A8L with Homemade HDRI

[atanguay]

While I'm in here, I think I'll do another.

To explain...the top image is a piece of original approved photography. But the problem is that it's an old model (small differences) and also a european version (license plate). So the challenge here is to take the new model and get it to match the old photography...thus bypassing the LONG approval process. The bottom image is the final replaced vehicle.

This is from the same dataset but it's lit from an HDRI handpainted in Photogenics HD to match the original environment. This way I could jump back and forth and do a low rez render to see where the refs were falling on the car, and where the illumination was going. Then go back and make changes. This was the hard part because the area of an image that will reflect in an almost flat part of an object is pretty small. Thank god Max automatically monitors for file changes now.

This is what makes being able to paint your own HDRIs so valuable. We'd all love to be able to travel to germany or wherever and gather a nice 360 light probe and then spend the rest of the week by the pool. But way more often than not, that's not going to happen. But if you can just work on mimicking the original location you can get away with it.

Also, obviously the wheels were kept from the original photography since it was so distinctive, and I didn't want to bother trying to get the mb right. I also handpainted in the little boogie nights on the front grill chrome to mimic the original photography.

The funny part here is that they actually like the rendered car better than the original photography. The original was over retouched. Look at the front driver's quarter panel...very odd. And the rendered car is a little cleaner and smoother.

Also, check out those weird signs on the original photography/art...talk about fake. Obviously motion blurred in photoshop.

Thanks for lookin in

[3dform]

very, very nice.... must have been a hard job...

How do you do the shading of the car?
Well, black is more simple then silver. But would be interesting to hear your experinces...

robert

[restoeboemi]

i like the second image, especially the reflection on the side glass, but something weird with the border between the tire and the road. Comp. in photoshop?

[marina]

In the "real" image, reflections are motion blurred too. Could vray do this kind of reflections?

[losbellos]

Everything looks good to me except the sharp shadows. make some noisy edge or use anvanved ray traced shadow with jitter edges, 1.5+

[egz]

In the "real" image, reflections are motion blurred too. Could vray do this kind of reflections?

Yes, VRay should be able to do motion blurred reflections

[egz]

Everything looks good to me except the sharp shadows. make some noisy edge or use anvanved ray traced shadow with jitter edges, 1.5+

I think the shadows are actually from the original photograph.

[egz]

Great work!

It would be intersting to see what the HDRI looks like.
I agree with restoeboemi that something looks weird between the tire and the ground, almost as if it was rendered with premultiplied alpha on white, and then the white matting hasn't been removed.