I have been watching a lot of F1 recently and I was quite fascinated with the steering wheel as it has so many buttons, all with different functionalities and different designs. I chose to make the 2020 Mclaren F1 wheel.
Methodology:
- I found references of Carlos Sainz’s and Lando Norris’ 2020 and 2019 wheels online
- I started making the different meshes, starting with the buttons and finishing with the paddles on the back
- For the main carbon fibre texture I used one from CCO textures
- For the buttons and the screen I just made the text and colours within a separate blender file, then rendering them all together to create a couple of textures to use.
- For the rev lights I used an emission with a constant color ramp which had the X location of the geometry as the factor
- For the rest of the materials I just played around with the principled BSDF node values and added noise textures as bump maps for some surface imperfections
- In terms of lighting, I used planes as emissions sources because I wanted sharp reflections on the screen and I used some gradients to add a bit of contrast
- Finally, I added a few compositing effects to make the render stand out. This included a bit of glare, playing around with the RGB curves and finally some colour correction.
This is my first post on blenderartists and I am happy to join the community!