Automotive testing

[TomMannington]

I can't share any of my archviz work here (yet) so in my spare time I've been messing around rendering some automotive bits and pieces. I find it a nice change of pace from my usual work and get to experiment with a larger variety of materials.

I haven't had a chance to play around with the dome mapping options in the Corona bitmap so I did a quick test last night to see how the car paint I've been working on looks.

HDRI is from AutomotiveCGI, model is by RexFu.
3DS Max 2017 & Corona 1.7 RC3

[TomMannington]

A few more shots from different angles and some tweaks to the car paint - turns out I had the upper flake layer (there are two flake layers) placed above the clear coat. I also reduced the dust layer on the tyre tread so that it fit better with this environment.

[Erald]

Dude, stop it! We can't handle that much fabulousness all together!

[TomMannington]

Dude, stop it! We can't handle that much fabulousness all together!

Thank you for the kind words. I'm also playing around with a studio scene using the Corona Volume material to create some dry-ice esqe myst.

C&C Welcome

[JeffPatton]

Nice work Tom.  The headlights on that last one (volume shot) are especially nice looking.

[TomMannington]

Thanks Jeff, the emissive material has an opacity falloff and the model has two geometry layers so there is a frosted transparent material above the emissive material. Can't take full credit for it as the model contributes to how well it works. This was meant for the latest Automotive CGI competition but between rebuilding my workstation and work it never got finished.

[Juraj]

Love it, looks great :- ).

We were also having some fun with Rex's models but those formats gave me some serious headache. This Mclaren I had to open in Rhino and export as Collada to succesfuly get into 3dsMax, which way did it work for you ? At no point I had sucess with the .objs (exported or from web).

[TomMannington]

Thanks Juraj. Rex's models are awsome, well mapped, but require a fair amount of work in Max. His The Centenario model is probably the easiest to work with but least favourite in terms of looks, I'm yet to find an angle where I like the look of it or a certain feature on the car ruins the overall balance of the image.
The BMW M4 is boarderline useless without a silly amount of hours dividing up the mesh as ouside of the main body panels everything else seem to be individual polygons and I lost patience with it.
The McClaren also took a lot of work to make usable. I used to use Rhino so I re-exported the model to a new OBJ file.

[MGDesignUK]

Great images and good job on the car paint shader. Would you mind posting a link to the HDRI and model please.

[TomMannington]

Car - https://grabcad.com/library/mclaren-570s-2015-1 Beware, it will take some time to get it usable for rendering and there are multiple parts that need realigning, though it is well mapped in the majority.

HDRI - https://www.automotivecgi.org/downloads/backplateshdri/

There is an accompanying Facebook group that is currently running a competion using the McLaren model - https://www.facebook.com/groups/automotivecgi/

[TomMannington]

Playing around with a 911 GT3 R. Decided to go full carbon with yellow detailing. My CEO is a massive Porsche fan so I'm thinking of doing a version sponsored by the company I work for as well.