Hello and welcome to this tutorial on rendering a sleek sports car in Blender Cycles!
This tutorial by Jonathan Williamson will take you through the complete process needed to render the sleek sports car you see below. Using a provided, fully modeled sports car you will learn many tips and tricks for rendering in Blender Cycles and for creating Cycles material shaders. This is an advanced tutorial but even intermediate users ought to be able to follow along if you pay close attention.
If you’re not already familiar with working in Cycles then we encourage you to check out our Introduction to the Cycles Render Engine
You may also want to follow our Introduction to Texturing with Cycles
What you’ll learn:
In this tutorial Jonathan will take you through how to set up the lighting using multiple mesh lights for full control, how to create each of the many shaders, including car paint, and finally how to composite the full together using the node compositor. Part 01 of this tutorial covers the initial lighting and many of the shaders. Part 02 will create the remaining shaders, finalize the lighting and perform all of the compositing.
Looks great, mate.
omg…impressive 1 hour 19 minutes and 30 sek…very nice result.
(italian)
Rendering a red bella ragazza
Thanks a lot for your work Jonathan.
dani
Looks like I showed up at just the right time!
Great tut. Love your style. You lost me for a little bit at one point but will watch it again to pick up the bits I missed. One little thing..not a criticism, but there seemed to be a rhythmic hum in the background, almost like a feedback if you know what I mean. Once again thanks and I don’t know how you find the hours to do everything.
Rear fascia, Jonathan! lol
wow! finally finished watching! Thank you! Finally! someone gave up what the Dot output means. lol That one has really been bugging me because I’ve only seen it used in extraordinarily complex setups that gave no contextual clues as to what it was. Sounded like you had a few pots of coffee first but lots of great info! I’m glad to see tuts like this in Cycle’s infancy rather than nearer it’s demise… so thank you. Oh, and for the Color Balance description… I’ve come to think that is really just another way of visualizing the RGB Curves node. Like if you lower the white value of the Lift and raise the white value of the gain, it does the same thing as making the contrast S-curve in the RGB curves node, and the color wheels are like the individual channels. Actually, I rarely use the RGB Curve node anymore now that I’ve learned to replicate the results with just a Color Balance. It can also do the job of the Bright/Contrast Node incidentally… Anyway, nice series! Peace.
Im using blender 2.61 and my cycles is really slow and when I watched part one I notice yours does 250 passes in like 20 seconds? is that because the newer build or just your God comp? my comp is like 6 years old or so so its not the greatest but did they improve it that much with couple updates?
Thanks for these cool tuts in cycles and nodes. I’m learning something new everytime I come to the site. Keep up the good work. cya
Hi Jeremiah!
Have you a NIVDIA GFX-Card with CUDA ? Go to the User-Preferences – select the “System” Tab and see bottom left the Setting “Compute Device”. Here activate the CUDA or OpenCL. You see nothing CUDA or OpenCL button, your GFX-Card is not a CUDA or OpenCL (GFX card with 1.1 or 1.2 OpenCL spec.).
Hope this is helpful for you
Greeting Neubi3D
I cant find the “Compute Device” button.
Which version of blender are you running? I’ll try downloading the new version tomorrow. Thanks for help though. I think the card has CUDA its a GForce 8600 GT. I usually ask my brother to do the tech stuff though lol but hes busy playing video games. cya
ahh in 2.61 it says I dont have 1.1 open cl spec unfortunately I can’t do fast cycles renders. oh well thanks again. When I have cash I’ll ask around for a good comp build for blender, but not sure when that will be. cya
Hi guys !
I think Jerremiah is right with his blender version. My thought is that the system tab did not show a “compute device” (Bottom left) until 2.62.
very nice to learn a shiny car compositing…
but what about :
- putting dust
- dirt, scratches
- some soil, mud pieces…
- and also some skews, bumps…
these will also make this a realistic result, i think!
nice tutorial
and, i don’t know if that would work in this situation, for the backlight you could turn off the transmission in the ray visibility and it wouldn’t light the car windows so bright.
That was exactly my first reaction … why not turning off the transmission ? I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. Awesome tutorial, btw, as always.
Hey joathan, Great Tutorial as always! One thing: I’ve just recently posted a tutorial about how to remove bright / black pixels in the compositor very easely, so that it also works with animations. Just needs 5 nodes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3r8jnAQH7g
would be interested in what you think about it!
Aurel
*Jonathan … sorry about misspelling
I came across this tutorial but I guess I’m too newbie to quite follow it.
Can this be made into a composite “firefly” node?
Sure, you can create a node group, and then you can call it to another file!
If you want to get started o the compositor, i made a tut about that as well
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNAubcdQD-A
Brilliant!!! Thank you for this info. Makes perfect sense once you see the node setup. It is so easy to understand that I am actually embarrassed that no one has made this tutorial already. LOL But then again E=mc2 is pretty simple too… ahem. Thank you.
Hi Jonathan,
first things first: astonishing tutorial…perfectly done..i´m impressed!
But what is this weird background-sound? How long does it take to the final picture?
I have no clue…
greetz from germany
pat
Great tutorial Jonathan, convinced me to become a citizen user. Nice way of sneaking the discount code in as well.
As tbagriyanik mentioned if a follow up on creating realistic scratches, dirt etc was to be created I think that would be great.
Glad to have you Roy!
You’ve got me thinking about the “dirty” version of the car. I will do some testing and see what I can do
Why didn’t you add the streak effects together and *then* add it to the render instead of doing it the way you did? You brightened up the whole image your way.
But a great tutorial!
Actually by setting each of the Glare’s “Mix” value to 1 it shouldn’t have brightened the image at all. That being said, I may have made a mistake in the tutorial and forgotten to increase the mix value.
I’m talking about you color corrected the first glare and blurred it and then added that to the image. But when you duplicated it you also duplicated the add node so both glares were added to the image before you added them together.
May not be that important though
You have a low Hz hum in your recording with an interference pattern. Interestingly it should be pretty easy to perfectly remove the noise from the recording, but because of the interference pattern (Which I bet was caused by you removing some hum in the first place) it would take a rather clever sound engineer
My guess is someone screwed up processing the audio. Oops.
You can hear the noise clearer if you speed up the audio. (which I do when I’m watching these videos).
Jonathan, thanks for another great tutorial! What would also be useful to see is an exploration of the other side of the spectrum i.e. non-realistic rendering. By that I mean renders that look hand drawn, or, for example, a watercolour style etc.
While photorealistic renders can be amazing, there tends to be a terrible ‘sameness’ where no individual style is discernible. For archviz and product shots this is understandable, but for animation and illustration, not so much.
Could you guys do a tutorial with the Freestyle renderer? Looking at the creator’s blog (http://freestyleintegration.wordpress.com/) some great work seems to be going on there. It seems to have a great deal of customizability, although I’ve struggled with it somewhat.
Absolutely amazing tutorial and probably longest I’ve ever follow
with stops and rewinds back took me 2 hours or more,I could know better understand couple new nodes . superb tutorial thx again
Great as always
Excellent tutorial, Jonathan. Very impressive. This might have already been mentioned, but if not…
Color balance node (in Photoshop language)
Lift = shadows (dark values in image)
Gamma = mid tones (mid range values)
Gain = highlights (bright values)
Thanks again for another great tutorial.
Ah excellent! Thanks for filling me in
Jonathan,
Excellent work, as per usual.
However, I do have a rare complaint–I really felt that the explanation of Render Layers was VERY confusing. I have a tenuous grasp on the topic, but I felt more confused afterwards.
Still, an overall fantastic product on your part. Thanks!
moar Citizen!
awesome tutorial, as always, Jonathan !!
cool, this is better than citizen tutorials, i guess?.. ahahah..
Hello all, I have a few questions. I’ve really never used render layers and compositer much but I think its cool what you can do with them. So,
this is 5 render layers
1. Keylight: Car, Background, Keylight
2.Background:?
3.Softbox + Fill:?
4.Backlight: Car and Backlight
5.Front Lights: Car and Front light detail
The 2 question marks are what im confused with do I just do the background and Car for #2
and the car, softbox, and fill for #3. And are 1,4, and 5 the right way to do those passes?
Thanks in advance for any feedback that clues me in sorry if the question seems noobish. cya
P.S. If my comp is slow at passes should I do that save as open exr multilayer w/ RGBA after each render layer? Thanks
Awesome car render, i like this
style too. thank you very kindly
for sharing this one mr. jonathan.
What version of Blender is that?
looks really cool!
Totally loved the tutorial (both parts) Mr Williamson, very intuitive, learnt a heck of a lot……as you can see via my image of K.I.T.T. which I uploaded. He is fully textured both inside and out, nose to tail. Love that Ferrari you built, fantastic model.
Once again, thank you for these great tutorials, and my highest regards to CG Cookie.
Mark
Great One! Just one thing…On the scene panel, next to the render layers buttons, those ones are only to toggle visibility on or off, they are actually the same ones as the ones you find on the 3D view panel. They dont have any effect on your render layers and you can only toggle then on or off for the whole project, cheers!
That was a great tutorial! I really had fun doing it, but unfortunately my computer could not handle all of the compositing, so this is the best i could do and i love the results.
http://s1154.photobucket.com/albums/p536/TGamer1447/?action=view¤t=Audi-rs5image.png
also the Audi-rs5 is not mine i got it off blender swap, but i did all of the rendering.
The very left color wheel is the shadows, the middle is the midtones, and the very right color wheel is the hilights.
Shadows – Blacks
Midtones – Greys
Hilights – Whites
the s curve you did was NOT darkenin the shadows, it was enlighting them and crushing the hilightes. it was a poor description lol
“because the tail lights are kinda fun”