Introduction

This is a Making Of from the first sketch of my idea through the modeling process and the evolution of the car chassis's look and feel till the final Mesh. Light, material and rendering settings are not subject of interest. For further information in that case, look in my VW Concept Making Of - i used scene and materials almost the same way as in the VW Scene.

The Idea

My main idea was, to build a very agressive surreal looking futuristic car - like every little boy wants to have :). One thing, that could help very much to give the whole project a realistic touch, is to take your favourite car manufactur - like BMW in that case - and look for the design line that you can find in all the current car products. If you have an idea what BMW is - and what the modern BMWs are looking like - you know the typical form of the front with that cat-like lights, the bulge of the engine bonnet and of course those renal formed air inlets or the BMW logo in the middle.

So, of course it doesn't have to be BMW, VW or any other known manufactor - maybe you want to model an independent concept car - the biggest problem in that case is the creativity - or better i should say no creativity :)
I mean - if you don't want to model a Peugeot Concept - don't copy the design line - otherwise all people who see your finished work will tell you even those similarities - and that is never a good critic for a design.

Now, when i was sure to make a BMW - i was thinking of the main body shape. I had two options in mind:

First: A well known v formation like almost all Lamborghini, Ferrari, Trans Am and so on, have.

Another very futuristic main chassis form is an aerodynamic drop like form, like the Lexus concept car, well known from the movie Minority Report or the Bugatti Veyron.

My final design - it's a combination of both, i think.

The Concept

In this case i prefered the drop like design or a combination ob both - so i made some ugly sketches to see how the lines work together, not very detailed and not very impressive - only to get some ideas and form variations in mind.

After this, the fun begins - the modeling process. I began with two cylinder objects, deleted some not usefull polygons and during the good old poly modeling process i fiddled around with some form variations. You can see an overview of the basic modeling process in this animated GIF:

each Frame is a Snapshot of nearly a half hour work

As i thought the base chassis is finished, i got another idea for the sides - so i nearly rebuilt all the car body again. This trial and error process is not very productive but the result is going to get better with every moved vertex. If you are not a real designer thats the typical kind of finding your own concept.

The very first test rendering - many mesh errors and stupid side design.

Modifications on the sides, windows and on the back parts.

Last changes on the back parts, sides - almost finished.

The Details

I had some details in mind, who would make my concept more individual to other concept studies, especially in this case. Because of the well known car manufactor i had to think of some very independent details to get a more united design - not only a collage of some nice existing cars ;)

When i build the chasis it looked too much like an Audi TT or VW Beatle - so i had to brake the common line - that made me think of a spoiler. I tried to integrate it smooth in the existing line - and it worked.

Another very unique design part are those totally integrated rear-view mirrors. With some BMW typical design elements - like those sharky gills in it - it works, and i cannot imagine this car with traditional rear-view mirrors.

But one of the most characteristic things on this car must be the wheels - especially the rims.i thought about it for a long time. First i had some very rough rims with big angular spokes. This would look cool, of course - but would not be that cold futuristic look i wanted to create. So i got the opinion, that those speed bicycle wheels have instead of spokes one full filled wheel - because of the aerodynamic advantages of such constructions. And this gives a very futuristic look to those bikes - so i made a very similar version - with some holes for better airflow for the brake cooling system (never forget the practical part when creating your own designs).

I made the wheel material like brushed steel - to preserve the hard and cold all over look and feel.

The Post Work

Every still-rendering needs some post work in Photoshop. Common changes i make on every image are contrast and color corrections - but there are some very interesting things that could help you to save rendertime. Especially on modern still render images GI, or similar light simulations, help to get the overall looking much more plastic and even realer then a fake GI with many simple Point Lights. But the process is very time consuming if you want to get a smooth result - and nobody likes grain or GI blobs.
Other examples for this problem are blure reflections/refractions or rectangular Lights. If you don't use high subdivision rates you will get the same ugly blobs/grain in your reflections or shadows, for the second case.

So let's have a look at this:

As you can see i used low subdivision settings for the reflections and for the shadows - but it took almost 4h to render the original image. So i got some ugly graining in the shadows and on the car.

So, i opened the image in Photoshop and slected () the shadows. With Ctrl+Alt+D i made a soft selection of 4px - finally i blured the selection 4 pixels with gaussean blur filter.

I've done the same with the grainy car parts - but attention on the sharp parts - exclude them from your selection, otherwise the overall image looks too blur - then soft selection again, but in this case only 2px, because of the sharpner lines - and gaussean blur 2px in this case.

So look at this result - it took me 10min in PS - if i would use higher interpolation/subdivision settings in the renderer it could slow down the rendering for hours. In some cases - especially on fine parts - it might be more intuitive process to degrain the parts with the smooth tool:

Another problem on many renderings are aliased edges - with PS you can easily anti-alias them with this tool .

Last main thing that i added in PS was the overglow of the front/back lights and the lensflares. Of course i could add the lensflare effects in the renderer post effects - but for still images i like to have the manual control to play with some settings like itensity, size, color and so on. I am sure there are many ways to add lens effects with Photoshop - here is what i've done:

First i added a new layer on top - filled with black color. Then i used Filter->Rendering-Filter->Lensflare->105mm size of 100% is almost ok, if necessary i lower the sice later. Now i set the composition effect for that layer to negativ multiply and change some brightness/contrast for finetuning. This horizontal streched flare is not more than it seems - a vertical shrinked and horizontal streched Photoshop 105mm flare.

Final Images

I hope you enjoyed this little Making-Of and some of the techniques are usefull for your work.

© by Benny Herudek 2004

Introduction

First i have to say, that this is not a step by step tutorial that shows you how to model a car. It just should show you some of my techniques, like the materials or the light setup and some other tricks. Some things are 3d Studio Max and VRay specific, but i think most of the common 3d Solutions like Maya Cinema Lightwave Softimage an so on are very similar and all the tricks must be makeable on all this packages/renderer.

The Modeling of the main car mesh

As we all know Car Modeling is not that hard, as it looks like. There are several methods to make a car. Some time ago i allways made cars with a splinecage, converted it to editable poly and fine tuned the mesh. One of the most interesting methods is to model the base mesh with NURBS. Especially with Rhino you can make very sharp and clear looking car meshes.
But i never had the time to train myself in nurbs modeling. So i like to model my cars with the polymodeling technique.
Just from one Box extruding out the very base form of the car. Then with chamfer, conect, inset and other meshtools i try to refine the mesh where i need more Details. This methode has some advantages: You can easyly add/remove details where you need them, and you finally have 3 differnt detailed Versions of the model. I mean the base polymesh, this is like a real time or lowpoly, for those who need to use it in ral time applications like games, or just some instanceses in the scene which don't need so much Details - maybe for Background.
Then when you aply the MeshSmooth Modifer, you can have two more detailed versions of your car (3 smoothing iterations makes no sense in most cases).

basic mesh without any subdivision/mesh smooth filter

Modeling of the tires and rims

	Modeling of good looking tires is a bit time consulting job, but if you've done it once, you can use the tire for most of your cars. First you have to look for a nice tire on the internet (1), to get a profile structure, if you are a bit creative, you can also make your own unique tires. As i wanted to make a very detailed tire, i was searching for a very special tire and found this -->	(1)
(2)		(3)
(4)		(5)

This is a not so easy tire to model, because of the asynchrony and those many lines. So, first you have to look, what you want to model and what you want to bump. My opinion was to model the red things(2) and to bump the green things(3). - So how to begin? First you have to find out the main tile of the tire(4) - this tile build the whole tire, if you would clone it and stich the clones together like in my Photoshop test(5).

So ive done it - this is my geometry of the final tile:

Now, how i told, you have to clone it (instance) and make a row like in this Screenshot: Now you can apply a Bend Modifer for all the clones together, and make it round. You have to fiddle a bit about, how many tiles you need, i took 28 tiles, but in some cases you only need 20.

The best thing is, that you can change the whole tire, just by changeing one instance of the tiles. But finally i collapsed all the clones to only one editable poly, to weld the vertices and reduce the number of vertices.

Finally i made a nice bump map, for the small lines (3):

Final Testrendering of the tire: (wireframe) - as you see - it´s very to (1)

A rim modeling is very similar, only that i rotate the clones around the middle of the wheel. Finally i collapsed the spokes to weld the vertices and for modeling the inner circle.

Wireframe	MeshSmooth

The Car Paint

I hate Materials so much, hundreds of testrenderings - and if you want to get a nice look, it will render so slow. So my imagine was a dark silver, with nice specular higlights for contrast. The biggest problem is, that a car material only will look amazing, if you have the right environment - but this point i will explain to you later.
So in mind that i want a nice specular/glossy silver look, i used a shellac Material with 2 VRay Materials. The first is reflecting very glossy, to get the specular metal look. The second is a sharp reflecting VRayMat to get a better illusion of typical car paint. All reflections are fresnel with IOR of 1,6.

blur reflection	plus sharp reflection

Resulting material

The Environment

As the model was done i played a bit around with the material reflections and the environment. Because we all know a mirror without an environment isn't a mirror :-) .So i tried some HDRI environments, but they couldn't give me a soft gradient-like reflection, like in those car presentation images. So i made a environment with a grey grandiant - much similar to them, what photographers use in their studios. And for the highlights i used some rectangular VRayLights.

Then heavyly played around with the positions of the lights, to get the best result. Take a look onto the VW logo, its reflection is half splittet into dark and bright - that creates a better illusion of chrome, when i would change the size/position of the lights, the logo only will be bright or dark, that would never give a good chrome effect.

The Final Touch

I nerver presentate any images without some post production in Photoshop. So i like to give the bright color, especially white, a glow - or bloom effect. Some renderers can make this even by the rendering progress, but i like to have the full control and time to play around with some Settings of Contrast, Colorbalance and of course some blur/sharpening of some parts of the image. So look at the difference of the last two images:

the rendering:
after post production in Photoshop:

I hope you enjoyed this little Making-Of and some of the techniques are usefull to your work.

© by Benny Herudek 2005