Project Overview: Plymouth 1971 Cuda Hemi
Humam Munir focuses on the texturing, lighting, rendering and post-production as he reflects on how he recreated this classic car.
Introduction
My name is Humam Munir, a freelance 3D artist. 3DTotal asked me to write a project overview of my image Plymouth 1971 Cuda Hemi, so I'm going to focus on texturing, lighting, rendering and post-production. This won't be a step-by-step tutorial and I won't dwell on the modeling part because there are a lot of tutorials about this kind of thing already on the internet that you can find easily.
References
When starting any new project, it's very important to find some high quality references that can have instructional influences on your work. A good reference should do two things: match your ideas and give you ideas.
I Googled some images of the Plymouth and downloaded the pictures. I also found a free blueprint on www.the-blueprints.com.
Modeling
As I mentioned before, I'm not going to dwell on the modeling. You can see the main model of the car body in the image below.
Unwrapping
I did a planar unwrap. I didn't worry about perfect unwrapping at this point; I simply wanted to define my unwrap seams while I had the correct polygons selected, to save time.
Here you can see a simple part of the model - the hood - that I've chosen to explain some of the steps that I followed to create my textures. I used textures from the 3DTotal Textures V08:R2 - Vehicles DVD
When creating something like a car, it's important to use dirt to add realism. The following images show the difference between using dirt and not using dirt.
Maps
For the car paint I used a Shellac map, then in the base slot I used a VRayMtl shown in the image below.
In the Shellac slot I also used a VRayMtl.
The setup for the other materials can be seen in the following images, along with the final texturing.
Lighting
The lighting for this image was quite easy. I only used two lights: a V-Ray light with a direct light and an HDRi.
For the sky I used a V-Ray HDRi and I put it in the V-Ray dome light map slot, and inside environment map slot. The main light was the direct light.
Camera
A V-Ray physical camera was my choice for this image
Rendering
I made a lot of test renders before reaching the final render. For this I used V-Ray RT, which is a very useful test rendering engine because it gives you a fast render and allows you to see everything and change anything. I started off using low values in the render properties and once I'd checked everything was okay, I increased the values.
I'd also recommend that you use Render Elements, as it's a powerful tool in your hands!
Post-production
Photoshop was the program that I used to merge all of my render elements and composite the final image.
Applying Hue/Saturation
The next step was to add some car headlights. Creating headlights in Photoshop is very easy. I started by making an elliptical shape selection.
Then I filled it with a black color and added a Lens Flare filter.
Next I resized it and moved it on top of the car light.
Finally I set the layer to Screen and played around with the opacity until I got the result I was after. And with that the image was finished!
I may not be the best, but I always like to share what I can. Thank you for reading this project overview and I hope you found something here helpful!
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