Roadwarrior 666

#1

This project was originally a car-modeling practice excercise I did a while back. Once I got the car modeled though I couldn’t help but model armour plating as normal cars are just boring:)
I’ve been modeling and adding to the design off and on over the last few months and finally decided to take it through to final render using it as a chance to really try out Mari for part of my texturing workflow and also to test out some new shader workflows in Vray.

I’ve always loved the original Mad Max film and when I was a kid I used to play the old Games Workshop(I’m sure it was) game ‘Car Wars.’ It was like a tabletop battle game with Mad Max-esque cars. I used to convert and paint my own ‘player character’ vehicles by converting old toy cars I had into killing machines(using warhammer paint, balsa wood, and cornflake boxes:) )

And now I’ve decided to re-live my childhood using slightly more advanced technology. :wink:

And a few wips…

#2

Based on the ‘supercharger’ engine from Mad Max:

#3

The front bull bars:

#4

Rally lights: (geometry/positioning will be tweaked to add some variation)

#5

The wheel: (vraydisplacementmod on the sidewall)

#6

Wow, like the details. I am sure the final product would be killer when combined.

#7

Thanks mate. Should be posting up the rest of the modeling wips soon enough.

#8

Look Dev for the tire shader. Mostly just a test to see how the caked-on dirt looks. Texture/dirtmask painted in Mari. The shader is a vray blend material. My texturing/shading workflow for the project will be a combination of layered maps/shaders in 3dsmax and painted maps in Mari. I will make heavy use of painted masks to drive different effects in my vray blend shaders. I might do a workflow overview video if I get time.

#9

Eventually I will ‘ding’ up all the geo to give the vehicle a more battered look.

#10

The armour plating was modeled in 3dsmax using existing geometry. I then UV-ed it and took it to Zbrush to add some damage: bullet holes/dents/chipped edges, basically anything that will create interesting patterns in the reflections, or add tiny spec hits to chipped edges. The resulting mesh was decimated for render with the UVs baked for painting in Mari.


#11

UVs were unwrapped in 3dsmax very quickly. The process involved splitting the mesh elements to individual objects using a one-click ‘soulburn script’ and then just selecting all the objects>hide unselected>select a part to uv>isolate selection>apply uvmapping clear/uvw unwrap mods>apply uv material>unwrap>collapse stack> un-isolate(for want of a better word:) ) selection>hide selection>rinse repeat for the other parts>re-attach all parts to a single mesh>apply unwrap uvw again>arrange uv shells>rescale to uniform checker and pack>done!

This process is actually extremely fast and took about 15 mins for the armour.

Note: I generally don’t bother with multi-tile UDIMs for a project like this as the process is a bit redundant for a still render illustration. I’d much rather use an 8k map if I needed the resolution instead of messing about with UDIM setups.

#12

cool looking car. looking forward to your updates

#13

Killer details!
But isn’t the goodyear logo upside down? :slight_smile:

#14

Thanks.

Car body UVs: the unwrapping procedure for this mesh was different than the armour. I just cut all the seams and used a combination of pelt>peel>relax. This was also a very quick process.

Alot of times people get too caught up in the method they use to unwrap hard-surface objects and it can end up taking them hours! This only took about 20 mins…pelt>peel>relax:)

Note: Alot of the time I will bake 1 sub-D level into the mesh and then UV(it’s a good idea to save different scenes at different stages so you’re always working non-destructively) as this will help to eliminate nasty UV errors caused by Max’s turbosmooth modifier. Then another turbosmooth can be added when uving is complete(if desired)
There are many workarounds to this well-known issue but none that I have ever found to work well enough for my liking.

#15

Ha! You sir, are correct. Here’s the displacement texture I intend to use for final:

Cheers for the comment.

#16

Nice work, but u have a problem where the side nerve meets the front wheel arc.

#17

Thanks for the comment.

Sorry, I’m not quite sure what you mean by side nerve?

#18

Rear spoiler:


#19

The side exhaust system: (pre-‘dinged-up’)


#20

Been working on more shader lookdev. Depending on the object I’ll use a different combination of UV/Texture/Shading methods. Sometimes I’ll manually unwrap the object. Other times I might use UV Master in Zbrush or a combination of flatten mapping with manual tweaking and the ‘render surface map’ tools in Max. And When appropriate I will even use the basic UVW mapping modifier.

For texturing/shading I always use a combination of hand-painting/tiled textures/procedurals.
And my shaders will generally be blended materials with different effects layered on using hand-painted masks/tiled masks/procedural masks just like the texturing. Sometimes I’ll layer the textures in a Max composite map, sometimes Mari, sometimes Photoshop. It definitely pays to be flexible and not just rely on a limited workflow.

I’m a strong believer in using whatever techniques I have at my disposal in order to get the job done, and that applies to everything:modeling/Uv-ing/texturing/shading.

Rally lights.

(don’t mind the weird, harsh lines, that’s where this part intersects with the car body)