THE MAKING OF HOT ROD

In this article I would like to show you what kind of methods I used to create my latest picture ’Hotrod’. Although in Hungary (my home) those cars aren’t too popular, I really like the style of cars from the 30’s, so I decided to make my own hotrod. The car isn’t an exact type, I just wanted to catch the most characteristic shapes of this era.

Building the car

Becouse blueprints are really hard to find for these cars, I had to use only reference pictures during the modeling process. So first I created the wheels and then modeled the body of the car according to them. I used poly-modeling for the whole car then smoothed the objects with Meshsmooth.

At the intake manifold I had to pay attention to the small parts, but the engine is only a box with some very basic modifications

At the front, the headlights were created from hemi-spheres, the grill from boxes. After attaching the boxes together I used FFD Box modifier to get the proper shape and bend them to the right position. The glass of the headlight has a displacement map on it, that was blurred a bit in Photoshop, to earn a smoother extruding effect.

On the final render it can’t be seen, but a simple interior was also created for the car.

Materials: the carpaint is VrayMaterial, where the diffuse map is a very smooth Gradient Ramp with just a little difference between the two colors of the map, the reflect is Falloff, Perpendicular/Parallel type, from black to a middle-grey (from the inside to the outside). The chrome parts have also VrayMaterial, with black diffuse and white reflection color. The interioir leather is Standard Material, with a mix of noise and cellular maps in the bump slot and high specular and low glossiness values. Drawn texture was used only at the intake manifold, where after I drew a hexagon pixel by pixel I used the Define Pattern funcion in Photoshop and painted the whole texture with just one click.