Making Of 'Mustang Shelby 67'
Introduction
Hi, my name is Marco Aurélio Magalhaes da Silva and I was born in the state of São Paulo, in Brazil. I am 25 years old, I'm married to Cristina Perrotti Peixoto da Silva, and I have a degree as a mechanic technician that I achieved in Senai, Brazil, where I've had most of my experience with technical drawing. With my experience in the industry I decided to get more into CGI by enrolling on 3D courses where I learned the tools of the trade and, mostly, modeling concepts.
I would like to dedicate this work to the CGI School, Melies, in São Paulo, where I had the opportunity to study and develop this model. I also would like to thank João Luiz Boldrini, Rodrigo Pauliki, Matheus Braz Polito, Ronaldo Brito and Rafael Ribeiro, who all helped me in some way in my journey - teaching, motivating and working with me.
Modeling
This Mustang Shelby 67 is a high-poly model with only one subdivision in the mesh (Fig.01).
Modeling With Blueprints
To model this car I employed a popular technique used by modelers to achieve precision, which is poly-by-poly modeling. To me, this is the best technique to create complex inorganic models such as this one. I used a reference image often referred to as a "blueprint" which can be applied to the viewport or in grids within the 3D software. I'll give an example now of how to apply an image to the viewport using 3ds Max 2009:
Another way to add the images to the viewport is to create four grids in their respective axis. This was the technique I used for this model (Fig.08).
Here is an example of a blueprint used for the modeling of my Mustang Shelby. For realistic inorganic modeling it's imperative to use one of these. Blueprints can be acquired for free at www.the-blueprints.com (Fig.09).
Modeling Poly by Poly
I'll now illustrate a demonstration in 15 steps of how to use the poly-by-poly modeling method. I used a blueprint with four orthogonal views with good image resolution: Top, Front, Left or Right, and Back. Without blueprints it is much harder to achieve satisfactory results (Fig.10).
Materials & Textures
In this project, I used textures that I found on the internet through a Google search. They were free to use and were not taken from stock image sites. I created most of the final textures in Photoshop CS2. I use this older version of the software because it's enough for my needs, and the process is the same for newer versions. The main textures have a resolution of 3000 by 3000 pixels, which gave sharper detail. The bump textures were used to create the feeling of depth in some details of the model. The textures used can be seen in Fig.11.
Shaders & Settings
For the shaders I used a VRay Material with some adjusted parameters, as shown in Fig.12 and as follows:
Car Shader
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Diffuse
Diffuse: R: 0, G: 0, B: 0
-
Reflection
Reflect: R: 50, G: 50, B: 50 | Falloff: Black and White
Highlight glossiness: 1.0
Refl. glossiness: 0.98
Subdivs: 12
-
Refraction
Refract: R: 0, G: 0, B: 0
Glossiness: 1.0
Subdivs: 8
IOR: 1.6
BDRF
BRDF: Phong
-
Glass Shader
Diffuse
Diffuse: R: 0, G: 0, B: 0
- Reflection
-
Reflect: R: 255, G: 255, B: 255
Highlight glossiness: 1.0
Refl. glossiness: 1.0
Subdivs: 12
Fresnel reflections: Enabled
Fresnel IOR: 2.0
-
Refraction
Refraction: R: 220, G: 200, B: 200
Glossiness: 1.0
Subdivs: 12
Use interpolation: Enabled
IOR: 1.0
- BRDF
- BRDF: Phong
- Options
- Reflect on back side: Enabled
- Chrome Shader
- Diffuse
- Diffuse: R: 0, G: 0, B: 0
-
Reflection
Reflection: R: 171, G: 171, B: 171
Highlight glossiness: 0.98
Refl. glossiness: 0.96
Subdivs: 12
-
Refraction
Refraction: R: 0, G: 0, B: 0
Glossiness: 1.0
Subdivs: 8
IOR: 1.6
-
BRDF
BRDF: Phong
Lighting
This scene is fairly complex in terms of lighting. There are 11 VRay lights, all with Multiply values of less than 20 units. Only four of the VRay lights were projected directly onto the car, while the other seven were turned to face other directions to create blurred reflections and diffuse shadows. This is a very important technique when working with this type of lighting, so that the lights won't be overexposed. I also used four vertical white planes and an extra plane just slightly above them to create the reflection on the body of the car, just as if it were in a photo studio. I used one third of a smoothed sphere to create the impression of an infinite background, with 100% white color (Fig.13).
Even before rendering with custom shaders, it's important to setup and render test just the lighting of the scene, without applying any kind of shaders. This speeds up your work process and is more efficient because the yield is much lighter, and in this case the only concern is whether the lighting works as what you intended or not (Fig.14 - 15).
Rendering with VRay
Using V-Ray to render, I used settings that made an interesting combination. These parameters are not set rules but more of a study and personal preference of my own. If you want to try it out for yourself, I suggest you start off with the following parameters and then tweak them to your liking (Fig.16).
After adjusting the V-Ray parameters, I achieved the result shown in Fig.17 - 21. These all have a resolution of 3072 by 1728 pixels. For these five images I didn't use any extra render passes, such as Shadow, Ambient Occlusion, Specular, etc.
Composition
I decided to take the Mustang out of the studio and get him on the road - after all, that's where such a beauty should be! First of all, I rendered the image with the same settings as before - which did not work too well, as you can see (Fig.22). So I created an Ambient Occlusion pass (AO) to reinforce the corners and the spaces between elements (Fig.23). I took these two images into Photoshop, and with some adjustments of the brightness, contrast, layer blending mode and so on, I finally got a pleasing result (Fig.24).
Fig 22
Fig 23
Fig 24
Fig 01
Fig 02
Conclusion
I hope that with this simple "making of" I have been able to answer some questions about this type of render. It's up to each individual artist to figure out how to tweak the V-Ray settings to their liking - it is a powerful tool that is completely in the hands of willing and talented artists to get the best use out of it.
I would like to thank 3DCreative magazine for this opportunity to discuss a little about my work and experience with 3D. Please feel free to send any questions and/or comments to by email, or through my blog. Thanks for reading!
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