[WIP] Mclaren - Intense race aftermath (Need criticism before moving to interior modeling.)
It's been a long time since I have modeled anything. So, the idea is to test my patience for details because that's where I am weakest when it comes to modeling, every time I am modeling, I just want to finish up and see the result and I believe that plus lack of some techniques was causing me to have bad models/renders.
I decided to work on a car that has a complex shape and make the interior, exterior and a scene with a story behind it all. I will be making a scene where the car has just finished a very intense race and is at the pitstop.
I am almost done with the exterior. There are a few mistakes left to rectify such as the front and back grills symmetry line etc, but I would appreciate some criticism on what you think I should fix on the exterior before I move into making the interior of the car.
Replies
First glance, looks ok.
However can you please post a reference you'd modeled off of and a non sub divided hgh-poly wireframe image,
Difficult too verify accuracy without knowing which variant or sub-variant you're generating because there's a veritable bunch of them from this legendary marque, also may've spotted a shading/crease issue upper door panel but then again can't be sure?!
I'm not really following a reference 100%, but the one i use is egarage.com and from forza horizon game's garage i take screenshots or just look at them, their version is way different from the actual car.
Here are the wireframes:
Low Poly "Kinda":
And here are the high poly screenshots:
Thanks for that,
Yep, well your topology is certainly flawless so possibly lighting threw me off, what I'd thought could be a problem where the crease terminated:
Guess I'll have to eat my words :)
Edit:
Also looks like the Forza CB body shell, in my opinion was referenced from McLaren's 750S Sports Series.
It's far from flawless, there are some things that I don't know how to solve, and I don't know how to search for the solution and i don't know the techniques myself.
For example, for a car this detailed how would you keep the poly count low enough to be considered optimized, i mean the body without wheels and grills as textures with alpha alone cost 700k tris, with wheels, brakes and tires it is 2 million triangles and i haven't finished the interior yet, without it would probably be around 3 to 4 million polygons. I guess it is just my lack of experience.
After 14 something years as a hobbyist just modeling vehicles alone, I'm also still learning how to be efficient having not previously worked in a production environment/studio so my recommendation is to look into workflows authored by specialists. For instance Karol Miklas amongst others, I believe will provide further indepth optimization info, plus I think bears keeping in mind that a Gran Turismo PS3 (2010) automotive mesh was around 500k tris and since tech has moved on quite a ways, dealing with high poly counts seems less of an issue nowadays.
https://80.lv/articles/vehicle-production-for-games/
Occasionally I'd refer to his free Porsche 911 model, he'd generously released a while ago, personally for use as a teaching tool essentially get too grips with his modeled or baked smooth normal - mid poly approach.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/PoNRQ3
Hi, here is a list of issues to consider divided in several categories.
General:
- currently, race car bodies are made out of carbon fiber that is painted or wrapped (autocollant)
- wheels sit inside the wheel arch and not flush with the fender and are slightly tilted inwards (camber)
- usually the rear wheel is slightly bigger than the front one, look for exact specs online
- in car body design, surface continuity is very important, like the hood and the front bumper should be a fluid continuous surface
- race cars often have a simplified headlight as oposed to the production version of the car so make sure you use correct references
- door sills have some kind of gap and are almost never flush, especially on a race car post-race
Modeling (i assume that this is done for real time engines):
- in general car models for games do not have milions of polygons so you need to know a few optimisation techniques like silouette retention and baking normal information
- of course the best quality mesh is one with loads of polygons but for smaller things you can use a low poly version and bake down details from the high poly; a good example would be the wheels
- for the actual car body it is often a "mid poly" and no baking is involved, maybe some normal locking is used
- again, surface continuity is key and you need to either model each body part with sub-d and compensate for that workflow or model the whole body and separate the parts *after* subdivision
- if using subdivision, some optimization is required afterwards as it creates unnecesarry polys in small or flat surfaces
- some parts can be created in other ways (poly modeling, boolean modeling, etc) not everything should be subdivided
- most edges should be slightly rounder so that they catch nice highlights without creating aliasing
Materials:
- as mentioned above, race cars have carbon fiber bodies so any scratches in the paint should expose that
- use references from contemporary race cars to mimic realistic wear and tear
- generally, do not use games as reference, as the artistic direction on those can be heavily stylised, hollywood-ized, budget-constrained, etc.
- debris, grime and wear occurs in key areas and never uniformly all over the car, sometimes in obvious places and sometimes in counter intuitive places; again, reference is key
- obviously, different types of materials should be portrayed as such so that there is no confusion which part is made of what material i.e. metal parts should look like metal, glass parts should look like glass, etc
There is a lot more to cover here and getting everything right is almost impossible but i think you are on the right track, keep it up!