Introduction

Hello, my name Is Mile Eror and I am a freelance 3D artist. In this article I will talk about how I made my image of the Volkswagen Scirocco and show you some of the steps that were needed during the creation process.

Concept and Idea

On this project, one of the biggest tasks was creating materials that were somewhat similar to car paint. With this in mind I did some research regarding studio lightning and what kind of setup is used on physical sets. If you think the lighting setups inside a 3D package are tough, check out the actual physical sets. That's what I call heavy lifting. It's not pretty; that's for sure (Fig.01)!



From this research I found some astonishing images from studio shoots and wanted to see if I could pull off the same result, but inside 3ds Max.

Before the actual modeling, as in most of the cases, I gathered a lot of reference images, details and some material references. This formed something that I call my reference map, which is usually just one huge canvas where I have all the necessary material. Sometimes I have a couple of separate ones, but that really depends of the project. Fig.02 shows what I mean.



Another map that I made was all about locations and textures that I could use for the stage and environment. This helped me to lock in the mood and color space for the entire shot (Fig.03).