Hello beautiful people ! A couple of years ago, i started modeling the Peterbilt from the Duel movie cause i think it’s the sexiest truck ever (and the movies is great by the way). Long story short, my first attempt was way too ambitious : too much polys, tedious uv unwrapping, image textures too big… i could not handle it anymore, neither could my laptop anyways.
Since Cycles was released, i got back into Blender and learned a lot of stuff. I digged up this old model and tweaked the geometry managing to drop the number of polys from 129k down to 85k and eased up on the subsurfing. The truck (you call that the “tractor” right ?) and the tankboth have a 4k image texture with an alpha channel applied on a tiled rusty texture. Almost all images come from cgtextures.com and some are of my own.
Enough blabla, here are a couple of renders - with no composition though.
I guess it’s pretty much done as for the model itself, but feel free to point out any stuff that may look weird to you. I’m gonna start working on a simple scene (with a road or something) so it does not look dull as it kinda does now. I’m thinking of modeling the Plymouth later on (the car being chased by the truck in the movie) and perhaps set up a complete scene, but it’s a bit down the road. I’d like to focus on something new.
I’m not quite happy with the wipers marks on the windshield. Though it adds some extra filth, it gives the truck kind of an happy face, like “^^” whereas i want it to be threatening.
I have to ask, with all the attention to detail that you put into this model, why did you change the color of the front bumper, the wheels and the fuel tank? I think the windshield looks great but the chassis looks a little too rusty to me. Just my opinion from looking at the renders, I couldn’t come close to modeling or texturing anything like this.
The tractor should have couplings for the air lines, I notice you have the lines with the tank but not the tractor. That spiral air line would be a monster to model lol.
