I did a rough mockup of the refraction lens thing from the headlight, but im having trouble making it into one whole mesh, since i had to separate some parts in order to make the mesh accurate to the headlight lens
This is how my headlights look like with textures, which is kind of boring.
Normal maps dont work as well as actual lens meshes, me and my friends concluded from some experiments. It adds tri count but it makes our model look better.
How can i accurately model headlight lens while making it look good and under about 10k tris?
Any help is appreciated!
I think you can get descent results with normals or even a bump map, to model the “grids” would probably be overkill for most projects.
A few important notes.
As rigoletto said you should model the inside “mirror” and even the bulbs.
For refraction to work well the glass needs thickness.
For the reflections to look good you need something to reflect (hdri etc) This is the main thing you are missing your render looks dull because there is nothing reflected (or there is too much roughness) the reference picture has a nice showroom reflection.
This is nowhere near perfect I did it very quickly, it is Eevee you should be able to get better results with cycles and a bit more work and tweaking.
I used a wave texture with a brick texture as Bump map, the other nodes just give the wave texture a different size per brick. The “smooth Maximum” (math node) node makes the bump transition bit better making the bump “stand out” you can play with the values, it also converts the colour output to Value output (BW).
Disclaimer: I am sure that others who do more car renders will have better shader setups!
Thanks for the reply, i appreciate it!
About the hdri thing, dont worry about that, its just something i made up in about 5 minutes or so, so i didnt really focus on how it looks, but on how its modelled haha
But thanks for the node setup, ill use that in the future for projects!
I know modelling the headlight ridges would be overkill, but that’s what we’re going for hahaha
Below is a photo of headlights with actual modelled ridges (Credits to the original owner, i only got this from our research group chat)
I wish this was as simple as normal maps, but no, the guy who made this modelled the ridges, which is crazy!
Another reason for me trying to make the headlights as accurate as possible, is because the game engine we’re working on sadly does not support refraction.
Here is a photo of how my model looks like in the game engine, it hurts me to see this
Yes, it looks awful, i am aware. we even had to create a faux “refraction” texture just to make it look good. Thanks to my friend, who imported the car, tested it and took the photo
If there’s no other solution, ill just stick to the normalmap technique i guess
I have to admit that I did not try my shader with the lights on, with the lights on it does not look good.
I agree that modelling the ridges will look lovely if you can afford the poly count and will work better with the lights on.
No worries if it does not look good, i still have a use for it haha
I’ll use the lens shader you made for renders, since Blender supports refraction, then ill model the ridges for ingame use. I appreciate the help!
I have realised a couple of silly mistakes in the setup I posted.
I got rid of the smooth maximum as it was only adding flat normals between the grid lines, it was doing something but not what I thought.
You do not really need to use 2 brick textures this setup is gives practically the same result and is simpler.
