I tried recreating Bumblebee from the Transformers movie sequel. This by far the most complex scene I have made in Blender. It took me about 5 months, literally, to pull this off. I have never worked on it more than an hour in a day though. The biggest challenge was modeling without proper reference images. I’ve browsed several sites looking for proper reference images but failed. So I decided to use snapshots from the actual movie. I sketched out each piece at a time and I went to modeling. I mostly used box-modeling technique.
Lighting was pretty straight forward I used a Sun lamp as a key and fill, and also an Area rim light. I added AO and Environmental Lighting but I didn’t use it for the final render (above).
Material nodes were helpful in bring up some saturation. All the texturing was done with procedural textures except one scratch map from CGtextures (MetalScratches0037_2_S.jpg), which the scene will still look good without.
Rendering (with Blender Internal) took 11 mins. on my 4.3 Ghz laptop. I used the compositor for some Color grading, DOF, and a little glow. Then I switched to GIMP and adjusted some curves, added more Color grading, and a cute lens flare to top it all off. I also flipped the image horizontally for no apparent reason (so the blend file is horizontally the opposite of the image above).
Keep your comments as harsh as possible. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings.
Very nice render, my only crit is that the rims look far too clean when everything else have really nice dirty textures.
Also I am not too fond of the lens flare
But really great work, I also must say that I like the use of BI, 11 minutes instead of the many hours it would have taken Cycles to clean up that render is of real production value
I know! I was surprised too. This is one of the benefits of using Blender Internal over cycles. You gut full quality render in few minutes or an hour. Its just the configuration that’s hard. But with Cycles configuration is easy but rendering could take hours if not days.
Mustang’s are my fav too. When I think about it now it may have been better, for the sake of scale, if had tried modeling from the car, as in from the actual Chevy Camaro which has plenty of reference images online. Anyways, thanks guys.
Mainly because I couldn’t find the right reference images.
