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Peoples
10-17-2003, 03:16 PM
Just thought I'd show you what's cooking in my pot.. Inspired by the well known Thomas Suurland and his ultra-realistic beetle. Started with a point, after that, just copy-paste points & bridge. More to come - it's a [WIP]..

:thumbsup: :thumbsdow ?

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/render_show.jpg

Zion
10-17-2003, 03:32 PM
Looking sweet. Love the colour. The tires look a little low-profile. Was that on purpose?

Peoples
10-17-2003, 03:40 PM
Yeah, the rubber on the tire is my old model - I'll have to tweak that If I wan't to aim for the regular beetle-look. The headlights will be modelled completely- the image is just a placeholder for now..

AdamT
10-17-2003, 03:49 PM
Excellent start! Can't wait to see the "is it real or is it Memorex" shot.

sebek27
10-17-2003, 04:08 PM
awesome ! is it hdri render ? also would you mind posting your windshield glass setting since it looks very good ?

Peoples
10-17-2003, 04:35 PM
"Can't wait to see the "is it real or is it Memorex" shot." :surprised ? Am I missing something? I used a HDR image in a sky object but just for the reflections - no radiosity. The lightning is just a quick setup, one huge arealight for overall and one parallel spot for the crappy shadow..

I'll post the window settings asap for you Sebek, but it's really just the VERY basic glass. It's the hdr-reflections that play a huge role in the whole setup. I'm going' nutz staring at Suurland's beetle - it's just too perfect.

Btw - has anyone ordered the Dosch Extreme Hires HDRI DVD? I was wondering is it worth the 129€ - but I suppose you'll get some killer reflections w/ those:drool:

RusMan
10-17-2003, 04:56 PM
Looking very good, but the front bumper looks kinda weird, but it could be a camera angle. Are you going to model the interior?

sebek27
10-18-2003, 12:52 AM
still no settings for your glass..

JIII
10-18-2003, 03:12 AM
nice, the front bumper is a little odd, the whole body of the car is too soft in my opinion. It does not have the same "solid" feel to it as the real life beetle does.

Anyway nice job, ohh yea try using antialising in the final ;).

michaeli
10-18-2003, 05:02 AM
Lovely model, very beautiful, can't wait to see the final render.

Peoples
10-18-2003, 06:09 AM
I think I'll model a basic interior that looks good just through the glass.. I also have to weight some edges to get a bit more definition in some areas.

Sebek! THe settings:

Color: 0%
Transparency: 50%
Reflection: Fresnel going from 60% grey -> 5% grey

There you go..

Thanks for the commentares!

Peoples
10-18-2003, 03:19 PM
Modelled the front bumper - not 100% satisfied with it, some tweaking still needs to be done. I made a studio background with an extruded bezier-spline and put some Bhodinut noise in it. The sidewindows look like crap - have to re-model them. The rubber thingies surrounding the windows are also a pain in the ass - very difficult to get them aligned even if I split the edge points of the window frames..

Used the default glow effect too..

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/studio_1.jpg

:thumbsdow or :thumbsup: ?

AdamT
10-18-2003, 03:25 PM
:thumbsup:

It may be an optical illusion, but it looks like the roof may have a few waves in it.

ThirdEye
10-18-2003, 04:05 PM
Ok, here come some suggestions, it already looks quite nice but you might want to do some corrections. Look at the red circles i surrounded the mistakes with.

First thigs first: the shadow under the wheels. It's quite nice but the whole car seems floating, you might try to sharpen it a bit, it's too soft or maybe the floor near the wheels look too bright. The part of the chassis running over the front wheel have some problems, look at the circles. Same thing about the rear part, look at the other red circle. The roof needs some more work in the corner i circled, use HN weights for the corner vertex or do a couple more knife cuts. The rest looks ok, a suggestion tho: drop that green colour or everybody will start comparing your car with Suurland's, and m8, i wouldn't wanna find myself in that situation, Suurland's car is almost perfect ;)

Peoples
10-18-2003, 04:21 PM
Originally posted by ThirdEye_01
drop that green colour or everybody will start comparing your car with Suurland's, and m8, i wouldn't wanna find myself in that situation, Suurland's car is almost perfect ;)

You're right, I will have to drop that color, the car is nowhere near Suurland's quality:blush: As far as the errors you pointed out, I will definitely fix those - just haven't touched on those spots yet, been working on the mirrors and doorhandles. And the rear isn't there - the cut for the number plate causes me bigtime problems as well as getting the headlights indent smooth without affecting the mesh too much..

Thanks for pointing the focus points ThirdEye:thumbsup:

Peoples
10-18-2003, 06:14 PM
Haven't touched the "red circles" yet - but I give you a silver version. The glow over-exposed it a bit. wipwipwipwipwip...:scream:

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/studio_hopea.jpg

ThirdEye
10-18-2003, 06:18 PM
Definitely better :thumbsup:

Peoples
10-19-2003, 02:24 PM
Small update - new color and real headlight. I need to get them brighter and add some bumplines inside them.

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/studio_lights.jpg

ThirdEye
10-19-2003, 02:27 PM
That's really nice, indeed. Have you tried with some hotter colour like orange or red? They'd be really cool on a beetle :)

sebek27
10-19-2003, 02:52 PM
looks great :thumbsup: , how did you do the logo ? i'm trying to figure out how to model it, probably the best way is to create it in Illustrator and then import it into Cinema...

AdamT
10-19-2003, 03:20 PM
That looks excellent! Really like the paint shader. But now I'm sure those waves in the roof line are not an optical illusion and I really wish you'd fix 'em!

Peoples
10-19-2003, 03:53 PM
I'm having a hard time w/ the roof - how can such a simple shape be so hard to get smooth...:annoyed: Have to do some more work on that. The logo is just an extruded spline made of circles and linear splines connected together.

JIII
10-19-2003, 06:25 PM
I wonder if using iron would fix that roof?

ThirdEye
10-19-2003, 06:27 PM
Show us a wireframe of the roof Peoples, we'll find the problem ;)

kiwi
10-20-2003, 09:44 AM
Really nice work there Peoples :thumbsup:



I agree with third eye a nice hot colour would look good.I am a sucker for red on cars :)

Peoples
10-20-2003, 02:59 PM
Well - I managed to smoothen the roof pretty well. Here are two other colors for you.. I'll have to give this car a little break because I have some exams at university to pass... I haven't touched the non-exisiting rear part of this car yet and there are some minor errors that have to be smoothed, you can see some of those w/ the reflections.. But I like the look of these renders considering there's no GI - and just one area light;)

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/redwine.jpg

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/blue.jpg

:blush: (Sorry for the big images)

ThirdEye
10-20-2003, 03:26 PM
Wow wow wow wow! My fav is the red one! :thumbsup:

AdamT
10-20-2003, 03:33 PM
:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Conanart
10-20-2003, 03:36 PM
sebek27:
go to www.logotypes.ru it has hundreds of logos all ready to in illutrator format. Really great resource.

Peoples:
Please please do the wipers.

It is looking great.

Also on the red one it looks like there is a little bump right at the windshield roof join in the middle - or is that highlight? I like the blue one.

Looking forward to the next update.
G

Peoples
10-27-2003, 09:29 AM
No major progress - just got some inspiration to the color theme from "Kill Bill" - Tarantinos new film. I made new, more accurate alloy wheels. Still got some heavy studying to do @ uni - so this car will take a while before it's finished. Enjoy!

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/bee.jpg

Halogen
10-27-2003, 12:58 PM
wow this is looking really excellent peoples. May you share with us your winning material settings? it looks fuggin awsome!. I wanna see more details, and possibly the interior =P but its up to you. it sure does match up to suurlands beetle. nice one :thumbsup:

Peoples
10-27-2003, 01:40 PM
it sure does match up to suurlands beetle. :surprised (yeah right..)

But thanks! I doubt the material would work in any other scene than this - I've tweaked it a hundred times at least. I have pretty dark lightning in the scene (just one area light!) so I have boosted up the color brightness up to 150-200%, depending on the color. There are no specular channels on the paint mat, and the color channel is multiplied w/ a very light inverted fresnel (Thx to Thirdeye for the tip!). The reflection is fresnel, pretty low (=dark) values in it. But as I said - this material is suited to my own needs regarding this particular studio scene - and the HDRI plays a huge role with the reflections.

ThirdEye
10-27-2003, 01:44 PM
A suggestion for the final rendering: use area shadows ;)

Peoples
12-18-2003, 07:43 PM
I think I'll dump the area shadows and go straight to full radiosity w/ my new G5 - here's a quick comp test and man does this machine rock or what?!? I couldn't believe it at first - and didn't have a clue that DP machines renders with two scanlines.. Well - here's the pic - I think I'll have the motivation to finish this beetle now with the new hardware:p

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/beetleGarage.jpg

Conanart
12-18-2003, 08:32 PM
I think you need to check the scale of the beetle in thr garage, as it looks about 70% sized. Garages have low ceilings and there is too much room above the beetle. Plus the parking spaces behind the car would allow you to park it sideways.

Looks great though. Did you model the garage too?

G

Conanart
12-18-2003, 09:13 PM
Take a look at the two yellow lines under the car they are really wide - have you ever been in a garage where the space between the cars was nearly half the width of the car.

Look in the background the spaces 2 rows back are the right size for this car at this scale. As it stand right now the car if it sat sideways would take up just over half the frame which means it could just about fit into either of the spaces in the foreground sideways, which menas it is too small.

Sorry to bang on about it, but it is too small, and if you are going to go to the trouble of making a cool model like this and doing all that work it is worth getting it right.

G

PS, please add some wipers.:scream:

Halogen
12-19-2003, 04:17 AM
yes true it is quite small in comparison to the background, but it does look quite impressive. nicely done peoples :thumbsup:

Peoples
12-19-2003, 06:59 AM
I think you're right about the size - anyway this was just my first test render with my new machine. I'll have to scale it up and finish the modelling. The garage is just a picture - I found a HDRi which matches the scene pretty well.

Peoples
12-30-2003, 11:48 AM
Scaled up the car and added a softened layer in PS. Should model the rear part of the car and some basic interiors - and the vipers.

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/kuplaTalli3Soft.jpg

ThirdEye
12-30-2003, 09:29 PM
It's starting to get fantastic!!! :applause:

flingster
12-30-2003, 10:40 PM
oooh missed this until now very cool people prefer last one before glow/highlights...but scale is cool.

excellent result...well done bud..:buttrock: :buttrock:

handige_harrie
12-31-2003, 01:10 AM
For some reason the blur and glow makes it look like an awesome camera zoom/vertigo effect, almost like the image is moving :eek: I just can't focus on the entire car at once. Man this looks strange.

It is great for the effect itself or in an animation (though that'd be hard with a fixed bg) but if it is just a showcase of the car I would turn down the blur and glow (probably the PS effect). I would keep the yellow/blue contrast, that looks great.

Anyway great work :thumbsup:.

Ikari
12-31-2003, 03:31 AM
hey this ones really great, i like the car paint very much, but i liked the red one even more...it had really fire in it!

the last rendering is great, too, but i would turn down the bloom a little bit, it's to heavy imho, but just a itsy-bitsy-little-bit.

great stuff, cant wait for the final :)

Brent Turbo
12-31-2003, 04:44 AM
The car paint shader just isn't doing it for me. You should definitely look for some more reference on car finishes. The reflections are a little strong facing the camera, I think there should be more fresnel applied to the reflection channel.

http://www.otokatalog.com/download/wallpaper/beetle.jpg

Otherwise, a brilliant model!

ThirdEye
12-31-2003, 10:14 AM
You're showing a metallic paint shader Brent, which is very different from the plastic one chosen by Peoples and has a lot more fresnel fx than the VW yellow. ;)

ThirdEye
01-01-2004, 12:57 PM
Originally posted by Peoples
Scaled up the car and added a softened layer in PS. Should model the rear part of the car and some basic interiors - and the vipers.

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/kuplaTalli3Soft.jpg

An advice: try to soften only the car, the environment was soft enough in the other render, now you still see a big softening difference between the env and the car ;)

ThirdEye
01-01-2004, 01:03 PM
A question: what version of C4D r u using? Give us your GI settings, i think they're improvable.

Emberghost
01-01-2004, 10:05 PM
Originally posted by ThirdEye
A question: what version of C4D r u using? Give us your GI settings, i think they're improvable.

I second that, as being a noob it might help me out :drool: .

Peoples
01-02-2004, 08:53 AM
Wow - been away for the holidays, thanks for kicking this thread alive again! I´ll have to dig the GI settings, that render was one of the first on my dual G5 - so I didn't tweak them that much, but there's room for improvement. The softening layer in PS sure does give a strange look to the picture, but you´re right, it's a bit too much. I really have to get the rear done - I hate to show you the same angle every time:shrug: But - I'm aiming for my personal best here so I think we'll get something decent out of this:blush:

Peoples
01-02-2004, 11:03 AM
My settings for the render:

Strength: 100%
Accuracy: 80%
Prepass size: 1/1
Diffuse depth: 3
Stochastic samples: 600
Min: 30
Max: 300

I will tweak them a bit because there are still some artifacts - even that this took about an hour to render on 1.8DP G5.. I'm working on this beetle as we speak so stay tuned:D

Peoples
01-02-2004, 11:08 AM
... and that's a pure HDRI render, no lights whatsoever. I just found a decent matcing garage pic for the free carwash hdri available at www.hdrimaps.com - so that's also why the reflections don't match 100% - but I think it's close enough.

I'll try to blur the hdri used for the GI and keep a crips one for the reflections. The last one used a crisp hdri dor lightning as well - I might get fewer artifacts with a blurred one. I just remembered I actually tried a blurred version but got some VERY strange artifacts (very dark and sharp spots) - I didn't change a thing exept the blur in the HDRI............

Peoples
01-02-2004, 11:21 AM
Just thoug I'd show what I'm struggling with at the moment - the rear part is a pain in the ass to model - I have looked at dozens of reference images and my prints match pretty good - but I just can't get such a simple looking surface to look good:bounce: :bounce:

Well- I'll keep working, It'll have to work out sooner or later...

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/probs.gif

ThirdEye
01-02-2004, 12:37 PM
Your settings are VERY high but you still get some artifacts because of the high contrast of the hdr pic (it's in the nature of hdri). If you have 8.5 put the hdri in a filter shader and increase the gamma to 2,2, it will allow u to use less "expensive" settings because of the reduced contrast. Reduce the diffuse depth to 1, that will destroy the rendertimes ;)

Peoples
05-20-2004, 05:58 PM
Hey ya!

Haven't been too active lately on this forum, but here are my latest shots of the Beetle. It's pretty much done, but a killer render still needs to be done, as I'm not too happy with these.

Any tips?

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/peetle1.jpg

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/peetle2.jpg

ThirdEye
05-20-2004, 05:59 PM
red crosses mate

Peoples
05-20-2004, 06:00 PM
fixed

ThirdEye
05-20-2004, 06:01 PM
glad to see you finished the car, now i'd just composite it again in that environment of the old renders, they looked great.

Peoples
05-21-2004, 07:59 PM
I'll have to tweak the garage comp - in the meanwhile:

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/collage2.jpg

:D

ThirdEye
05-21-2004, 08:05 PM
AWESOME

miloszwl
05-21-2004, 08:16 PM
pure sweetness! :beer:

sebek27
05-21-2004, 09:32 PM
great job ! kind of goes well with Uma and her outfit in Kill Bill:)

Peoples
05-22-2004, 08:26 AM
I got the inspiration for the colors after seeing Kill Bill vol 1. :thumbsup:

handige_harrie
05-23-2004, 06:12 PM
Originally posted by Peoples
I got the inspiration for the colors after seeing Kill Bill vol 1. :thumbsup:

Then I want to see a "pussy wagon" version :applause:

or at least a wheelchair on the side...

I'm a huge Kill Bill fan ;)

Forgot to say: the car looks great.


(reminds me I have to finish my own car. Well after the exams, in about 1.5 week I have all the time in the world to do so :buttrock: )

Peoples
05-24-2004, 05:54 PM
here ya go :D

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/pussywagon.jpg

handige_harrie
05-25-2004, 08:28 AM
LOL :beer:

You should take this further (red leather interior, pimpy rims etc.) Cause it looks great!

Peoples
06-02-2004, 06:49 PM
Something I came up with - my fist radiosity (hdri) animation, don't mind the flickering... I'm not sure about some © issues, I used some VW logos + sony TV for the anim - but it's just for fun, no € involved:hmm:

So - It's a flash movie, believe it or not - original is Quicktime.

If you can't see or load it - please tell me, it's onlyÂ_~1MB page.

Take a look:

Beetle commercial (http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/beetleAnim/anim.html)

ThirdEye
06-03-2004, 01:23 PM
It kicks ass ;)

Katachi
06-03-2004, 02:02 PM
Nice car and render! But something about the car is bugging me. I am not sure what it is, but it´s off-beetle. Probably the sides of it. Are you sure the car´s 100% the right proportions?

btw. I come from Wolfsburg ;)

Peoples
06-03-2004, 06:16 PM
Well - I dunno... here are the prints, I think they match pretty good...:hmm:

http://www.hut.fi/u/vhautala/renders/4views.jpg

Thanks for viewing :thumbsup:

Peoples
08-14-2004, 03:46 PM
Long time no see folks - I'm back and here's one more beetle for you. This one isn't made for Uma and Kill Bill, but I like it's redwine flavor.

Here you go:

http://www.hut.fi/~vhautala/renders/DGarage.jpg

scarlie
08-14-2004, 09:56 PM
Great render !
I like the color... and the red wine :D

But, it looks too sharp to me, and a little oversaturated, according to the background...

Keep it up :thumbsup:

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