But I didn’t refrain the urge to do a test render, to see how the car will look. It’s a simple test : only a white plane above the car to light it, scratch-made shaders. The white areas are still clay-rendered because of the lack of shaders for those parts.

Model progress is different on the two pictures, the second is the latest : it shows headlights and details in air intake (radiators, grilles, bumper)

What do you think ?

I needed some time to decide if I should do a simple targa version, like a Toyota Supra (i.e. with minimum roof removal) or a more open version like a Porsche Carrera GT. The simple targa would have been more easy, as the Lotus Elise is already one. But I hope I will be able to achieve a better design, at least let’s say more elaborated. Well, something like nice engine cover (like Carrera GT or Bug’ Veyron) with amazing air intake (like Zonda Five Roadster)

So before drawing my concept, I will focus on getting a spline cage right. No blueprints for this one : I asked Hennessey a couple of weeks ago, no answer but they were kind enough to add my e-mail address to their mailing list

I started then to fully remodel the hood, front bumper, front fenders. Then time has come for sides : doors, side skirts, rear fenders, top air intakes. I just keeped the previous rear end, as it was already good enough in my opinion, and the engine cover.

Here are some clay renders of the model, I hope it shows the new surfaces quality clearly.

It’s definitely a long-term project : I started it almost 2 years ago. But I’m still fascinated by this car : so impressive, so powerful, so extreme. I think I will get back to it soon

Here’s the 2010 official contest for this summer : SMCars goes topless !!!

The idea is really simple : model and render a roof-less car. Any roofless car can apply : convertible (no matter soft or hard top), targa, spider, roadster, etc. You can even make your own from an existing model, or design an all-original concept.

Head right now to the SMCars Goes Topless thread to discover the full set of rules and starting thinking about your entry now !

Grass is only a small part of the above picture, but having it realistic add a lot of credibility to the whole picture. I started to work on grass for my current project, a C5 DTM Coupé concept for the SMCars.net contest “Real World Racer”. I wanted to add a good scene, something I didn’t do for the previous project, the Marcos 1800 GT. And what more intuitive than a race track for a race car ?

Modeling the grass

Blender has a very nice feature, particles system. There is even a particles system dedicated to hair, fur or grass. It’s really easy to use, and especially easy to tweak to make the grass high, low, dense, sparse, aligned or disturbed. Please follow steps 1 to 12 in the first link above : http://www.yafaray.org/documentation/tutorials/particles1. I just used different settings to match my need :

• I use about 3000 particles per square meter. That is, 3000 grass pieces. When you create your emitter, just compute its area and set the particles count to follow this rule of thumb.
• I used the following physics setting : for initial velocity, 0.008 as normal and 0.005 as random, and for global effects, AccZ of -0.001.

Once we converted the particles system to mesh then to curves then back to a mesh but with thickness this time, I copy the original particles emitter object to a hidden layer, making future changes easy. I said “I copy” because I need to keep the emitter surface as a ground below the grass. For this object, just turn off particles, a simple surface will do the job.

You now have 2 mesh objects : a dense one, for the grass pieces, and a light one, the ground below the grass. We now need to quickly create 2 shaders to see the result : just a green and a brown one will be enough for now :

Rendering it with a simple lighting (DirectLighting with SunSky background, no sun) will give you the following :

It’s a bit too simple as of now, but the modeling is done.

Rendering a realistic grass

Turn the previous simplistic render into a realistic one is easy. We just need to add a grass texture to create color variation on the grass.

I used the one provided in the second tutorial I linked at the top of this article : http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=68269. Here’s that texture :

It’s a basic texture set : just add an Image texture to the previous Green shader, select the image file and voilà ! No other setting need to be tweaked.

It’s time to render again :

Except for a gap between ground and grass, we’re done. For the real use I showed in first picture of this article, the work is exactly the same. I just took care to measure the surface of my emitter mesh to achieve a proper grass density.

You can now play with particles settings, and texture, to get a different looking grass. Show your own below in comments !

I don’t use LuxRender but Yafaray. This renderer is the successor of the well-known Yafray, and it’s a full rewrite to achieve great speed and nice functionnalities.

I thought : “It’s a shame a famous renderer like Yafaray doesn’t have a shaders database on its own”. So I started to create one from scratch this morning.

As of now it’s already the 2nd version online : check it out now : http://yafaray.thomasbaron.net

This is a really fresh project, so don’t expect to see it full of great shaders at this stage. Current goal is to enhance the site to achieve something suitable for daily use. Features are, as of writting :

• Free accounts opened right now
• Download a standardized scene to achieve consistent previews
• Upload your shader easily
• Browse the existing categories
• Create your own categories
• Use the built-in search engine

For an upcoming tutorial, I created a wire cage of my C5 Tourer (that is, the wagon) using this blueprint :So I studied a lot of DTM reference pictures, and modified the wire cage to turn it into a DTM Coupé.

Of course I changed some stuff during modeling, and more will be changed until the contest comes to an end. Here’s the current state of the model :

Ever dreamed of driving a race-car? I know I have… How about designing your own? If that’s a big 10-4 for you too, than SMC has got an engine-oil-soaked treat for you…

this particular SMCars.net Contest is asking you to do the following; Pick a car, or design your own, and tailor it towards a certain motorsport. That is it. We want this Contest kept simple to allow your imaginations to run wild and naked throughout SMC. We don’t want them too wild and naked though, so the only limits are technology to the present day, so no light-speed hovering space jet-ski racers, mkay? Other than that, go for gold!!

Some examples of what we’re looking for? A Lamborghini Countach modified to compete is the Paris-Dakar Rally, a Fiat 500 stripped and suped to race in the SuperGT leagues, a Honda Civic made to break the land-speed record… Getting the idea??

The goal is clear, and the contenders brought some crazy projects :

• Volkswagen Passat Wagon with Pike’s Peak style
• Holden Commodore intended for Dakar
• Mitsubishi Lancer for street racing
• Zagato Perana as a FIA GT
• Toyota Hilux as a drift machine

And for the first time for SMC, there is not only medails to win, but your choice a single die-cast model from Die-Cast Model Cars to the value of $100 !

To learn more about it : http://www.smcars.net/forums/contest-forum/30321-real-world-racer.html. To see all the entries : http://www.smcars.net/forums/real-world-racer/. To engage : www.smcars.net.

PS : Of course I’m in…

This model once won the “Light is Right” contest at www.SMCars.net, but only with one vote ahead !

You’ll find it in the Free Models page, as well as my previously released car, the Marcos 1800 GT.

A .zip file is available for download. It contains a .blend file, which is a Blender file. Download and install Blender first to read the file. The .blend file is organized using layers :

• Layer #1 contains body panels and interior.
• Layer #2 contains chassis with technical stuff attached to it.
• Layer #3 contains wheels.
• Layer #4 is just a test of a chassis with welds on it. No need for it, only layers 1 to 3 are required to gather the full model.
• Layer #5 are my blueprint box and a wire representation of the chassis.

All required shaders are included. Please pay attention that this project was conducted using YafRay 0.0.9, so it won’t render “out of the box” properly without it (YafaRay won’t do the job here)

Feel free to post your thought about it below, please just keep in mind I didn’t have enough time to complete the model : for example, the engine is missing.

As I stated it as an objective for the project, I wanted to create all my shaders on my own. Here’re the current settings I’m using and how they look like.

Of course they can’t be considered as definitive shaders. But they can be of interest for your own work and experiments, so here they are.

Clay

Clay may look useless, as Yaf(a)Ray offers an option to render a scene in clay, no matter what shaders have been defined (or not)

But how can you render a whole model in clay except the windows ? You can’t with the builtin feature of Yaf(a)Ray. Here comes the need for a clay shader. The main advantage of the settings below is that they are the very same settings used internally by Yaf(a)Ray. So a whole model rendered clay by Yaf(a)Ray and a model using only this shader will look the same.

Car paint, glass, rim alloy : most noticed shaders

The car paint lacks some metallic flakes within it, I will work on it later and post updates here : don’t miss them !

The glass shader is the default setting from Yaf(a)Ray. It just does the job, provided your windows have some thickness (otherwise Yaf(a)Ray can’t compute refraction properly) and you set enough rebounds in the Depth parameter. Especially, you need to increase this setting if you have a window laying behind another one, like I do have in my render.

The rim alloy is a glossy, dark one :

Plastics

Below are a mat plastic and a shiny one. Both are black, but notice I didn’t use #000000 as color : in real world, a black object is never completely black as #000000 is, because it actually does reflect a bit of light.

Rubber

Below are a mat rubber and an attempt for a waxed rubber. Mat rubber perfectly does the job for joints around windows, for example.

The waxed rubber was intended to look like a brand new shiny tire : waxed. This attempt is a failure so far, so I will have to fix this as soon as possible. Stay tuned for updates here.

Chrome

Chrome has never been a complicated shaders : setting a fully reflective shader will work most of time. I didn’t need more complicated solution so far, so here’s a simple shader.