The cockpit is placed in a cylindrical tube as it is designed to rotate. The front wheels were constructed in the 3D blockout to have enough space in their build to rotate as well, allowing for the car to lean into corners to give it a distinctive look. The mesh was designed to avoid any intersection when rotations were taking place (Fig.06).


The wheel units themselves have a small turbine in the rear of the central divide. The power to this turbine is fed by the motion of the wheels that it sits between. While moving forward the turbine provides down-force, but when braking, the entire unit rotates 90 degrees to face forward, which reorients the turbine and allows for the air-brake to open (Fig.07).


I decided to try and set the design into some kind of simple environment to get a feel for how it may look (Fig.08). This gave me a chance to check out materials and the overall shape. I was happy with the results, but felt the design really needed to have some elements added to it to make it look more credible.



I came across some amazing JSF development hangar pictures while browsing the net, which can be seen in Fig.09. I wanted to try and replicate the feel of these pictures and so set about blocking in a basic scene.


To save time and get high quality render plates for compositing, I sent the scene without lights to my friend, Alex Jupp, who had recently been working with V-Ray. He quickly knocked out some renders based on the position of the light housings above the car. The purpose of these plates was not to make pretty final renders, but to get an assortment of qualities that would be convenient to work with in Photoshop for the purpose of compositing.

These renders were as follows:

• Scene Wireframe (Fig.10)
• Ambient Occlusion (Fig.11)
• Area Lights (Fig.12)
• Reflections (Fig.13)
• Reflection Overdose – don't stare or your eyes might start bleeding! (Fig.14)
• Lighting and Reflection Variation (Fig.15)
• Specularity (Fig.16)