Materials

When I start doing the materials, I always think about how they would act in real live. This makes the creation process much easier. For example, with the rim material (Fig.07), I used simply Vraymtl with a grey diffuse colour and a Reflection glossiness of 0,78 (Fig.08).

Tyre material

The tyre material has a fall off in the diffuse slot going from black to a dark grey value, to give the tyre material a little bit more depth (Fig.09). I always get asked about the headlight material, which was very easily done, simply take a look at the screenshot shown in Fig.10. In the bump map slot I put a gradient ramp, to give the reflection more variation (Fig.11).

Environment

I always start by applying UVW to all parts in my scene, and with the help of the free Texporter plug-in I can export the wire to Photoshop. After that I browse through the 3DTotal Texture CDs and pick the textures that I would like to use and then save them in my local project folder. The great advantage of those textures are that they are perfectly seamless, and so the texture process is so much easier. To give the wall a more "random” feeling I used the stamp tool to add some more structure to it. In Fig.12 you can see the side wall. Now to add some dirt to the bottom of the image, so I use a few of the dirt images from 3DTotal's V5 Dirt & Graffiti” CD. First of all I added a new texture (3DTotal Texture Aged & Stressed) (Fig.13). In the next step I added a layer mask to our previous created layer and put the dirt map in the alpha slot (Fig.14-15). So far, so good. In Fig.16 you can see the added dirt mask. With the alpha slot still selected you can then use your pen tool set to black to paint transparent areas. If you want to see more dirt in some areas set the pen tool to white, and draw some dirt on the wall. The same process works if you want to add some graffiti to the wall. Just load up your image and apply your alpha map and adjust your blending from both surfaces with the pen tool in the alpha slot (Fig.17). I used this same technique for all other parts in the scene.