Unit 9: Adaptation - Night Car Textured - Complete

Hello Everyone,

I am back with one of my 3 models complete, it has been a few days but at least the night car is completely wrapped up here. This week is going to be primarily aimed at the day car the Driver is almost ready for posting also. The night car took a little while to texture mainly due to all of the pieces. I may have to be less precious on the Day car just so I don't fall into the trap of using days on a simple texturing job. I guess ultimately I wanted my models to keep a kind of painterly feel, didn't know how to do that other then crudely paint in shade really...

I have a few development stage videos which I can share with you also to show some of my experiments with painting in ZBrush. I kind of wanted to show a slice of everything but I kind of got carried away as I do and forgot to keep hitting record. I had another little issue also with my graphics tablet which shows everything darker then it is on a 1080 screen... quite annoying. It largely means that whenever I paint and remove it from the screen it is actually 20 times brighter when I take it to another. These are all flaws I'm just learning now so I had to darken the textures too...

Anyway lets get to the final textured model here!

The Night Car image above is from a scene which I had been texturing up the night car on. It has a simple over head spotlight with a blue tint. The Car lights have a small glow to them but mostly they are just plates over the body geometry. I did this render mainly to see that it worked under mental rays light systems and effected my normal maps properly. One thing I did learn from this was that mental ray can actually display tangent space normals. Maya Software always seems to make them stronger then they should be.... That's one I wont forget in the future.


The videos above are some of the development steps I took throughout the texturing process. Sorry about the lack of metal panels on the windows, I completely forgot them on the final rendition of the model. We will just have to make do with normal windows I do not have time to go back and adjust it. Never the less I learnt a few nice tricks including "Spotlight" which is ZBrush's projection system. I posted a small sample from my coming to grips with that in a video above. I used it specifically with the hub caps and the lights. Its quite a cool tool I don't mind saying...

Next comes the UV Mapping for this little beast, let me tell you these maps took ages to perfect mainly because of the darkness on my tablet. Still everything worked out in the end. One thing you cannot see is the ambient occlusion maps that I baked into the DIF prior. It completely slipped my mind to save them, not that I didn't have enough random things sitting on my desktop. The depth shown in the DIF is provided by a top down ambient occlusion map that was otherwise rendered out and multiplied down onto my exported texture.

Last but not least comes a render which I did of the Night Car with an ambient light just so everyone could appreciate the detail of the textures and normals. I am actually quite chuffed at how nice this little car turned out really. Part of me just wishes I had more time to have a longer play with it but our time is coming to a close so I must venture elsewhere. Still it is quite a nice low poly model and actually looks like it could go in a game. "It's not shiny or perfect, its a bucket on wheels and it totally shows character I personally wouldn't mind driving it"... is there something wrong with me?

This now means that I have actually completed one of my models fully, now I have to get the other 2 up to scratch before Monday. Hoping I can actually do it in time, maybe if I don't sleep all week I can get double the amount of days. Not sure of my approach yet but I will adjust my time scale accordingly if needed. This car took longer then I wanted it to but I guess I just wanted it to look half decent and not some boring flat car in Maya. It has a kind of painterly feel to it now which is something I know has been missing from the concept stages...

Anyway, I am off to get my other models going, after some lunch.

Over & Out,
xXStItChXx