Photo Realistic Nissan 350z

octokitty

Hey guys, I had to take a break on my character to work on this for an advertising job I'll be interviewing for next week. I really wanted to have at least one photo realistic thing on my website. So here's where I am. I'm really happy with it, it's the first thing I've ever done like this. But I'm not sure if the lighting or materials are the best they could be. So if anyone has any advice please let me know!

LRoy

definitely going to need a lot of work with the lighting/shader.

check out some of these http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/category/24/Lighting-and-Rendering

octokitty

thanks, but i really don't want to spend money on a tutorial right now... so any free one's would be great.

biofrost

Follow LRoy's advice, the model looks fine but how you render it out is going to make or break it's presentation

octokitty

I'm really not gonna spend money on tutorials. Although I want to get better at lighting and rendering, that isn't my focus. So, for now I want to at least have good basic lighting, it doesn't have to be amazing. And I totally get that good lighting/rendering shows off the model better. So if anyone has any advice, or tutorials that are free that would be great. What makes this look weird/bad and what should i do to make it better??

MrHobo

What usually helps sells a car model is the environmental reflections, which your lacking right now. I'd guess a good place to start would be a cubemap. I honestly dont know where to start with that. Checking the wiki would be a great place to start a search.

engelmanna

Are you doing this in an engine or with a renderer like Mental Ray? If you are doing it with Mental Ray, I'd start looking for tutorials here:

http://www.cg-cars.com/forumdisplay.php/12-Lighting-and-Rendering-Tutorials

I also like to visit this next link for lighting and rendering stuff:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=21

If you have any specific questions I can try and answer them too. Good Luck!

octokitty

Thank you! That is the sort of thing I'm looking for! I'm gonna look over that site tonight. Oh and I am using Mental Ray for this.

AlecMoody

Automotive studio lighting can get pretty technical. The traditional studio approach is to light the background in a way that produces pleasing reflections rather than directly lighting the car.

Your perspective is also bad/hiding the model. It looks like there are quite a few ares of the model that could be refined but its hard to see what is going on with that wide angle camera.

Try and take a closer look at areas like the A pillar and also the cross contour lines on the doors (especially where they meet the roof lines). In general the way the panels meet each other and the areas around the windows look like they could be improved.

Jesse Moody

Yeah for this to be photo real you got your work cut out for ya. Right off I can see you didn't model the nissan logo on the hood. Thats kinda big in my opinion. I mean the shape is there but it's not recessed and missing the text.

But the biggest thing is what others have already mentioned. Lighting and Materials. The tires and rims really look cg. We are only seeing one shot too but it seems like there are things missing that should be visible on the front tires too. (Rotors, Calipers, Etc)

The blacked out windows also scream there is no interior. It's ok but the black doesn't look like glass all that much. Granted to be glass it would have to be transparent but it could be more reflective instead.

It is a decent start but you still got a lot of stuff to put into this to make it look nicer. Those tutorials everyone suggested are worth their weight in gold but there are so many free tutorials out there for rendering cars, creating nice car paint materials, etc.

pior

I'd say you could go 2 ways. Either get pretty technical and delve into advanced rendering techniques ... or just go quick and (not so) dirty with realtimes tricks, basically just applying a clean cubemap reflection on the body and hacking everything else - prelit background, alpha planes for shadows, and so on. You can even comp stuff in photoshop to simulate effects you dont have access to. (after all, that's how engines and movie renders work)

Just grab a good reference you like and try to match it using all the smart ways you can think of.

octokitty

Ok, cube map seems to be the way to go for now. I just realized I only have 2 days left to finish this, so simple lighting is fine. I guess it might not end up photo realistic, but actually now that I think about it, I don't know why I thought I could do advanced lighting when I don't know much about it, haha. I guess I overestimated what I would be capable of doing. Anyway, I'm gonna try the cube map tomorrow and see how that goes, thanks!

AlecMoody

if you want to do something outdoors I have HDR environments with backplates on my site.

scroll down to the bottom:
http://www.alecmoody.com/5/index.html

Jesse Moody

one technique i have used in the past with mental ray is floating a white self illuminated plane above the car that actually creates light and reflections. It worked good. Can't remember all the details this was probably about 4 years ago.

But yeah my suggestion. Check out 3 Point Shader lite and create your materials in that. You can do real time lighting in viewport, set up nice refelctions, env based lighting, etc. Even do DOF in the viewport.

Drav

Get the Vray demo, find a vray car lighting tutorial, theres a good one with a beetle that goes through the material setup and lighting/background setup. Then find a Vray hdr environment map tutorial.......works very well for cars, but be perpared to spend a bit of time getting it just right. Should be doable in 2 days, and will get you a much nicer render than mental ray imo.

Skillmister

Only problem with the vray demo is the watermark. You can photoshop it out with a bit of effort in which case this becomes very useful
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-3d-studio-max/create-a-photorealistic-car-render-using-3ds-max-and-vray/

octokitty

i was looking at vray, and i actually was gonna follow that tutorial, but i don't know 3ds max unfortunately and that watermark issue would suck. so i think i'm gonna stick with mental ray and try the a simple light setup. I've been seeing a lot about self illuminating planes over the car, and cube maps, so ill probably do something like that. Although I would try vray in the future, for this i just dont have the time.

octokitty

Ok i fixed the lighting, and it's funny how looking at that last one, i realize how bad it really was! Anyway, I'm still messing with an illuminated plane i have for those highlights. Oh, here's the light setup I based mine off of, but I changed a few things. So if anyone has any ideas about illuminated planes or adding lights or whatever that would be cool, thanks!



BTW, don't worry I'm gonna add the actual Nissan text to the emblem! I was just waiting til I figured out the lighting/rendering.

owaru

Looks way better ! :poly136:
but the rubber material looks off.

octokitty

thanks! yea you're right about the tires, i'll fix them for the next render.