Introduction

This will be a brief explanation about making of the quad bike, I like quads but you won’t exactly see me riding one (too scary for me ) anyway it was needed for a small project for a presentation of a quad and motorcycles racing track, it needed to be animated as well.

Reference

As usually if you needed any decent realistic existing model you need reference, unfortunately I couldn’t find blueprints for the quad but I did manage to find a decent front side pictures, a tip is to not only look in the official sites and try google image search or anything similar, amateur images is sometimes more clear than good ones because they don’t do any effort to make it perfect they show it for how its really is

As you see its far from perfect reference, so when modeling you always have to be careful and look at reference images taken from a normal viewing angle and checking to see if it’s the same or not (simply use your eye), you can pretty much say that modeling without decent blueprints isn’t certainly your first choice, I can hear some one out there saying duh anyway.
A little trick also is to put the reference image as a background then use a camera to try to replicate the original one, and see if there are major proportional differences (camera match)

Modeling

I’ve had no problems with modeling, the only hard thing was the lack of good reference which makes modeling more time consuming, I made the all the basic objects using editable poly as following:

then I started adding details also using primitives, splines etc.. and adding simple modifiers to primitives taper, FFD etc
I did also make 4 or 5 types of screws and small objects so I can quickly start copying them and instancing them, that added good amount of details very quickly

Starting

Starting out with the setup of your chosen blueprints, I?ve decided to make the “Mazda RX8″ and I found the blueprints at http://www.onnovanbraam.com/ who has an wide range of car blueprints. Get the Mazda blueprint here BLUEPRINT

You start out with making 4 boxes that match the size of your blueprint images and then you open your material editor and get the images from where you saved them. Also get some reference pictures, so you can see how the car looks in real life.

Apply your blueprints an place them like the picture in the top, NOW YOU READY TO BEGIN MEDELLING…

Basic Modelling

To start modelling you create a plane with no segments, place the plane at the front just above the wheel. Make sure that the plane is positioned correctly in all viewports.

When you have done this, turn the plane into an “Editable mesh” object so you can begin modelling the car. If you want to you can give the “Plane” another name like car or body…

Now we start modelling the car, go into your editable mesh and choose “Edge” from the panel. Pick the outher segment of the plane, hold down shift and drag the mouse to the wanted direction.

Continue doing this until you have shaped the plane all around the wheel carrige. Keep in mine that you have to move your edges in all viewports to get the right shape of the car.

The target of this project was to create a rigged character as real as possible and with all the clothes layers. This has been the first time I do something like this, and also the first time I tried to do a full human character, so I also used it to learn a lot.

Modeling

There’s really not too much to explain about the modeling. It’s all always the same tools: extruding edges and polys, cutting edges, moving vertexes… These are the basics that everybody can learn from the famous Joan of Arc tutorial. Once you have that basics, I think what is more useful to learn is to see the wires, so here you have mine. You can see some parts have more edges than the normal, but that’s cause all the rigging stuff I wanted to add. For example, if you look at the hips, I added some edges just to make the flesh deform correctly when she’s wearing the underwear, or if you look at the ribs I added edges to create them but in the modeling pose they are not visible, I just make them visible when she’s bending back. That’s, imo, probably the hardest part about modeling, knowing where you have to put the edgeloops and knowing what you will need when rigging. It’s just planning it before start to model.

During the wip of this project, some people asked me how I model the clothes. Once you have the body it’s easier. For example, to create her shirt I first duplicated the body mesh and added a bit of push. Then I deleted all the parts I don’t needed (legs, hands, head…) and tried to reduce the quantity of edges, trying to preserve the body’s shape. It’s just deleting edgeloops till you have it as simple as you can. Then I add the cloth parts, so for example, with the shirt, I added the seams on the lower part, where the body and the arms come together and all the neck zone, creating the shape and adding the rope. But still all as simple as you can, the less polys the better it will be. So I had something like in the image. Finally I added all the wrinkles. For me it’s useful to have references even of an irregular think as the wrinkles, not to exactly copy them, but to have an idea of where will them appear and how. Creating them it’s easy but boring for me. It’s just selecting some edges you have (or creating new edges cutting them) and extruding them (with a 0 height) so you finish with a triple parallel edgeloop, and then you just have to move up or down the middle edges to create the wrinkle, move the vertexes to make it more irregular and weld target the vertexes on the ends of the wrinkle. And repeat this process with different shapes and directions till you’re happy with the result.

Rigging

In this project I did my own rigging instead of using character studio, cause this way I had more control about it, and it had been better for me to learn, that was really the purpose of this project. I learned a lot from this two guys, www.keesrijnen.com and www.paulneale.com, so I think I have to mention them.Really there’s not too much I can say in a tutorial like this. I’ve done IK legs, a spline IK for the spine and IK-FK arms (the way to do this is to create 3 arms for each, one working in IK, other working in FK and the third one, that is the real arm, takes the position from one or from the other depending on a value of a spinner I have). For the facial rigging I also used bones and some morphers, but I didn’t liked the result so the next time I will do it a bit different (with bones and morphers too, but in a different way).

I think the strangest think I’ve done in this rigging are the breast bones. I was trying to simulate the real breast movement, so when she’s looking down they tend to center and fall, when she’s looking up they tend to separate and flatten and when she moves an arm up they have to stretch too. I used a combination of morphers and this bones, that where rotated inside or outside depending on the body’s position.

Skinning

In this tutorial I am going to show you how I did the picture. I will not go into step by step details and I assume that you are familiar with the basics of 3D Studio MAX. This tutorial describes modeling, lighting, texturing and post production of the scene…I prefer to do my scenes in this order because I find it much easier to setup materials with lighting present, because materials tend to look different in material editor than in scene with lights. Maybe this is not the optimal way, but it works for me, and you should try to find what suits you the best because that is the only way to raise your productivity.

Enough said, let’s get to business:

Geometry in the scene is quite simple

Chain Links:

Are just editable meshes with meshsmooth, there really isn’t much philosophy in creating those. To put a chain in desired position I manually positioned every single link until I was satisfied with the result. By doing so I could easily create certain amount of randomness that contributed to a much more “real” feeling of the chain. I could have also used Path Deform plugin, but I found it unsuitable for my current need because it would bend chain links and make them curvy which would produce an unnatural effect.

Leaves and petals:

Are again simple meshsmoothed boxes. The only thing where you should pay attention is adding folds (details give the image a “real” feeling and I would suggest that you carefully observe things around you and see how much irregularities there are in organic things). I added folds using a “soft selection” tool of the edit mesh modifier (which I added AFTER the meshsmooth). Simply select a row of vertices, adjust the falloff and then move them up or down until you create a nice fold. Just be careful not to derange the smoothness of the mesh (if you do disturb the mesh, you can add another meshsmooth, but then number of polygons would drastically increase and so would rendering time and memory usage, so try to keep it as smooth as possible).

With all the modeling finished this is how the scene looks

Ha! Pretty poor well, didn’t I tell you geometry was simple…lighting, textures and post production is what will give this particular image a real atmosphere. Let’s try to make things a little better. For the lighting of the scene I used Brazil r/s (but any other shader such as MentalRay, V-ray…etc, would do the trick, I just got used to Brazil) and Brazil lights. Two of them from the side of the scene, both casting area shadows. There is also Sky Light enabled as well as Indirect Illumination (‘Luma server’ rollout):

The reason why I used two lights is the fact that I wanted to achieve certain amount of contrast (try to avoid creating “flat” and “washed out” images if your going for a non CG look). First light (lower intensity) illuminates the greater part of the scene and the second (higher intensity) only the very left part of the image producing an illusion of a intensive light source but not affecting the flower itself. See light attenuation and intensity setup on images below:

Really useful option which you should use when setting up lights (when you don’t need a lot of details) is Image Antialiasing under ‘Image sampling’ rollout. Try to lower values and see how noticeably faster scene renders, and you still can see whether you are on the right way with lighting or not. Another timesaver is a ‘shade rate’ option (under ‘luma server’ rollout). Lower values mean lower quality of shadows and faster rendering, so it is up to you to make a compromise that suits your needs. My advice is to keep it all the time pretty low and just raise it in final rendering if necessary (for this picture I used -4, -4 values for min/max even for a final rendering).

This is what we get if we hit render again:

(Notice that I also modified camera position in order to achieve more “dramatic” look.).

Now we’re getting somewhere…at least I hope so .

Once you are satisfied with scene illumination it time to have fun with texturing.

Petal and leaves:

Textures were painted in photoshop. There is a really cool tutorial written by Jacob Johnson (‘complete projects’ tutorial section of 3D Total: “Flower Bug” ) on creating really nice petal tex, so I will skip explaining any of that, because I followed the same tutorial when creating my image.

Rusty ol’ chain :

Has a simple blend material using procedural maps as diffuse, mask and bump maps. material#1 is metal and material #2 is rust and the mask is noise map. Beautiful thing about procedural maps is that they don’t need uvw mapping coordinates hence no stretching can ever occur.

Floor:

Wood map for diffuse, same image but desaturated and slightly increased contrast for bump map (bump value is -9).

diffusemap bump map.

Wall:

Mix of wood and ‘dirtmap’ for diffuse and the same as above for bump (bump value is -80).

dirt map wood map

Hit ‘render scene’, wait for about 30 mins (my case) and here is the result:

Hmmm something is still missing. Depth of field maybe? Well yes, but I am not patient enough to add it now in MAX, do the test renders again, wait for some time…Photoshop? why not! Blur tool (shortcut key: ‘R’) is quite a timesaver. Just a few strokes here and there and you have it…for parts that are closer to the observer (camera) use a lower ‘strength’ percentage, for the far parts raise the value.

It would also be nice to add a subtle soft glow to the brightest parts of the image. Use the select>color range and pick the most illuminated part of the image (in this case that would be the tip of the most left petal). Play with the fuzziness value until you select just the brightest part if the image. Copy the selection to a new layer and use some blur. Then decrease opacity of the layer if necessary, and guess what…there’s your glow.

Minor color correction (image>adjustments>Hue and saturation, green and magenta channels) were also done.

And that would be it…here is the result.

Tip: All the things that I’ve done in photoshop can be achieved in MAX as well, I was just too lazy to set up DoF in Brasil, to change the color balance on textures and to use glow inside MAX. I would loose much more time and get the pretty same result. On the other hand, by using photoshop I saved time just this once. If I ever need a higher resolution picture than the one I made, I will need to render it in hi-res and then repeat the whole post production process (unless I recorded a macro…and guess what…I haven’t ). So it really depends from situation to situation which way of adding effects you should choose. Also you might consider this type of post production just as a guideline for the things you want to do in your favorite 3D software.

So, grab a mouse and start working!

Modelling:

Since I didn’t have that much 3D knowledge, I kept things very simple. Most of the objects started out as a box and then I proceeded to pull the edges/verts, cut, extrude (basic polymodeling tools). Only a few objects use Meshsmooth modifyer. What I decided to do is to use Tessellate modifyer instead and on top of that a small amount of Noise modifyer (as we all know, there are hardly any surfaces that are dead straight).

Phone Booth:

As this was the focus of my scene, I modelled it first. I got the reference material on the net (Google Images). Frame was built first. Then the door – copied 4 times and at the end I did the top part. This is one of few objects that use Meshsmooth.

Street Tiles:

I had to decide here, if I want to use bump mapping or model them. I went for the latter. I created a plane with enough length and width segments, selected all polygons and extruded them. Then I put some modifiers on top (noise #1, tessellate, noise #2 and uvw mapping).

Buildings:

Buildings… well walls were made out of planes. I extruded the polys where the windows are inwards and that was that. All I had to do is to add a few more edges so that noise modifyer could do its job and I was done.

Grass:

Take 3 triangles, bend them and then randomly rotate&scale them. The rest is just copying and positioning.

Garbage:

Cigarette buts, broken bottles, McDonalds bag, newspaper and so on add a lot to realism. All these little things are really easy to make. Do a basic shape, throw noise modifyer on top and you are done. Leave the rest to the textures. As for bottles, just create a spline profile and slap Lattice modifier on top.

Interior:

I only modeled the visible parts. No need to spend lots of time on objects that will never be seen. Also, the farther away the object is in the scene, the less details you need.

Lamps & Signs:

These old lights weren’t as easy to make as one would think. The tall one was made with Lattice modifyer and the rest was polymodeling. Same applies to wall lamps. Sign is pretty basic apart from the little wavy details. I used renderable splines for those.

Texturing:

Most of the textures were made using the Blend material and Composite materials. Composite lets you mix together more materials into one where as Blend blends two materials using a mask.