I do use mental ray surface approximation both for tessellation and displacements
I forgot to mention that fot the headlight I use MR dielectric shader with displacement map. In order to make the dielectric material to work you need to specify IOR not lower than 1.5. Otherwise this freaking shader just won't work. I wish it would able to show the property of the glass substance without the refraction! It would be OK....but I really don't like the effect of refraction visible at the bottom of the glass. The real car's headlight glass does NOT refract the light! I just wonder if there is any way to render a glass material with the look of dielectric shader (which is very cool by my opinion) - but - WITHOUT the refraction.
very good model!!!
i like it so much the new cayman pheraphs has taken some of her style from this car... try to put a 3/4 behind your model... the porsche carrera 4S in the first render is modelled?
I also use MR but within Max, and pretty sure it doesn't take 43 minutes to render a headlight, though it will take some time. I don't use refraction. One thing I have found with MRs adherence to actual Physics (as you say) is that the light lense needs to be a solid - not a single sided plane - for best results with using a meaningfull IOR.
I have to say your headlight at the moment looks fine.
I have a half written tutorial on my method ... I'll need to hurry up and finish it and post it.
I think most people use a combination of modelling, with maps for bumpmaps, diffuse and diffusion when creating tail lights.
Love how you have VERY accurately matched the lighting in the ref photo !
Dave
DMMultimedia HomePage Old School Fords, Max/MR and Schnorbill Texturing/Rendering Tutorials
I continue working on stop/turn light transparent plastic shader.
It seems I've finally got to the point when it started to look decent enough.
The first image is what I get straight from the rendering.
Two others were edited in post to add some glow and grain. And color correction for turn light (I made it yellow).
The render time is not too bad...around 5 munutes per frame.
I have to keep number of the surfaces/shaders with raytracing properties to bare minimum. Not simply because more raytracing doubles/triples render time.
It also introduces the all kind of rendering artifacts on the surface of glass.
For instance I can't place a mirror like object behind the trasparent glass. It results too many reflective/refractive calculations. The rendering rays keep bouncing back and forth between the mirror object (bulb reflector) and the glass itself. In order to avoid the artifacts I have to crank the quality settings up...which makes the rendering too long and too unstable....well..
It would be great to know your opinions/comments!
Many thanks!
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