This is a tutorial set covering the complete project of modeling, shading, lighting and rendering a Ferrari in mental ray. The techniques presented in these videos represent an accurate production workflow for how to create cars in 3d applications like Maya.

We start off by sizing up Ferrari blue prints in Photoshop which are then imported into Maya and used as reference images throughout the modeling tutorial. You will learn how to make all the different component parts of a car including wheels, alloys, bump and rear area, lights, mirrors, windscreen, contoured panels, intake area and fenders using polygon modeling techniques. When building a car it’s important to align your geometry to create clean, seamless transitions so you will see how to do this is done correctly by snapping to points and curves. The entire
Ferrari is created from an initial polygon plane where the edges are extruded and new faces are extracted to build additional geometry following the exact blue prints on the image planes. Some of the modeling tools you’ll be using are append to poly tool, fill hole and split poly tool for inserting edges. We also focus on how to avoid ngons and clean up our geometry to maintain only quads and tris in a model.

When the car model is complete we convert the polygons to sub d’s to add creases along the panels, and then convert back to polygons once again while still maintaining our sub d level detail with the hard creases, the technique shown for this is excellent because working with sub d’s
can be difficult if this is something you haven’t done before and following this tutorial would give you a great start.

During the shading part we do a lot of work in Photoshop where we create displacement maps for the tires treads and damage stripes from photographic images with the pen tool. We also make custom transparency maps for the grid pattern on the front lights by using the alpha channels. In Maya you’ll see how you can build up shading networks for car paint with procedural textures and layered shaders, and how to use mental ray’s approximation editor and projection UV’s to save a lot of time.

The final car is rendered using HDR lighting techniques which is common practice when rendering showroom objects in isolation. We create several environments to take a better look at how different lighting conditions affects our car paint shader and get some more practice with this type of Image Based Lighting.

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