it's not just ref...
it's the very small details like some dust on the skin.
remember the stir when the fzr with rain ON it was shown?
now imagine a car with dirt on it like after a offroad race.

well have to know how to render first lol you cant just jump into stuff advanced like that

dirt and stuff is easy though, that just material properties.. but then again, thats what i consider rendering.. so tristan isnt there yet lol

easy... ha
ok then go and make me a dirty cube in 800x600 please.
how to render isn't the question (press a button).
it's composing a scene...
and more important using light.

sorry for the long wait, had dinner and had to make a scene from scratch, but the total dirt making time has been... just under 20 minutes (for all the textures and the materials)

so thats not to bad.. obviously its not the best since i didnt spend to much time on it, anyways.. its not any different from the way sniiki did his raindrops (which can be an odd way, but for as little time he spent on it [im sure he didnt spend much] it came out fairly good [but not accurate of course])

so this is what you can get:

looks painted, sorry, but imo it doesn't look as if the dirt actually has a "body" and thats not what i meant to get.
see dirt should at least look like a crispy surface some bumps bigger than others sure.
but you have the 3ds skinning advance.
me cant just add the lfs-skin unchanged to the mesh of the car and automaticly looks as known...
maybee not such a good example but this (attach.) looks awesome to me.
and if you can guess what it is i'll post the other pics.

ps: unfortunately not my work...

..i never used a displacement map.. or bump.. want it to stick out more? i can do it easy

your just talking about material properties; its really NOT hard to do at all...

(if you dont believe me how it works; heres hte alpha dirt layer)

no, i'm not talking about material properties, harrrrr, sniiki's raindrops were actually ON the surface not THE surface...

..read what he said; that was too his material doing that.. not modeling..

Quote from Sniiki :

Made a copy of the object on which the drops will come, then gave that copy a water material. Then with vray's displacement mod made the drops, using bump map (made in photoshop)

case closed

my dirt is.. can .. be done exactly the same, i just didnt apply a bump or displacement map.. thats the only difference

Nice discussion, although I think Micha's gone a bit far. I don't care right now how to make dirt or raindrops appear on my car. I am looking to make reasonably realistic renders of clean cars in a showroom kind of thing. AS boring as that may be to some people, I m getting a perverse amount of pleasure out of it.

I am not a modeller. I tried making a Veyron a month of so ago, but found I just didn't have the time or the skill to progress at a standard I liked. So the LFS 'scenes' are made using default CMX imports. The skins are made my vMax.Xero, and designed by vMax.Xero, vMax.JustinZ and vMax.James (formerly JamesF1). I am claiming no credit for them.

All I am trying to do is learn about material properties, lighting (by far the hardest thing to do) and reflections. Dirt, rain, scenery etc will all come later when I am reasonably competent at this first stage. I could take the easy route and use other people's scenes so that I cannot be open to critisism, but that holds no interest for me.

I thank you all for your advice, tips and opinions. I can't promise to take them all onboard, but I will consider all of them. Already the reflective floor has gone (now a matte floor), the wheels are going to be black, and I am going to improve the rubber (looks okay on my LCD, but when examined at an angle to the screen I can see what I guess most of you can see - the weird lines and colours...).

As for too many reflections, real cars are surprisingly reflective. That render of the rF3 that looks all washed out is, in many ways, quite realistic. If the ground was less bright, and the paint of the car was less saturated, I think it would be quite good. The poblem is I acheived that without knowing what I was doing, and cannot get myself back there it seems.

I'll play with it a bit more today, but don't end up in arguments about whether I'm learning the right stuff please.

hi tristan,

i'm following your progress and find it quite impressive, actually. and that gets me motivated to start with 3dsmax myself. my question now is, whether there is a free and downloadable version of that software?

thanks in advance for a reply and keep up the good work!

roland

Yes , you can get a 30 day trial here http://nct.digitalriver.com/fulfill/0049.034

Will PM you will more details

well ok i see it's quite pointless to change the mesh, as it's really easier to apply the dirt or raindrops via a meterial layer.
So this leads me to the question how to define that mat. since cinema has no V-ray plug-in, or i didn't found it yet.
so please help me XCNuse.

http://www.creativemac.com/200 ... s/koc4ddisplace040224.htm

2 second google search of cinema 4d bump mapping, and the first thing came up with displacement map which is good enough (actually displacement maps are much better than bump maps; they just take longer to render thats all..)

thx it's just i'm much more into talking to people than to google (lazyness)

thanks tristan. much appreciated.

r.

Okay, teaching myself UVW mapping. Don't comment on the rest of the scene, or the low poly wheels or the lighting, this is all about the sidewall texture (on one wheel only atm).

Edit: added image

the correct tyre specs are missing

just subdivide the wheel, and apply a cylindrical UV on the center of the tire, and just do a flat plane UV map on the sidewalls

My next project. The LFS helmet is very low poly, and as such looks a bit rubbish in render. Add to that that the visor is solid and there are no details inside if you make it transparent.

So, I took the helmet, and I altered it. It's got a visor with thickness, pivot pins on the side (and one on the floor for the hell of it), and padding on the inside, so it looks a bit like a helmet.

Now, it's early days, as I've never done 3D modelling of any real quantity before (3D CAD isn't quite the same), so I'm learning. I haven't done the texture mapping a great deal of good, so I apologise for it being a bit naff. I intend to improve it at some point, whilst keeping the default helmet skin layout so it remains reasonably compatible. This is where I'm at so far.

slap a meshsmoother on it and bam your done, then just set some pivot points onto the pivot joints of the shield, and.. well there you go.. done.. 2 minutes work if you know what your doing

Thats the thing - I don't know what I'm doing. Meshsmoothing made it look horrid to start with and took about 2 hours to clear up, and it stopped the visor from fitting, as well as messing up the texture wrapping.

And I have no idea what you mean about pivot points! Can you do such a thing? The trouble is that if you keep the visor aligned at the pivot, it goes 'into' the helmet when you lift it... not my helmet design, so don't kill me. Also, the inside took a while to do, as the shell command (which is what I used) made a mess.

Basically, I spent my time clearing up the time saving tools :S

well, for "shelling" try to copy the helmet without the visor size it down 2% you get some real material "thickness" (didn't know how to say it otherwise) connect the corresponding vertices to sew your new helmet (inner/outer).

to get the "fluffy" helmet padding use some boolean ops like:

1. substract helmet from cube, use what it left from the inside of the helmet, throw the rest of the cube away.
2. C4d has a "magnetic" tool to manipulate more vertices/polygons at once to create smooth bumps.
3. use hypernurbs to let it look more natural.
4. Now substract helmet+head from cube you'll get what would be between these 2 objects.

sorry for lousy english but no translator could translate "Schnittmenge" to english, this word describes in my lang what would remain between helmet+head.

well.. same thing with me and cars, i've tried to clean up a few of the cars, started FZGTR but havent finished it yet (working on more important stuff currently) but you gotta get rid of all those triangles and turn them into quads.. pain the ass yes, and .. yes.. VERY time consuming

also, use meshsmoother THEN shell modifier.. else you'd get a mess

as for the wrapping, i bet you can use a spherical map on it.. and it would come out right (obviously wouldnt fit those of LFS, but it would come out right)

edit - here this may help you with your joint rigging: http://www.3dnuts.com/tutorial ... igging_robot_joints.shtml

Playing some more... this time with RainX. Lighting isn't ideal really, but hey, I've learnt something from this, so it's satisfied my criteria for the thread

hm.. looks pretty interesting, never heard of rainX.. obvoiusly you can see the problems it has lol but.. i'll have to look into that