Saleen S7

[Eric2575]

Started a new WIP post with a more appropriate heading.

 

Picked this old model up and started tweaking again. Here are some quick renders with some color experiments - none of which I like.

 

Also worked some more on the interior - dash, gauges, seats, door panels, center console and stick.

 

The body is undergoing tweaking every time I touch the project. The metal is getting smoother every time. I also reworked the rims of the car, loosing over 500 cps without changing the look of the rims. This was done just by getting more experience in modeling and eliminating what was not necessary.

 

I've started working on the engine compartment and will post a render tomorrow.

 

Hope you like the progress after such a long hiatus.

[martin]

A guy drove one of those to the local "Beaches" restaurant during the 4th of July celebration, (it made the front page of the paper!) Then, I saw a Lamborghini Gallardo and a Ferrari 360 at the "Beach Boys" concert Friday night (Yves was there too). I used to think I was pretty hot stuff in my Ferrari 348TS (I had a 308GTSI too) but now I've got gray hair and wrinkles... No more fancy sports cars for me... Except via Animation:Master! Thanks for that image!

[Viper GTX2.0]

That is a realy nice car. could u tell me the body properties of it? Im asking this couse imm modeling a car my self and want to tryout ur body properties if it will turn out better on my car model then the one from a nother car that some one has made forgot the name of the guy.

[ddustin]

Very nice work Eric

[agep]

Hi Eric

I'm glad to see that you have picked up the project again Don't you dare leave it unfinished again, capish? Nice work so far

 

Stian

[Eric2575]

Ok, started work last night on the visible framework under the rear glass, added the glass and started on the engine. The engine work is really difficult, since there are only shots of the frame and engine as seen from an open rear hatch. As hard as I could, I could not get any clear references of the transmission or any other part of the engine as seen from the side. When you only have an overhead perspective view with all the body panels in place, there's a lot of trial and error in getting a good looking representation of the real thing.

 

Martin: You're welcome. Just wait until you see the completed model. I want to add this model to the high res pics you are collecting for Hash. Not sure if I'm going to add some sort of background or leave it just plain white?

 

Oskar: The body properties (paint) is a variation of Colin Freeman's paint found here (thanks Colin): http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...amp;hl=carpaint

I tweaked it a little bit to my liking - still a long ways off - and removed the candy flake. Play with it on some spheres until you get a look you like and then apply it to your model. Be aware, the panels need to be very smooth, or the paint will show every flaw. You've got a nice start there on modeling cars with your Viper. Just think, every model you do from now on will get even better!

 

David: Thanks! If you ever have a reconstruction that involves a Saleen S7, you know where to get one

 

Hi Stian: Congrats on your contest win! Never mind about the Bismark - wow!!! You were born to do computer modeling and animation. Too bad I wasn't able to attend this years Hash Bash, I really wanted to meet you. Maybe next year

[Viper GTX2.0]

Thx Eric that paint is just wat i waz looking for but could u tell me how u remove the flake i dont want them?

 

Viper GTX2.0

[Eric2575]

In the PWS look under materials and open the paint material. After you open the material, you should see a turbulence as one of its properties - been a long time since I looked at the original material. Remove that turbulence and you should be good to go. I actually just looked at the main properties of the paint and used what I found helpful.

[Eric2575]

Did a little more work on the engine and another color change. Will post a better render with hatch glass and engine vents tomorrow.

[Eric2575]

And one more update on tweaking the body. Frontal body shell view.

[Dhar]

>droooooool<

 

This is top notch stuff. Keep up the great work!

[Eric2575]

Sorry about the crappy render, but here is an update on the engine progress.

 

Btw, Dan, instead of me having to reinvent the wheel, would you refresh my memory on the lighting settings you used to get your best render of the Retro? I want to render the S7 as large as possible (poster?) but don't want to wait 10 hours for a crappy render due to lighting issues. I tried one render with Yves skylight rig- hey, I'll post that as the second pic - but the body color came out pink, although it renders a cherry red with a standard 3 light setup.

 

Need settings for a multipass skylight setup to render as natural as possible. Thanks

[Scottj3d]

This is looking great! I was starting to think it might have been overkill adding an engine to the chevelle. Glad to see getting into extreme details (ones that normally wouldn't be seen in a typical animation) appeals to others when modeling a car. Is the setup very complicated to get the realistic lighting on those render's. The engine area is looking nice. I especially like the hoses and connections. Cool stuff!

[Eric2575]

Thanks Scott. Your Chevelle got me thinking about doing a more detailed engine for the S7. As far as the rendering goes, I'm not sure why the S7 turned pink in the skylight setup. The settings are not that much different from other lighting setuup, it's just that the renders take so long that I get somewhat frustrated about putting in another 3 hour run just to find that the latest small tweak in the lights ruined the render.

 

That's why I'm hoping Dan can shed some light (pun intended) on the subject. I re-read his post on the Retro and will try and see what I can make out of that.

 

There are also several posts about ambient occlusion that look interesting. I feel like I'm out of the loop, cause no sooner does AM v.13 come out and everybody raves about AO. Where do people get info on how to use AO and how is is implemented in V.13 anyway?

 

I'm gonna do a search with ambient occlusion as the key word and see what I come up with. I feel like I ditched school, everybody has done their homework, and I'm clueless.

[ypoissant]

I'm not sure why the S7 turned pink in the skylight setup.

Because it is reflecting a white environment.

[Eric2575]

I did some post scanning on AO and actually did a small render with it. Seems to me that AO is primarily used for the black and white renders without specularity? So, not exactly the right solution to get a photorealistic render of the S7?

[Eric2575]

Interior update.

[agep]

Awesome, just awesome Eric!! This is certainly the best car I've seen been made in A:M so far, no doubt.

Nice details on the interior.

[KenH]

Verrrry cool. You'll be modeling the girl on the bonnet next.

[Eric2575]

Thank you Stian. You really keep me inspired in trying to do my best in Animation Master. Besides, I don't want you to send the Bismark over here to keep me from slackin....those are some mighty fine and powerful guns

 

Hey Ken,

 

you're not too far off, I have been considering trying my hand at a human figure. Yves' female model, well, her head anyway, got me thinking in that direction. Not that there is anything wrong with the body, but I will be trying for a more natural vs stylized look. That's a bit into the future, though.

 

In the meantime, I may do a basic tutorial on smoothing surfaces. It seems that topic comes up quite a bit in the beginner's forum.

 

Anyways, stay out of the heat and keep cool...

 

Stian, are you guys having unusual weather up north these days? The US is having a pretty bad heatwave right now and it's gonna continue into next week. I fully believe in Global Warming and am seriously hoping that we haven't screwed up the planet beyond repair just yet.

[Dhar]

Way to go Eric. I could almost smell that Connolly leather. Nice going

[Eric2575]

Still tinkering with it now and then. Did some more interior work, engine work, baffles in the back of the car, and more...

 

I also experimented with AO and IBL, but the render times are killer. When you play around with render settings and it takes 10 hours to see the results, tweaking gets old really fast.

 

This render is a simple old 3 light setup. I'm going to try a few more IBL renders and then I'm done with the S7.

 

When you look at the render, you'll notice that it's not very sharp. I don't know if that's because I messed with the paint settings or if it's because I used "soften shadows?" Depth of field is not enabled.

[DanCBradbury]

Oh wow, that's amazing work there eric. I can't believe i missed this. I saw my name in a whole bunch of the previous posts, so I'm sorry if it looked like i was ignoring ya... heh

 

well, your model looks superb, but overall i've completely changed how i work with my car's reflections and so on. Number one change is i no longer use specularity in anything I do. Another thing i changed is I no longer use environment maps for the reflections; instead, i use a luminare patch with an exr texture on it that has an incredibly bright white value on it (about 300% pure white). In the choreography, I have a non-occluding black box that surrounds the entire scene for an environment reflection color. I have so much control over how my renders come out now, and i like them a whole lot better than the old ones. What's great is i dont have to deal with any complex materials and it's also very easy to change colors and reflectivity values, because I dont have the environment maps to deal with.

 

My AO settings are (in the choreography settings) 100% Ambiance Intensity, 100% Ambiance Occlusion (in the render options window) 10% Ambience Occlusion. At 16 passes it took 32 minutes to render the 1024x768 image. The red one has a very diffused reflection wich was created by surface roughness, but i need to find some way to add on a crisp reflection to the paint that will work on top of the diffused reflection to imitate the car wax layer. Candy paint looks awesome, but is so hard to duplicate... at least i'm getting close ._.U

 

I've included a project file with the environment I'm using, no retro though, but the paint should take no time at all to set up; just add a color and reflectivity value (i use about 30%). It's as easy as that

Environment.zip

[case]

and the butterfly doors lol nice work keep us posted

[R Reynolds]

Excellent modeling!

 

Are the tire tread details displacement decals? They're cut so deep they look modeled.

[Eric2575]

Thank you for the kind words. Also a big thanks to Dan for giving us another insight into rendering and the prj file to examine.

 

Rodger, yes, the tire has a displacement decal wrapped around it. I took the tire pattern off the Saleen and created my own dispalcement map from scratch. I used shades of gray to get the look.

 

Did some more detail modeling on the car and hope to have an IBL render later tonight.

 

Thanks for the interest

[MattWBradbury]

Eric, if you are going to use Ambiance Occlusion, my suggestion is that you put all of your windows into a seperate model that does not cast occlusion, and match the car model, and the window model together in the choreography. Make sure that you use a HDR image for your projection maps.

[Eric2575]

Matt, is it better to use a full sphere or a half dome for the Projection map model, or does it depend on the HDR I will be using? Also, is there a way to get the sphere or dome to project the HDR onto the model but not show the dome/sphere? I got some pretty good results on the car using a sphere per Xtaz, but I used the Uffizi HDR converted in HDRIShop and that map does not seem like it is mean for a full sphere - not sure? Also, the dome renders in the background and I don't want it to. The whole background looks wrong - see pic.

 

If I use 100% transparent on the dome/sphere, it won't give a reflection on the car. Same goes if I use fog. See second pic.

 

P.s. Don't look too closely at the interior or tail lights, I was just trying stuff out. Will get lighting down once I have the whole setup figured out.

[DanCBradbury]

If you're going to use an hdr image for your reflections, than you'll probably want to go with an environment map material, because you don't need a physical sphere model surrounding your model, and you can make your background look the way you want.

 

Also, was your second image rendered with AO? All of your shadows in all of your renders so far are way too light for what they should be. I'm not sure if you're going for a cartoon-ish style sort of look, but, if you're going for realism, all lights should have 100% darkness shadows, and the choreography Ambiance Occlusion settings should be set to 100% always.

[Eric2575]

Here are a few of the critical settings:

 

Chor AO is always set @ 100%

Render Panel AO sampling is usually 25 - 30%

The paint material I made has 30% ambiance if that matters

 

I tried rendering AO without any lights and found that the bottom of the open doors are way too dark. Then I added a keylight with 100% shadows and 2 rays cast for extra shadow on the ground and a fill light with no shadows from underneath for giving the doors something extra.

 

I'm gonna render with these settings to see wgat I get.

 

And NOOOOO, I don't want a toon look. I want to get as photorealistic as possible.

 

Once the render is done, I'll post it.

[MattWBradbury]

The bottom of your doors should be dark. Make sure that, for the Ambiance Occlusion settings, you have Ambiance set to 100%, and Occlusion set to 100%. I would suggest getting rid of the ambiance on the car paint surface properties, as well as on the ground and then adjust the settings to get a more realistic render.

[Eric2575]

Matt,

 

both ambiance and occlusion are set to 100%, I never change that. The reason I added fill and key lights was the fact that without them, the AO render looked too dark and did not cast any distinctive shadows. I wanted the render to turn out like it was shot on a sunny day. When you look at any car on a sunny day, the bottom of the doors are definitely not dark.

 

I may have gotten something wrong, so I am currently rendering several different AO setups with all settings written down for comparison later. I'll post all images when done. The pose will stay the same for comparison purposes.

 

Please keep visiting this thread, I really appreciate the input.

 

 

Eric

[DanCBradbury]

I wanted the render to turn out like it was shot on a sunny day. When you look at any car on a sunny day, the bottom of the doors are definitely not dark.

You mean like this trebuchet? I could tell ya how I did that if you want to know.

 

The car doors would be pretty dark, but radiosity and the paint reflection of the bright ground would have a large effect on how the underside of the vehicle was lit. When you add lights that dont cast shadows you end up getting bright areas where there should be no light at all, ie the underside of the dash board. In my opinion, it would be better for the underside of the door to be dark than to light a scene with a bright non shadow casting light.

[Eric2575]

Well, the first horrible render is done! This is AO with 100%, 100%, 25% sampling. This render still has the fill and key lights but reduced to 50% intensity. As you just pointed out, the fill light cast some very unnatural light under the bottom of the dash. This is also the first render that has some noticeable artifacts in the panels. This has nothing to do with normals since I made sure several times that all are facing the right way. As you can see, the render is very very dark, that's why I added the fill and key in the first place. Btw, the multipass is only set to 9x for the sake of speeding up these test renders. Total time for this render was 1 hour 19 minutes at 1024x768. I noticed that just before the render finished, it did a softening on the whole render, giving a fuzzy look. I really don't like that and figure to disable that in the next render.

 

For the next render, I will get rid of the ambiance in the paint and see what effect that will have on the render. Everything else will stay the same for the following test.

 

If you have any ideas what may be causing the artifacts, I'd love to know. I read a post a while back dealing with a similar issue, but can't find it right now.

 

Yes, please share your lighting setup for the trebuchet.

 

Thanks Dan.

 

Now for the next render.....

[DanCBradbury]

It looks really dark for some reason are you using white for the AO color? For AO you can increase the Intensity just like raising a light's intensities. Also, you dont have to render out a scene all the way to get a general idea of what it's going to look like. If you select one of the render buttons right click+drag out a box and it will render only that outline.

 

For the trebuchet I used the default camera sky blue color for AO, 100% Intensity, 100% Occlusion, and then I used a sun light type with a bright yellow orange color like 255, 240, 200, 100% intensity, 2 ray casts, and 100% darkness shadows.

 

Hope that helps.

[Eric2575]

I've got the next test render cooking now, so I can't tell you with 100% accuracy if I am using white as the AO color, but I am relatively certain. This render has the ambiance turned off for the body color and it also has the fill light turned off. To get some more light into the interior, I made both the front and rear glass a separate model and reunited them with the body in the chor - occlusion turned off for the glass model.

 

We'll see how that turns out.

 

No idea on the curious artifacts?

 

Holy crudmuffin, I just got a glimpse of the first pass. It's even darker than the first render. Gloom is setting in

 

It also look like the artifacts have moved to a different patch now???

 

****************************************************************************

 

Ok, here it is. Fill light is now turned off, paint has no more ambiance, multipass "soften" has been turned off (still getting the fuzzy look), and reflections "soft" is turned off (also no effect on the soft render look). This render took 59 min 11 sec.

 

The results of changes made:

 

Fill turned off - results in even darker render although the unnatural glow under dash is gone.

Ambiance in paint turned off - no difference noteworthy

Multipass soften turned off - no difference noteworthy

Reflections "soft" turned off - no difference noteworthy

 

Overall difference between render 1 and render 2 - render 2 is notably darker

[DanCBradbury]

i've noticed in the past that even when a jpg is saved at 100% quality there is still some very strange noise generated. I would suggest a tga.

[Eric2575]

I'm rendering a cube in the same chor that is so dark with the S7. It is turning out dark too. So it can't be the model, but something in the chor settings.

 

I'll try to render as tga, but I have gotten good results without artifacts on the Saleen rendered to jpg. I'll get to the bottom of this yet!!

 

Here is the cube...dark...with AO only, fog, and no other lights

 

Next I'll crank up the key light to 90%

[Eric2575]

Here is the cube render: AO 100,100,25, fog on, one key light at 85%...not too bad

[MattWBradbury]

For now, just use white for the Global Color and render out something small. 240X180 should be a fine resolution to get an idea of the light levels. Make sure that you have multipass turned on as well (use at least 9 passes).

[Eric2575]

All right, I'm a renderin' fool. This render was done with 110 ambiance intensity set in the chor. There is only one keylight (sun) set at 95%. Since I am still getting these artifacts in random areas, maybe a reboot of the system will help. Although I want to use IBL, I'll do as you suggest and render the next one with white Global color.

[DanCBradbury]

Ah, it's looking much better now.

 

Your artifacts may be a result of the environment map you're using

[Eric2575]

I was thinking the same thing. Will do a render later without it.

[Kamikaze]

Another super duper A:M mechanical model....and modeler........WOW !!!

I mean WOWwwww!!

 

Mike

[Eric2575]

Thanks Mike!

 

Coming from a fellow submariner and mech modeler, I'll take that as a nice compliment

 

Update: Yes, for some reason, the Emap was causing the artifacts. This small render is without the map and looks to have no major visible defects.

 

Is there a way to turn off the last step in the multipass process: Softening? The renders looks really good, up until the last pass which is the softening pass. After that pass, the model is blurred (softened) to my great dismay. How can I stop softening????????? I'll post a screencap of the before softening and the after.

[Eric2575]

This render is a bit bigger, but with 25 passes vs 9 passes and the AO ambiance intensity turned down to 50% with 30% AO sampling. The keylight is still in the scene casting the shadows. Time: 37 min 10 sec

[MattWBradbury]

Your softening problem is not actually caused by the Multipass soften; it's caused by the JPEG compression. Save the file as a TGA, open it up in Photoshop, and save it as a high quality JPEG.

 

Your model is looking much better, but the Klieg shadows are barely noticable.

 

Can you do some renders where the doors arn't open?

[DanCBradbury]

Wow, looking much better, now all ya need is to throw in some luninare objects and you're good

[Eric2575]

Ok, this is getting pretty good. Now I've got to read up about IBL.

 

Matt, for some reason, when I changed the render settings to spit out a tga, the fog wouldn't render. I tried several times making sure fog is set, etc, but no go with tga and fog. As soon as I changed back to jpg output, the fog would render normally. What the heck???

 

Here's a render with the doors down.

[DanCBradbury]

Really nice render! It's looking much better. Are your rims 100% reflective? They dont seem to be from the pic. I've found that the best chrome surface has a black color and is 100% reflective. Also, if you want the realest looking render I wouldn't go with IBL. It does not do any raytracing, so there's light color where it shouldn't be all over the place. In my opinion, AO with a single color is better looking than AO with IBL.

 

You're just having all sorts of weird problems :\

 

Did you make sure that the option render tab's render mode was set to "the camera"? Did you also make sure that the alpha was turned off? I just did some simple AO with Fog tests, but i was never able to get fog to go away except with an alpha, but it took it away in both a tga and a jpg.