Unit 9: Adaptation - Day Car Textured - Complete

Hello Everyone,

I am back after having waged a war throughout the night to get to the day... Ha-ha that sounded cooler in my head (Its a gag about my day and night cars). I have managed to get the little beast completely textured. Every single element is entirely hand painted. I have many things to do today so I probably will be missing another nights sleep tonight. Peh who needs sleep when you are churning out fun workload right? Anyway this post is about the Day car with a couple of videos that I remembered to record throughout the painting/texturing process... It's gonna be cool don't worry.

Texturing only took a long time due to the amount of sub tools that I broke the model into from my UV coordinates in ZBrush. It has its advantages and obvious disadvantages. The advantage of it is you can freely isolate 1 section of the model and rotate round it with complete freedom. The disadvantage is you have to paint everything individually meaning you cannot take advantage of symmetry. Its also a blow because you have to reattach the model once it is in Maya. And if you are a stickler for 1 UV map like me then you also have to paste all the UVs into one image... the same with the normals...

Anyway allow me to introduce you to the illusive "Day" Car.

The image above shows a high quality render from Mental ray. Before you say anything yes I know its a dark scene. This is just so it is in keeping with my other posts which were also set in similar dark scenes (the Driver included). Having a darker scene also allows me to take advantage of the headlights on each of these cars. Rest assured I will be doing a very small "Day" set meaning I will have to get my head around day lighting in Maya. For the moment though just let me enjoy the victory and accept the day car how she is :)


The videos above show a few of the development steps toward the final render. They are mostly just texturing and poly-painting entries. I didn't feel it was necessary to capture me painting every single one. I am just looking to keep things interesting not dull by recording hours of me building something. I even sped these videos up slightly so they did not drag for too long. You can imagine these were not 5 minute paint jobs. After painting each one I had to export it and its UVs and dump everything into Maya and merge it back to the main body... It was tiring.

The image above shows the UV maps used in this model. There were ambient occlusion maps baked into these textures that helped give them some additional depth. The occlusion took the lighting from an overhead spotlight. The sections of the map are as follows - UV - basically the texture coordinates and the wire of each polygon. The 50/50 is a screen of the wire onto the texture map. The DIF is the texture map on its own and last but not least... The NRM is the normal maps which use the camera to create the illusion of surface deformation (This could be bumps, dents, anything).

The image above shows the turnaround of the "Day" car. I decided to try something a little different lighting wise for this render. Ambient wasn't cutting it so I got 4 spot lights on each side of the car to try and keep as much of it illuminated as possible. The glass in the windows and in the front lights are separate material shaders. They use the same textures essentially but the lights have a slight glow and a higher incandescence. The glass for the windows just has higher reflectivity then the body of the car. Its not entirely noticeable on this render but trust me its there...

This car took me all day and night yesterday to get ready for today. This is mainly due to everything having to be hand painted. The lack of symmetry also didn't help matters much. I think it turned out okay though I mean this car doesn't look bad for the lowest poly in my entire list. At 3200 polygons it feels alive. I really am liking the richer colour of it too. I know it could be considered a sharp yellow now, washing it out just felt wrong... like it was losing its vibrancy. Its a banana car that has been in a in a really damaging car wreck... Last but not least... I love my windows...

Take it easy!
xXStItChXx