So I Spent a week modelling this bad boy. Then a second week doing refinements. Modelling cars is my forte so I wanted to challenge myself with a unique shape.
I’m pretty much up to the lighting and rendering stage. Some parts will be unwrapped for texturing but not all of it. keep in mind I didn’t model the whole vehicle I just made sure it looked very much like the mazda furai.
I don’t know much about the mentalray shaders so I’m doing some research in digital tutors.
Impressive model. Maybe you should look at vray. I think vray is better in making car renders.
Some of your poly flows look wonkie but if it works it works.
Mental Ray is just as good as any other render engine.Depends on your skill level I guess.
You could look into Renderman free edition it’s a really easy engine to get into fast.
Can’t wait to see some renders of this model.
I’d really love to use renderman or Vray for that matter but unfortunately this is a uni assignment and for the sake of an efficient pipeline at home and at uni I’m constrained to using mental ray. And your right. I do believe I can achieve a good result with mental ray.
//youtu.be/1dALc_XU6dA
Coming across an issue I had with the rendering. I personally blame the substance shader for doing this to me. Maybe I shouldn’t use it in the future and just go Manuel.
Just figuring out the lighting before placing it on a highway. I want to achieve night time lighting which I believe I’ll achieve in post process. In real life the car material is not so reflective and has more of a matte effect.
Also I don’t like how I have a greybase for the body. I want a darker base.
I’m facing an issue and I need your guys help. There is no shadow under the car. :shrug: I’m using mental ray and here are my render settings.
Both Area lights have an intensity of 1 and the ambient light has an intensity of 0.8
I think I should start buil;ding my highway before I get any deeper into particles or lighting or rendering. I feel I may have skipped a very important step and that was building the highway. I don’t mind I’ve set up the shaders but the lighting was all testing and for display purposes.
Its my first time using Linear lighting and I feel I’ve hit a milestone. Lighting is not my strong point infact its really weak for me.
I’ve only screenshot the renders instead of saving them. Also I’m using mental ray for the rendering engine.
for example road, you should play around with glossiness reflectivity and bump maps are quite easy to setup, but glossines is harder to get correct.
if you break down the road texture, parts with layer of water are glossy and chunks of concrete are with low glossines
Cheers for the feedback. 
Yeah I’ve bee working on it quite a bit lately. Still Tryna fix up some more stuff.
I’ve created some style frames while test rendering. I plan to have 2 seconds for each style frame.
Check the shadow settings on your light.
If you´re going for a studio shot here I suggest searching for different studio light setups for cars. Your light there acts as a small soft box which is a really poor choice for lighting a car.
Remove the environment and contain the scene within a matte dark grey box. Change the car material to a semi-glossy grey. You can change the color of the backdrop to separate it from the car.
Now you can start lighting the car.
For a studio shot you don’t need reflections from the environment. Let the lights take car of that. With a good set up you’ll get nice, clean, reflections without distracting elements. Think of highlighting the shapes and forms of the car.
One lighting set up that i’m particularly fond of is just a big light box over the car. Make it cover the whole car and adjust all the parameters until it looks good.
I would focus more on the car and give it less negative space to show off the backdrop, especially given that the current backdrop is just the same repeating element. Also, tone down the effects immensely, since right now we’re not seeing any of the car’s features; we know it exists because of the lights and mirror reflections, but the body details are totally lost in motion blur.
Yeah the lighting I did for that scene was very poor and I wasn’t using linear workflow. I never even heard the term of linear workflow before. Having discovered linear workflow I deleted my original lights and started from scratch with research from digital tutors.
Not gonna have a studio setup for the final animation but if I’m ever to do a studio setup again then I’m gonna try what you’ve mentioned. Cheers
Definitely too blury to see the vehicle clearly. The car is going to be the focal point of the scene so considering the story of the image(composition) I’m not worried if the background is too dark or blurry.
Allot of the comments and feedback I’ve received from this forum I’m going to mostly apply in post. This is also my first time using render passes.
Its my first time using render passes for mental ray and applying my knowledge about it, Allot of my research came from digital tutors and I’m having to go through multiple courses just so I can get my head around it. I feel I may have only scrapped the surface of linear workflow and render passes as it is my first time learning abou this. For now this is the best I can do.
I always render my passes into one EXR file, but I had to install separate exr plugin into photoshop, it cant handle multi-layered exr itself (as long as I know) I have never had problems with exr in nuke for example and I guess it works well in after effects too
