This
article focuses on shading and texturing
the Mini Cooper, I’ll talk a
little about rendering with Mental
Ray but I think other people have
covered that in more depth elsewhere.
I’d
wanted to build a cg car for a long
time, but couldn’t decide what
model of car it would be. It was only
after seeing a few New Mini models
I thought I’d have a crack at
the original model. This project would
also be my first time using Maya so
I didn’t worry about taking my
time.
The
car was modeled in the conventional
polygon manner; every element was
constructed from a single plane using
the Connect Poly Shape tools written
by Dirk
Bialluch .
As
always good reference was the key,
I decided to base my car on an actual
cooper. I found a fair few images
of LRX 827E which I really liked (Especially
as it lacked the chrome grill surround).
Rendering
Research
When
I started work on the car I began
also experimenting with the Mental
Ray add-on for Maya. To be honest
it was pretty clunky and extremely
slow. The documentation was useless
and there wasn’t much in the
way of tutorials of help on the web.
I tinkered around with it and tried
to understand the Global Illumination
and Final Gathering systems.
I
found the early implementation of
Mental Ray for Maya extremely frustrating
and had almost given up when Alias
got their act together and brought
out the new cleverly integrated free
version. Although still tricky to
master this version was a lot faster.
