Headlamp Material & Texture : The headlamps (and rear lamps, which are not shown in the final image) were UV mapped to fake the protrusions on the glass.


Light Bulbs : Nothing special. They are only white ovals with the "Emit” parameter set to 0.318.

Tyre Material & Texture : The rubber material is dark and scarcely reflective (I wonder why?!). I wasn't originally going to use the "Goodyear” logotype, but I realised that it was one of the features that would make the model look real and believable, instead of just being an oversized toy. I used a very simple Color map (although "color” is a bit of a stretch, because it's only a b/w image), and a Bump map to elevate it and to simulate the threads.

Lighting

The lighting is a single HDRI probe (created by Keith Bruns, keith@unparent.com).

Rendering

In order for this scene to look photorealistic, I chose to work with Yafray (version 0.0.9, www.yafray.org), which is a free open source raytracer which has been integrated into Blender. I set it up to render at "Full GI”; the rest were default settings. The render time was 1 hour and 23 minutes.

Post Production & Final Image

The rendered scene came out a little bit dark, so I used Paint Shop Pro (version XI) to correct that problem and to soften the shadows.

Now, I wanted the final render to look like a magazine advertisement, so I took the "General Motors” logo, changed one of the letters, and used the tasteless but hilarious "gorilla” reference as a tagline.


If you want to make your own version of this car, I will leave you my own blueprints (at least they're better than the Simpsons'!).


Thanks A LOT to the team at 3DTotal for giving me this opportunity.