Audi A8L

[atanguay]

Hey all...thought I'd pop up a fairly recent image.

This is from CAD data with simulated studio lighting illuminating the car. There were 12 different paints needed in 3 families...metallic, pearlescent, and standard. There were four poses, 12 paint schemes, and 4 types of rims. So this was a lot of compositing.
I ran seperate passes for paint, chrome, rubber, clearcoat, facing, and plastic. Then alpha channels for each of those to keep everything seperate in Pshop. Makes cleaning up problem areas and errors a lot easier on a global scale.

The interior is real and comped in from photography since interior CAD data wasn't available and why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to. The front black grill is also brought in from the photography because it looked a little nicer. But everything else is rendered.

Bake3D really saved my butt for the ground plane. It's the only thing lit with real CG lights. I made a studio model, lit it with soft shadow area lights, baked it in there and killed all the lights and let the car get lit by the studio light geometry. Even the plastics and rubbers are Vray materials with a blurry reflection to serve as a specular highlight.

Now if I can just get Vray for Maya, I can get some nice dynamics based animation out of these cars.

[RErender]

Looks great! Is it going to be online? be cool to see how you pulled off all the different paints, maybe a nice car paint library for your friends here at the forum . Are the headlights geometry? if yes they are some the most convincing I've seen. Not sure how well Maya does car simulation but have you seen http://www.newplugins.com/Products/VS1_5/CarAndTruck/# ? The old version was pretty cool but the new one looks great, cars are actualy driven and steered by the wheels.

[rodigus]

This is one hell of an image.
I noticed the use of photos AFTER you mentioned it. If not, I would never had realised it. The studio simulation really did its job, both in the lighting and the reflections. The use of bake3D is really ingenious. Makign the tools work for YOU and not the other way around, is really a sign of professionalism. Those skills are really valuable.

I would be very inrested in taking a look at the car with a different perspective, in order to see how the mapped elements work when changing the view.

Really nice image.

/Diego

[atanguay]

>>>Looks great! Is it going to be online?

Sure, you can see it here:

http://www.audiusa.com/a8_sedan/a8_s...-true_,00.html

Click the little tab on the left, then click 'Envision' then click 'Color' or 'Wheels'. Everything you see there is rendered. You can just rollover and the colors will change. Then at the top you can change your angle of the car.

Also, if you click 'Gallery' and bring up the 'Images/Wallpapers' tab at the bottom, in the top row, the second and last images are renders, as well as the second image in the bottom row.


>>>maybe a nice car paint library for your friends here at the forum

Hmmm, maybe we can do that. The silver is the one I'm most proud of. It was a pain. And looking at it again, less on the white...too yellowed...damn.


>>>Are the headlights geometry? if yes they are some the most convincing I've seen

Thanks a lot...yeah, they're geometry. They were really dense, so I remade some parts of it to simplify, and I also put some fake ref mapped chrome pieces in there to give them something to refract.


>>>Not sure how well Maya does car simulation but have you seen http://www.newplugins.com/Products/VS1_5/CarAndTruck/# ?

Yeah, I'm dying for this to come out. I've been working on a rig in Maya...but it's tedious. Any idea when it's going to come out? Lots of need for it here in Michigan.

Thanks again for the kind words..
A

[andrius]

Just wondering if you have set up any HDRI's in maya. I've been using some plugins and Mental Ray to render HDRI in maya but nothing so far comes even close to Vray. It's a shame, I have some nice cars modeled in PA/Studio tools but they are all nurbs. I've tried importing .iges files into max and using vray but for some reason it dosen't take to it very well. All of the product designers I work with model with Pro E or Solid Works, which basically spit out b-spline based models. I wish I could find a work around

[mike_kennedy]

I have used Rhino to aid my getting CAD models into Max. I can import NURBS models into Rhino and then spit them out to STL or 3ds files that Max can read. The IGES translator into Max is pretty good too if you want to retain the files in Max as NURBS. There is a Max 3 IGES Setting.
There is another product called Power Solids , a Max plug-in the is supposed to do a much better job of importing Nurbs via IGES into max and then being able to spit out a Quad Mesh that can be mesh smoothed.
I think they have a demo too.
Cheers
MK

[asango]

I've tried importing .iges files into max and using vray but for some reason it dosen't take to it very well. All of the product designers I work with model with Pro E or Solid Works, which basically spit out b-spline based models. I wish I could find a work around

heh. funny you mention that. im a product designer in a room full of engineers who work on proE. 3ds is my modeler/render(vRay of course) of choice and i have been working on getting a good workflow between solid models and meshes.

ive tried a few different things...i had the same problem with IGES, the meshes are just too dense and usually crash max. STLs work great for single parts...and can be used for assembly's, but you have to be careful about the resolution. This is assuming that you dont need to edit the meshes, b/c the imported meshes are quite messy. at first the STLs i was getting where really low res meshes, one of the CAD guys tried adjusting the export settings and we found that aprox. .005 cord height is a decent setting.

i also tried the plugin that mike mentioned, powersolids - www.nPowerSoftware.com.

They have a demo you can download. After i downloaded it i got a email from the VP of the company asking about what i was looking to get out of it and if he could be of any help. heh.

he said that the best method of xfering between proE and 3ds was via the STEP file format, which of course their plugin allows max to import.

the result was nice, basically creates a new proprietary object type which you can diplay as a bspline or a quad mesh. but there were some problems with stability which might have been do to the complexity of the object i was testing.

if anyone else has a good solution please let me know. id love to find a smooth workflow solution.
thx

[suurland]

Very nice work atanguay.. and great to see someone doing the same kind of work as me and almost using the same techniques.

About IGES there is only one way to get it clean into max and that's with powersolids/powertranslator. I imported a convertible car with exterior and interior that was delivered to me as IGES on 5 cds. I got it into max without that big problems, it just took some time to convert it all and fix the IGES files.

/Thomas

[corey]

Nugraf/Polytrans works like a charm too. Have you tried polytrans Tomas?

[RErender]

Yeah, I'm dying for this to come out. I've been working on a rig in Maya...but it's tedious. Any idea when it's going to come out? Lots of need for it here in Michigan.

Really don't know when but I think it is soon. We use the previous version here and are waiting for the new one.

[atanguay]

Yup...I follow the same path as Mike Kennedy here with just a couple little differences.

1) Take the IGES exports from CATIA, bring them into Rhino...

2) Simplify them if they have extra crap in there...Headlights for instance are full of little mounting hoohas and whatnots...adios those suckers.

3) Use Rhino's mesher to make something pretty dense, export them as OBJs

4) Import into Max onto seperate layers using the RezN8 layer manager

5) Use Polygon Cruncher from MooTools to get rid of really unnecessary polys chunk by chunk.

6) Use Rhino to make a really low poly version that I can whip around in the viewpoint, but doesn't get rendered.

Now, before I would have said poly reduction tools suck...but PolygonCruncher really works...it's really something else. does a wonderful job of interactively reducing things just the way you like. As soon as I start to see errors or something not quite smooth, I back off a little, and use that. It's really good at maintaining surface integrity and radiuses.

For a while I was just using rhino's detailed meshing tools, but found it just much easier to let it make a dense mesh, then reduce it.

That's the basic workflow.

I tried the PowerSolids, but no matter how well it works, the renderer has to dice the NURBS into polys at render time, which in Max takes FOREVER. So by going to dense polys myself, I take this step out of the rendering equation. NURBS are hilariously bad in Max.

I also keep the car body in 3 seperate 'zones'...front, mid, and rear and put them on seperate layers. if I need to edit any of these parts, which even though they're reduced are still pretty dense, I can just work on that area. Also, pieces of every material family are put on their own layer to help with rendering alpha channels of each material type. Once again, get the Rezn8 one, not the crappy built in one. It has an alternate material feature that will let you isolate objects by rendering a layer as pure white...without losing your original settings.

As for andrius's question about HDRIs in Maya....not really I'm afraid. I would give it a shot now that Mental Ray is in there, but not with the basic crappy renderer.
I guess the demo of that car rig thing for Max is coming out next week. I wrote the guy and that's what he says, so Maya's dynamics might not be that necessary. I tried mimicking the the little car suspension dynamics rig I made in Maya with reactor...turned out just awful. What a mess. Oh well.

Thanks for all the kind words you guys.

-Andy

[suurland]

I tried the PowerSolids, but no matter how well it works, the renderer has to dice the NURBS into polys at render time, which in Max takes FOREVER. So by going to dense polys myself, I take this step out of the rendering equation. NURBS are hilariously bad in Max.

Yes it has to dice it into polys, but it's powersolid that does it.. and not max so max's nurbs is not used at any time. And you can even set it to save the mesh, so basically it only have to do it once.

And the mesh it makes is really nice, but the best part is the smoothing. If you shade something in rhino it looks perfect and when you shade the same mesh in max it looks like crap, but with powersolids it shades like it does in rhino.

The peugeot 307 on my homepage (www.suurland.com) is made before I got powersolids(powertranslator) and it's 1.4mil polys and there is no interior. Using powersolids on another car that got ALL interior details I got a scene with 900000 polys and the funny part is the new car with less polys and more details even looks a lot better then the rhino mesh because there is no smoothing and reflection problems at all the corners. (Sorry I can't prove this fact with images, but the new car is still under NDA)

To me there is no contest...

/Thomas

[winberg]

Great car, and great renderings..

I have been struggling with the same workflow problems myself, and I am using rhino together with powersolids to get nice meshes in Max..

Heres how I do it:

1. Import the model(s) into rhino for cleanup
2. Import the model into max
3. Make poly mesh of nurbs objects with PowerSolids in max, then colapse to mesh after making the polys in the viewport.

This way I have control over the density, and powerSolids ususally makes really nice clean meshes...

-Tom

[flipside]

I also tried powertranslator and I was really impressed. Another great thing is that by default it meshes the closer objects more detailed than the ones further away. You can also lock the mesh for animations so it doesn't have to mesh it every new frame.

Also it uses a lower setting to display in the viewport, very neat.

I brought a carwash (couple of thousand parts) into max with powertranslator and it worked great. Before I tried it by meshing every part in rhino seperately to keep polys low. I spent hours and hours to convert and import it all, and then I couldn't render it... With powertranslator it took +-30mins to get it into max, and +-20 to get it meshed, and it rendered fine.

How do you guys work with transferring many parts to max? In rhino everything is on layers, but when I import into max with powertranslator, everything is named 'importedbrep' and all layer info is gone.

[atanguay]

Looks like it's time to try powersolids/powertranslator again.