Ok this is my first model that isn’t a gingerbread man tutorial, woohoo!
OMG this thing took 3 hours to render! ACK! What am I doing wrong?
Here’s the (big) wireframe:
It is all quads. However, it was quite difficult and time-consuming to do it that way. Is there an easier way to make something all quads while keeping the polys down, or am I doing this correctly? I’m pretty much placing one vertex at a time and connecting them wherever two or more faceloops collide. It’s like a puzzle trying to get all the edgeloops to meld using only quads.
For example, the wheel wells were especially difficult. First the outside, then the insides as well. (I made it a completely closed mesh.) Which is kinda sad, since half the work I put into this model (the wheel wells) you can’t even see, LOL.
was going to ask though, how do you create something like that?, i got the whell thing, but the car, i have never done anything like that, and was woundering if you help
you could bound select (bkey) the verts then press extrude and move them to there location - that wouldn’t be modeling without quads but atleast it wouldn’t be so much manipulation - cutting blend time to half! nice car! the poly count is nice too! now just add some materials!
For me, it just took a lot of time. I started drawing a 2D side view in the basic shape of a car, then extruded it. But as it turned out, I could have just as easily started with extruding a square, ha ha. Because I redrew the car shape so many times that the basic shape I initially started with is pretty much gone now.
The main thing that makes it easier (wheels too) is knowing that you can make one mesh and then have other objects point to that mesh. So for instance when you change something on one wheel, the other 4 wheels all change instantly. I did the same thing with the left and right sides of the car. There is one mesh for half the car. The other half is a mirror image of the same mesh.
You set this up in the Link and Materials panel. For instance, when I pull up my Link and Materials list, there are basically only two things listed: car and wheel. I have 4 wheel objects, and 2 car objects that point to the wheel and car meshes. It’s really pretty cool.
The car looks nice, just setsmooth it. About the render time, check your OSA settings. For something like this, a setting of about 5 should suffice. You should also keep the number of light’s you use now to a minimum. You could even forgo lights at this point and use OA while you’re tweaking the mesh. When you start to add materials, use lamps and ONE spotlamp (the shadow calculations of multiple spot’s send the render time through the roof.)
About render times: It looks to me like you have raytraced shadows on, which you don’t need at this point. also, you can lower the render-time subsurf level at this point also. (You will only need it as high as you have it when you are doing a final render, if that.) It looks like you boosted to achieve the smooth appearance it instead of simply using “set smooth.” you could probably lower it one or even two levels and use set smooth with hardly any loss in quality.
Hope it helps.
edit: with regards to digital_me’s suggestion, I think using AO is not the best solution for tweaking your mesh. AO is pretty time consuming for render. I would suggest a simple shadow buffer spot if shadows are needed. if not, a couple lamps would suffice.
nice start on your car model. Good to see you got your spokes working the way you wanted .
I’ve never modelled a car before so I don’t have any huge crits. Looks like the hood of the car could be lengthened a bit but I’m not familiar with the model so that could just be part of the design.
Like Nate said, set smooth, autosmooth, and lowering the subsurf level should bring the render times down.
i also agree with Nate on the AO. Render times would probably be a bit long for preview renders. For previews a directional spot and a few hemi lamps would be good I think. If you really want the soft shadows, then you could use a low sample fake gi dome (probably some old topics in general you could search for about this).
I haven’t been very lucky getting AO to work up to this point. But, I did figure out how to get a texture to show up on the world background finally.
Other changes here include lots of reshaping and smoothing, (attempting to shape this into a C5R), and turning off the 3-hour raytrace! Now using one hemi lamp and no raytracing, it renders in about 2 seconds, hehe.
Can I make the wheels look like chrome without raytracing?
But envmaps can be very tricky to get working correctly. I think your better off moving the wheels to a seperate layer and test the chrome with raytracing there, so you don’t have to render the entire car. For AO to work you need to have raytracing turned on.
Yes it has been very tricky. I figured out how to get envmapping to work, but I’m having some trouble tweaking it. I seem to get either perfect mirrors, or no reflections at all. Trying to get that ‘in-between’ shiny-but-not-perfect-mirror look is extremely frustrating.
Yeah raytracing would be easier, but then my renders would go from 3 seconds to 3 hours. That is ‘not good’.
Edit: Ooo! After some more hours of twiddling the gizmos, I figured out that using Map To:Col, with ‘Add’ blending mode seems to work best for chrome and shiny things. I put this one on Add, about 0.33 Col. For the wheels it is 0.7 Col, and it looks much better now.
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Other changes here include lots of reshaping and smoothing, (attempting to shape this into a C5R), and turning off the 3-hour raytrace! Now using one hemi lamp and no raytracing, it renders in about 2 seconds, hehe.
