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.

I also posted some clays, to show the whole model.

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 browsed the most famous shaders repository for Blender : www.blender-materials.org. They’re really doing an excellent job there, I found there some really nice shaders :

• Camouflage
• Roughly brushed metal
• Rust for pipes
• Tire rubber

But unfortunately for me, most of these shaders aren’t compatible with YafRay out of the box : unsupported images formats, wrong aspect once rendered, and so on. Nothing one can solve with enough free time, I think.

As I don’t have that much time, it motivated me to give the Blender internal renderer a serious try. Yes, the two renders above are from the internal. That’s quite new for me.

I used a not-yet-officially-released feature in Blender, which allows to simulate a sky, a sun and the atmosphere absorption. Learn more about it on the author web site. It’s really to use thanks to the help of GraphicAll.org.

That nice effect, combined with ambient occlusion, allowed me to produce a not-so-bad render with the Internal. I still have lot of tricks to learn about AO, especially with the brand new AAO (Approximated AO) So, stay tuned !

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.

I decided to join, with a … lightweight car. History loves repetitions That’s my Super Seven, designed to escort convoys or to perform hit-and-run attacks.

Blades, spikes, bull bar, flame throwers, rotative minigun, rocket launchers, chainsaw, heavy caliber (.50 !!!) sniper rifle. The whole stuff is there to make sure the driver and its copilot stay as safe as possible. Here’s the .50 rifle, based on a Garrett M82. 57″ long…

And for carefully looking people, there is a little easter egg. Euh, sorry, an easter monkey. Suzanne, the Blender mascot, made it as a brand figure.