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

[Dariusz_Makowski_Dadal]

@Iain

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.