Modeling and Rendering of a Mercedes S600by Ali Ismail, Jordan Web: www.aliismail.com

Now you could in some cases avoid adding the edge loops all over, try to do it smart to get the sharpness you want with as less edge as you can. Try to make an even distribution of edges to fix the areas which gets missed up as a result of adding edges, even if it meant adding even more edges, but please try to understand how mesh smooth works when you add edges and anticipate what effect they will have.

BTW if anyone found any difficulties doing this mesh he can check wire frames of finished cars and try to learn from them, or you can use your tablet to draw a basic wireframe on any image similar to the image below , if you don't have a tablet just print the image out and draw on it using your pencil, this image will help you realize how to start modeling it..

As you can see from my jerky drawing anything will do, I don't draw the wireframe now but when I was starting out to learn about edge loops it helped me, you can do as I do now just look at the model and visualize how you are going to do the edge loops and it will make your modeling faster.

One more thing also, its better to check your mesh for any non quad faces, you could see it directly on your smoothed mesh (it will simply look funny at any area with non quads) but to check it more easily and quickly just use the check non quad script (if you aren't using max look for a similar option in your app or if you can download a script from the internet)

Just type "Select Non Quad" at the maxscript reference in 3dsmax and you will find a tutorial called how to select non quad polygons, or select that tutorial from the how to tutorial menu, in a minute you will have it ready (no need to learn scripts just copy and paste the script and see the instructions of using it in the tutorial)

That’s all for modeling now :)

Car Rendering

This section will be about rendering a car in 2 different styles, I used VRay to render it but you can do the same in all renderers, it’s the same principle.

At first I would like to thank Dominick Cliff, He made a very short tutorial waaaay back about rendering a car, but it made me understand the importance of the surrounding environment for reflections. The cool thing about HDRI is that it makes life a lot easier, it stores both light information and the environment to reflect as well which makes sense, the most crucial thing to care about when using an HDRI is that it should fit with the background image or scene you are using if it wasn't taken from the HDRI itself.

For example you obviously can't just put a car on a white background with an HDRI reflecting a beach, it will look occurred even if the reflections on the car and all the render settings and materials are perfect. In some cases when the HDRI is similar to your scene but not enough you can try to put the HDRI in a mix map to try to add a different color tone to it and play with the light value of the HDRI to make it as close as possible to your scene but in studio style or other types of renders or scenes with no similar HDRI maps or closed sets etc… it becomes hard to use an HDRI which will give you what you want.

There are ready HDRIs in white and black color and prepared to simulate lights in a studio but they can't always give you the results you want. That’s why for studio renders I always depend mainly on lights or reflection objects that I make.

I will start off with the material so you can test with the lights on a good material. Now the material or shader key to any successful car paint should be multilayer, in order to make car paint more realistic its not enough to put in just one layer with Fresnel reflections, when you observe car paint in real life and especially when there is intense sun on it you see it reflecting the sun but you can see the sun also being reflected in a glossy blurred reflection, that’s why we need to make the 3d car paint more than one layer. For people using brazil renderer or mental ray in maya you have a ready car paint material/ shader to use, they will include multilayer reflection and more details by default, it will be easier to use the car paint materials there.

Anyway as you see in the image reflection will come in different layers