Car out of the BOX

In 2006, I was introduced to Mr. Peter Thompson, owner ofMeritus Racing by Paul McAusland of UrbanImaging. He had recommended my 3D visualservice to Mr. Thompson and from then on I was creating the visuals for MeritusRacing sponsorship campaign.

The visuals I have created required photorealism anddelicate compositing of rendered image to the photography plate.To accomplish the big task of visual realismI used the tool I have been using since 1996 when I started at game design KLightwave 3D. The package has all the stuffs and shaders I need to get the taskdone. Occlusion was new to me at that time and soon as I've tried the shaders,the effects on the final renders are clearly the realism I was looking toachieve.Although Lightwave's internalrendering is very good, the limited time and amount of renders I needed means Ican't spend 3 hours for one image alone. The solution I had is to use a 3rdparty rendering plugin. With the use of FPrime and its real time renderingoutput, I was able to be productive and meet the tight deadline of submittingthe visuals for sponsorship presentation on schedule.
Modeling:
I was commissioned to create 3d Models for 4 differentformula cars, namely, BMW Formula, Renault V6, A1GP and GP2. I was able tocomplete one car in 10 days total and spent about 1-2 hours a day. The task of modeling was incredibly time consuming but itwas a lot of fun. I am meticulous and had always been clean with my models, apractice I've inherited since starting with low polygon modeling for games. Iused subdivisional modeling since this is far simpler than the precision requiredby spline modeling.

Car out of the BOX

In this article Ichose to present GP2 formula car.
I always treat modeling as if I were sculpting in real clayor marble, whether be it characters, organic form, building, cars etc.With GP2 I chose to start from a simple box withmultiple segments and placed the plan views respectively on XYZ axis for myreference.
First I loaded the blue print of GP2 on to a plane polygons. I prep the modeling windows by opening the Layers, Polygon Stats and Numeric windows on the right hand side. This 3 windows are very important as I can see all the functions I will use. I always starts with Polygon (ctrl+H) and Symmetry on (shift Y). Symmetry is very handy tool as it reflects everything that I do on the right side on to the left side or upper part to down part. It is also important to rememnber to place the object orientation to exact 0,0,0 values at the start for the symmetry to work.

I started with segmented boxes as shown below. This segments aremy control point on how I will mould the basic shape of the car body.

After few tweaks here and there I press "tab" to activate subdivision, below is the basic shape I have created. This will be my working plate which I will modify until I get the finer details.

My modeling technique is very organic, most of it involves extruding and segmenting the polygons by using BANDSAW PRO. This tool is very handy, you can find it under Multiply tabs from the top menu of the modeling window.

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