Wow, a project I actually finished!
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.
Nice render. Your vignetting node tree is smart & simple, thanks for the info, I have never used that Math node before.
Probably the cleanest and professional animation i have ever seen on Blender…Really great job ! and thank to share your blend…
Great job!
I really love seeing your node setup. It would be really interesting to see more of these. This is one part of Blender that we don’t see very many tutorials about.
I agree with you Blender internal rocks!
Looks great! Thanks for showing the nodes setup, very interesting.
That’s really great, Mike! :)
Thanks for sharing these details and congrats for finishing this project! I have some waiting to be finished… =p
Cheers
Wow speechless. Only thing missing is some elegant music. All internal huh. You are like one of the Blender Gods. I can’t wait to see what other things you’re working on. Will you play around with the smoke?
OK, im a totaly blasted, amazing work. One thing though, how do you span 24 cores on 4 pcs???
Probably 4 hexacores.
Did you use any render manager, or did you do it all manually?
That’s a nice image!…am amazed at what the internal renderer can do.
I agree, this really needs sound to support the rest of it’s awesomeness! Were you paid, or have permission from BMW?
The work is amazing, I am not surprised the internal engine produced this, just happy that others are getting to see it’s true power in the hands of a master.
@Ronny
8+8+4+4 cores. :D
I didn’t use a render manager. Although I can see how it might benefit a larger project.
Hi,
Amazing quality. Thanx for sharing the files too
The rendering quality is excellent!!
Wow! Very very very nice animation! And thanks for sharing your node setup ;-)
Btw, you could also use vSwarm for rendering the project. Then you could probably use 12 computers? :P
Awesome work there. The compositing is sick!!!!
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing..
increible¡¡¡
sin duda un excelente trabajo
saludos desde mexico
the “small speckles” texture in the car material, you should use a very small clouds texture, instead of noise.
noise isn’t stable for animations, while clouds are. ;)
True, noise isn’t stable when animating, but that’s the effect I wanted(sparkles aren’t suppose to be stable). Although, most of the noise artifact you see is from not having enough blurry reflection sampling.
Great work, Mike. Very inspiring!
Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Amazing………..
Thank you for sharing
Err the vignetting was smartly achieved :D I will totally steal that since my workflow involves doing it in photoshop/gimp.
The glare in the headlight closeup, is pure awesomeness. Love the tint in it.
+5 interwebs
Yeah I wish there would be an easier way (a pre-made node, perhaps), but for now, this will do.
the “small speckles” texture in the car material, you should use a very small clouds texture, instead of noise.
noise isn’t stable for animations, while clouds are. ;)
For some reason i’m ending up with a blank page once i try to post a comment,do you know reasons why its occurence?i’m implementing oprea web-browser
amazing and very lowpoly too, thanks alot for sharing
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I very find this a eyeopener. By no means looked at it in this way. In case you are going to write some more postings about this subject, I genuinely is going to be back soon! Btw your layout is quite briliant. I’ll be using something similar for my very own blog if it’s ok with you.
Amazing work, as beginner, I’m really impressed and this kind of work, motivates me to go further :)
Could you give some details about modeling process ?
(I agree, Dropbox is amazing, you should invite people to use it to get some extra space free :D )
I found your entry about car modeling video from CG Cookie, sorry I’ve just discovered your blog :)
Good stuff, i think you should consider a quad core PC or more for rendering.
Thanks.
Thanks for great information I was searching for this information for my mission
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