After the WZA contest, SMCars.net launched a new official contest, 60's cars.

Last year I spend some time on the Marcos 1800 GT and as it's a 60's car, I start it from scratch to enter this contest.
 Nice way to see if I really improved my skills during the 12 last months.

Here's a time-filling project I started, to keep me focused on modeling between two contests at SMCars.net, WZA and 60's.

This car is not so famous, but really original from the french car make Renault. Lightweight, 2 seats only, 150bhp 4strokes inline, 930kg. It sounds like a good recipe to me !

   

I posted about it at SMC : here's the thread. It's always nice to get useful feedback from such experienced artists.

Now I headed back to the Marcos 1800 GT for the 60's contest. I hope I'll find some time to work on it, and produce renders of the model.

The WZA contest came to an end, and it gaves us a wonderful winner : see the results at SMC.

Here are the renders I submitted as my official entry. Due to a lack of time, they aren't as good as I wanted, and even don't show the whole model with all weapons. But it has been a nice exercise for sure.

The deadline for the "When Zombies Attack" (a.k.a. WZA) contest at SMC is coming. So I get back to work on my SuperSeven entry.

The rendering process was really different for these pictures. Follow the jump to learn more about it and how to use it in your own projects.

I'm back with my last project. And it's a bit ... well ... different !

There is a new contest on www.smcars.net. After the lightweight cars contest I proposed (please see http://thomasbaron.net/posts/view/2004_ariel_atom_ii and http://thomasbaron.net/posts/view/ariel_atom_ii_looking_for_a_render_style), someone came with a new idea : design the vehicle you'll want to drive if the world were infested by zombies. And with the trend with zombies movies the last few years, the contest sounded as a good idea to many peoples. There is about 10 serious entries as of writing.

Here're some interesting advices and ressources to work with Blender as a precision tool.

That is, when you want to model anything with precision or accuracy to an existing object. Why bother with this ? Because I've learned to value the acuraccy of a car model as well as the simple beauty of a render. It's a matter of taste, and I just think it's more grateful to achieve an accurate model than to rush to produce something-looking-a-bit-like-but-not-really-the-same.

By the way, happy new year !

If you don't want to read much

For precision modeling, the shortest advice is : define yourself the scale you'll be using for your model. By writing this, I mean that there is no feature in Blender such as "define which size is a meter or a foot or a parsec or whatever length unit you can think of". There is only Blender units.

I'm still working on the Ariel Atom II. The modeling process continues but as a little break, I tried to find out some new interesting setups for rendering. Here're the 3 setups I got :

I submitted a contest on www.smcars.net about modeling lightweight cars : the "Light is Right" contest, of course name after the famous quote from the very famous Colin Chapman. Nothing more than about 950kg !

The deadline is for end of August. So far, we're 12 competitors. Of course I'm in the contest, with a 2004 Ariel Atom II.

 

With the new blog engine online, I'll allow anyone to see stats for the site. As you can see by your self on the stats page, there's a big hole in visits for April and May.

Because of inattention, I lost statistics for the site for almost whole April.  Unfortunately, it was a really good month (more than 8000 page views for about 4500 unique visitors). That is, my best month so far.

The hole for May has several origins : my wife gave me a second little marvel (welcome to the world, Gaspard !), we all moved to a new house and I started a brand new job. So the server was down for some weeks.

I hope I will regain soon a constant growth as I was used to for more than a year. Thanks you, every visitor, for viewing my work and tutorials. Keep coming here, there is some new tutorials to come, just like my latest one : realistic light setting in Blender !

Found on BlenderNation, this article by Itchy is really interesting and worth full-reading : it explains the basic principles of lighting and the way different kinds of lighting works :

• First page is about light and the mechanics behind it,
• Second page is about the effects on a photo of the light location,
• Third page is showing the different lighting possible at different hours or with differents weather.

I'll show you how to use this material in Blender to produce simple but realistic lighting. As usual, I will produce some renders with YafRay.

8448 alfaGT atom2 blender blueprints clay contest db9 enzo gallardo laguna lego lighting marcos materials modeling rendering screenshot siteLife spiderRenault superSeven test texturing tips tutorials unwrapping wireframe workInProgress yaf(a)ray yafray

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