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Abandoned Bel Air Making Of

By Jochem Arts

My inspiration came from images of forgotten car graveyards. Some iconic beauties can be found over there, so I made a tribute to a classic, the Chevrolet Bel Air '58. Every project starts with doing research. How does the car really look, are there blueprints to build one etc. I started by looking for some blueprints and found a website that has lots of them: http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/cars/ and on Google I found a lot of images from car graveyards. It's sad to see those beauties covered in rust.

I made a 3D model of an iconic car, The Chevrolet Bel Air. After the modelling part was completed, I started to pose the model so it looks like a rusty old wreck, which was the fun part of the entire process.

Then it was time to texture the model. I used a few rusty textures that I found on Google and started to place those on different spots on the car.

The next step was to create some ivy on the car. To create those I used an ivy generator and spread them all over the car.

Then I needed to make some grass. I used PaintFX in Maya to create grass patches. There are also commercial models available if you are not working with Maya. The default textures are quite useless since they don't render in Mental Ray (or any other renderer) and are built up with colour-ramps. So, I created custom shaders with textures to give them some colour.

I made several grass patches and put them in a particle emitter and instanced them on a surface. It's also possible to use some scatter scripts to create fields of grass. Those gaps in the middle were left there on purpose so that clumps of grass wouldn’t stick through the metal of the bumper and the tires. I manually placed some grass over those locations at the end.

The road was sculpted in Mudbox. Normal maps were extracted and used on the base plane. If you don't have a sculpting program it's possible to use the "sculpt-geometry tool" in Maya. It won't give you the same results, but you can create bumps and ditches with it.

The road was placed on the ground plane and some ground cover was placed on it. These were also made in PaintFX, converted to polygons and had a custom-made shader assigned. The ground plane had a grass texture assigned to it. I made some boulders and some small stones on the road.

The background didn't have instanced grass. That was no problem because it would be blurred in the depth-pass, there would be trees and bushes placed on it and finally, the car would block most of it anyway.

The trees were also made in PaintFX. They were converted to polygons, I generated some ivy on the trunk and created a custom shader for the leaves. The leaves shader is a two sided material with a bumpmap. It's also translucent, so the light can pass through the leaves and light them up. The tree in the background was floating, but my grass ground plane had a hill over there, which was hidden in this render.

Bushes were made and instanced over the ground plane. Only the bushes placed in the foreground were placed manually.

All the elements were ready so it was time to set up the proper settings. For lighting I used the physical sun & sky systems from MentalRay. Instead of a light colour I used a light temperature of around 5500K to create realistic daylight. I placed some extra trees in the scene, and a few on the right side of the camera. You can't see them in the render, but they cast a shadow on the road. This looks much more realistic then doing it in post production. Render settings had high quality (set on 2 with Mitchell filter) and the samples of the shadows etc. were set to 128. Resolution was set to 6000x4000 so I could make large prints. The render result is shown below.

I made a few custom shaders for the depth-pass, because the leaves had some transparency, and the default depth-pass gave everything the same shader, so you don't have any transparency. I used surface shaders and black volume fog to create the depth pass.

In Photoshop I used the Lens Blur filter to create the depth of field with the depth-pass shown above. I used adjustment layers to edit the saturation, levels and colour balance and use a photo filter. I ended up with a few variations, each with a completley different look and feel.