Automotive Secrets, what are the productions houses workflows and tricks?

[ali_cgi]

Thanks again John,

Getting the glass reflecting always seems hit or miss, It ends up fully transparent or covered in reflection, depending on the ibl dome of course,
Wow! No extra lighting thats really interesting!

Cheers, Alistair

[kosso_olli]

...was shocked to see the raw renders. they're properly bad...

That makes me feel sad! Of course the retouching is very important, but the better the renders are, the less retouch is needed. Not all raw renders are crap, believe me. Will post some images later.

[Wilyman]

That makes me feel sad! Of course the retouching is very important, but the better the renders are, the less retouch is needed. Not all raw renders are crap, believe me. Will post some images later.

I agree 100%!

I'd be interested to see what some of the raw Audi renders at PX2 look like, if you're allowed to show any.

Cheers,

John

[kosso_olli]

I'd be interested to see what some of the raw Audi renders at PX2 look like, if you're allowed to show any.

I don't have permission to show any of the Audi's I did, but here is a comparison from a render I did at Jung von Matt ad agency in Hamburg. The retouching was mainly just contrast and curves and so on, nothing too fancy.

Regards

Oliver

[kosso_olli]

Here are my answers to the questions from the first post, by the way.

How much does this type of work rely on the real cad data of the cars?

Almost all the work I do in the automotive business relies on data delivered by the manufacturer. Mostly this is a tesselated Maya file, you very rarely get any nurbs surfaces as Step or Iges files.

How good are the hdri's ?

This mostly depends on the photographer or his assistants at the set I have seen anything from very clean and perfectly stitched HDRIs to totally useless crap full of noise and unsharp areas. Never have done any CGI on location, but I would shoot the HDRIs myself if I had the chance.

What do the raw renders look like?

That depends on the company who does the renders. While working at Jung von Matt, which is the lead agency for Mercedes Benz, I had the chance to see raw renders from nearly every company that does CGI for MB, from big houses like Recom, The Scope or Zerone, to smaller companies like Digitales Leben. Bottom line is that there are no magic tricks. Either the guys at these companies know what they are doing or they don't. In my eyes it all comes down to the experience of the artists. Sadly, often there are other factors involved, such as deadlines or strange demands from the clients.
However, ignoring these factors, there are some quality differences between the images I have seen. Will not go into any details, but some of the big players have their problems as well.

How much post?

That could be anything from slight color adjustments, contrast etc. to heavy compositions with loads of images depending on the task. A huge ad campaign involving a new range of course will certainly require much more postwork then some small studio shots for a catalogue.

are the separate elements of the paint shader given to a retoucher . i.e. base, metal, fleck, coat? to be brushed in in photoshop?

I always do it that way. My carpaints are built from a base coat, covered by a metallic layer, then the clearcoat. For closeups I sometimes insert a flake layer using the FlakeMtl. For the traditional three quarter shots from further away, the flakes can not be seen anyway.

Are the hdri domes calibrated or heavily colour corrected?

Yes, I calibrate my domes to match the backplate. Otherwise the renderings will "float" and not integrate very well into the background. If the backplates have a certain look or color as the main element, I tweak my domes to match them.

What methods are used for creating car paint shaders? Vray Blend? Vray car paint? Shellac?

As I said before, BlendMtl. Pretty straightforward, with lots of control.

Synthetic lighting, HDR light studio area lights? What's the general lighting workflow?

Area lights with textures. Often simple gradients, sometimes more complex things with textures made from backplates blended with opacity maps.

Reflections? how do you get them looking good, flowing over the cars in the right places? No ugly reflections,

There is a neat script written by Borislav Petrov on Scriptspot. It lets you select a face, and then draw a spline along it's normal in relation to the camera position. That is often a good starting point. Another nice tool, often overlooked, it the place highlight tool that is built into 3dsMax. I couldn't imagine working without it. In general I have to say that the realtime stuff helped making the lighting process very fast. Sometimes it has it's downsided, though. Especially with heavy geo.

How are motion blurred domes created? Is it virtualrig or are there methods to shoot these on location?
i'm mainly talking about location backplates with matching domes,
Am i missing anything?

Virtualrig nowadays. When I was trained, I used to do this with the HDRI mapped onto a sphere, and moved that across the car with moblur enabled. Was a nightmare to get clean renders, but it worked back then.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Place highlights the best in max! :- ) wish maya had it haha

[Mokiki]

We're doing a lot of car jobs too and like others have said. Cad data is provided for most of them and there is a lot of post involved. But like koso I like to do produce good looking render (for the amount of time I have) before post gets the files.
Lighting is a mix of IBL /HDR Studio/ Vray area lights. Depending on what is needed.

[kosso_olli]

We're doing a lot of car jobs too and like others have said. Cad data is provided for most of them and there is a lot of post involved. But like koso I like to do produce good looking render (for the amount of time I have) before post gets the files.
Lighting is a mix of IBL /HDR Studio/ Vray area lights. Depending on what is needed.

Is your nickname in any way related to Ralph Richter?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I'm pretty sure its him :- )

[ali_cgi]

Hi Kosso,

Some really nice info here! Yes I have witnessed good and bad hdri's myself, I put it down to incorrect use of ptgui,
Junf Von Matt, I can imagine it to be very insightful to be a fly on the wall there! And very cool to know how different render quality can be,
I'll have to check those scripts out!

Cheers Kosso, Nice Feeback,

Alistair

[ali_cgi]

Ok then guys, lets add some extra related questions into the mix, little more specific to car work,

Render Pass Compositing, Useful passes for compositing/ retouch, how do you use different passes in post, which are the most valuable other than mattes,

Micro Noise / Surface Imperfections, is much of this going on in commercial ad work?

Tires, Modelled or displaced tread? Whats preferred? What works best?

Camera backplate matching? techniques, matching settings of something complex, like an Alpa stitch on a phase-one back, guesswork? or are there real values we can use for sensor size and lens,

The Max perspective match tool seems hit or miss, I could be using it wrong, Or are shots just matched creatively by eye, or backplates worked in retouch to match the car?

Horizontal and vertical shift, are these used creatively on shots to skew perspective?

Who picks the heights angles and lens's, I know car company's do this sort of thing for photography but is it the same in cgi? does the cg artist get a say?

Vray Sun or direct light, for boosting Sun power? Plus creating crisp shadows, what opinions are there on this?

What cool location rigs are available for cgi work? Real life rigs not talking about cgi rigging,

Is anyone cgi rigging their cars for easy positioning? Ie suspension, ride height, wheel angle, speed, lights on / off, doors open/closed I can imagine this to be handy in a little menu, but is the work involved just overkill?

Modo with vray is anybody going to switch? Modo seems the perfect tool for automotive work to me, modelling, retopology, etc, will it be as well integrated as in max? Also an osx version would be nice!

Hope this is aloud to be posted in the same thread,

Cheers,

Alistair

[kosso_olli]

Render Pass Compositing, Useful passes for compositing/ retouch, how do you use different passes in post, which are the most valuable other than mattes,

Hard to say really. In my experience this strongly depends on the retoucher who does the final artwork. Some retouchers demand different passes than others. But in the end, they all basically need Lighting, GI, Reflection, Refraction, Specular, sometimes SelfIllum. Other passes are optional. A friend of mine is freelancing as retoucher, he does crazy stuff using the raw reflection pass. He abuses it in my eyes, but hey, the results were nice

Render Micro Noise / Surface Imperfections, is much of this going on in commercial ad work?

Mostly dictated by the manufacturer. Mercedes had no problem with that back then, for Audi this is a no-no nowadays.

Tires, Modelled or displaced tread? Whats preferred? What works best?

Modelled treads, but displaced sidewall details. I set the displacement to static, which renders quite quick. For spinning tyres, the displacement is disabled, because you can barely see it.

Camera backplate matching? techniques, matching settings of something complex, like an Alpa stitch on a phase-one back, guesswork? or are there real values we can use for sensor size and lens,

The Max perspective match tool seems hit or miss, I could be using it wrong, Or are shots just matched creatively by eye, or backplates worked in retouch to match the car?

Often the photographer uses a stand in car on the set and can provide details like camera height, distance to front wheel center, lens etc. The perspective match tool does work very well, if you can find enough lines in the backplate. Also, there is the somewhat hidden camera match tool. Saved loads of work for me and is one of the things I can not find in Maya.

Horizontal and vertical shift, are these used creatively on shots to skew perspective?

Never used it for cars. This is more common in architecture I think.

Who picks the heights angles and lens's, I know car company's do this sort of thing for photography but is it the same in cgi? does the cg artist get a say?

Mostly the car companies. Had the case where I needed to render the new M-Class for an ad campaign. The camera angles were set up and provided by the M-Class product manager of MB. The photographer had no influence on this.

Vray Sun or direct light, for boosting Sun power? Plus creating crisp shadows, what opinions are there on this?

Direct light. Reason is that you give a certain color to the direct lights. I then make three lights, one red, one blue, one green. Each with slightly different settings or position. I then render these with the raw shadow pass. This will result in colored shadows in that pass, which you can easily select in PS using the color channels. Basically a mask for each shadow...

What cool location rigs are available for cgi work? Real life rigs not talking about cgi rigging,

Is anyone cgi rigging their cars for easy positioning? Ie suspension, ride height, wheel angle, speed, lights on / off, doors open/closed I can imagine this to be handy in a little menu, but is the work involved just overkill?

Because I am working for print, I do not need these rigs. Only thing I do is make a little setup for spinning wheels and for steering. I need that for rendering them with motion blur. Some dataprep companies like RTT can provide groups and helpers for this, but in general this is all a big mess. In Max at least, because they do it for Maya.

Modo with vray is anybody going to switch? Modo seems the perfect tool for automotive work to me, modelling, retopology, etc, will it be as well integrated as in max? Also an osx version would be nice!

Max ftw! I am the only one in my company who is using it, everyone else uses Maya. And to be honest, I can see no point in that. Everything seems to take ages in that software, even simple tasks are overly complicated. Also, Max has a whole lot of neat features out of the box which Maya does not have. Again, this is for print, not animation.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Ok then guys, lets add some extra related questions into the mix, little more specific to car work,

1 Render Pass Compositing, Useful passes for compositing/ retouch, how do you use different passes in post, which are the most valuable other than mattes,

2 Micro Noise / Surface Imperfections, is much of this going on in commercial ad work?

3 Tires, Modelled or displaced tread? Whats preferred? What works best?

4 Camera backplate matching? techniques, matching settings of something complex, like an Alpa stitch on a phase-one back, guesswork? or are there real values we can use for sensor size and lens,

5 The Max perspective match tool seems hit or miss, I could be using it wrong, Or are shots just matched creatively by eye, or backplates worked in retouch to match the car?

6 Horizontal and vertical shift, are these used creatively on shots to skew perspective?

7 Who picks the heights angles and lens's, I know car company's do this sort of thing for photography but is it the same in cgi? does the cg artist get a say?

8 Vray Sun or direct light, for boosting Sun power? Plus creating crisp shadows, what opinions are there on this?

9 What cool location rigs are available for cgi work? Real life rigs not talking about cgi rigging,

10 Is anyone cgi rigging their cars for easy positioning? Ie suspension, ride height, wheel angle, speed, lights on / off, doors open/closed I can imagine this to be handy in a little menu, but is the work involved just overkill?

11 Modo with vray is anybody going to switch? Modo seems the perfect tool for automotive work to me, modelling, retopology, etc, will it be as well integrated as in max? Also an osx version would be nice!

Hope this is aloud to be posted in the same thread,

Cheers,

Alistair

Please start numbering those questions

1 Light, Specular, Reflection, Reflection Filter, Normal, Bump Normal, Depth, Mask per material - No GI its bit pointless for cars. Unles its architecture but then I would not render GI for car.
2 Depend on artist. I build up my shaders and now after few years they are quite compelx using procedural textures and triplanar projections with details dirt and so on no AO tho. I use different softwares so I make sure all its compatible
3 Usually comes as CAD but if no then model
4 Bye eye or have box or triangle in backplate to match to
5 yea its random. Sometimes it works sometimes it dont. Just match 500 backplates and youll get a hang of it
6 Yea they are used a lot. If so then ure screwed as they are one of the hardest to match
7 Not really... more like Art Director. Usually you match it do backplate...
8 Yea can work. Or area light very far away
9 What rig are you talking about? I'm lost
10 I write a script a while a go for it. I use it till now :- )
11 Not sure....

A lot of work that the big companies do is to make sure there is fluent workflow. If there is a shader that is being reused 1000x then they are worked on and refined over time. Same with scripts. Learn python its very powerfull tool. I script now for maya, photoshop, vred and soon Nuke. The time it saves is insane... My entire render workflow system is fully automatic as well as stacking renders in photoshop....

If you are going to invest in cars make sure you can automate as much as you can.

[kosso_olli]

My entire render workflow system is fully automatic as well as stacking renders in photoshop...

Automatically stacking renders! Oh, how much time it would save... Never tried doing it, though.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Automatically stacking renders! Oh, how much time it would save... Never tried doing it, though.

Its. Epic. : p Specially when I get around 150-200 render layers for each car out of my render script...