Since I started working on this car project, I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback which really helped me move the project forward. It’s only fair that I return the favor and share a bit of what I learned here. (The full scene file including model, lighting, material and texture is available at my site)

The entire scene is rendered with the internal renderer in Blender 2.5.  As an artist, I want precise control over each elements of the scene, and the internal renderer allows me to iterate through test renders extremely rapidly to get the look I wanted. A photon-tracer like LuxRender would be too slow for me, with little extra return in image quality in my opinion.

Supposedly, like eyes to a human, car headlights defines the character of a car.  There is really no shortcut to making a sparkly looking headlight, I just modeled everything as geometry and applied a lot of reflection/refraction to the material.  As long as the geometry is there, all the cool effects happen automatically once you hit render.  i also placed a lamp at where the light should be, to throw in a bit of extra lumen.

A lot of that ‘cinematic’ look is due to post-production color correction.  Here you can see my postprocessing nodes setup.

For the animation, I rendered out the entire video at 1280×720, as PNGs.  Because PNG is only 24bit, extra dynamic range is lost, which made all the post-processing and cross-fading look half-assed.  Next time I’ll definitely render to floating-point EXR formats, which should help when I start applying more aggressive processings.  I also realized that a single computer is NEVER fast enough;  The 40 second clip would have taken 83 days to render on a single core, but with the help of 24 cores spanning across 4 PCs, I managed to push out the video in less than 4 days.  Dropbox made file synchronization embarrassingly simple.

A lot of the technical issues with the video (bad driving dynamics; black pixels; flickering) only cropped up last minute in the final rendering, at which point I am just too annoyed to re-render it.  So hopefully I’ll fix these distractions later and release a better version soon.

That’s it for now.  Hope you like what I have so far.

So without further ado, here is the packed Blender file of the BMW. Open with Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 or later.

The car is modeled and rendered entirely in Blender 2.5.  Render time is around 20 minutes at 3200×2400.

A few of you asked me how I setup the material/lighting/rendering options.  Without releasing the Blender file (yet), here is a screenshot that might help:

From left to right, you can see the world settings, world texture settings, car body material, and finally car body texture.

PS: Happy New Year!

Render Stats for the above screen capture:

~1.6million Faces
~10MB of texture
~3 light sources + 1 HDR EnvMap
~Ray traced reflection, refraction, and Approximate Ambient Occlusion
~500MB RAM use
~Intel Quad @ 3.0Ghz
720p resolution at 1 minute a frame. (5 minute a frame when 5x motion blur is enabled)

Edit:

No crazy DoF effect on this one…  I also found out that approximate ambient occlusion causes some artifact on the car body, mainly in how it treats subtle curved panels.  So I am going back to real AO.

And since a few of you asked about what lighting system I used, here is the setup I am using:

Sorry to disappoint.  Yes the car is lit with just a single Hemi light source.  (Take that David!)  The rest is done with Ambient Occlusion using an HDR image texture.

The reason why it’s such a tight crop (and lit with low key light) is because the rest of car aren’t detailed yet. :D

Edit: first beauty render