The Making of Hotrod

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.

1. 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.

As for the tires, I detached the sidewalls , and used a displacement map on the remaining part of the object to create the thread. The rim is from another work of mine (a Chevy Camaro), the disc is from TotalTextures V8 dvd.

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.