Superveloce Rendering

So this is my first car I made, and I’m just wondering what is wrong with it. I see others and other people’s look like awesomeness, and I want to make one like that. The problem is, I have no clue what standing in the way, besides the bad quality of the render. I need some tips on lighting mostly, and photorealism tips, because I do see some sharp edges, but besides that I don’t know what’s wrong…thanks




Its looking good, actually. Its your first car, so don’t expect it to be perfect. :slight_smile: So far what I think the problems are, are lighting, and materials. First, the rear lights material is excellent, they look real. What isn’t so good is the body and window materials. For lighting, go for the standard 3-point lighting system. For materials, under >materials look for the Glass BSDF material and play around with it, you’ll get better results for the windows. Regarding the car body, you could definitely turn up the specularity to give it the “glazed paint” look, and then add an environment texture to make the reflection realistic. Then maybe add some detail:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]273581[/ATTACH]
This body detail would then allow for an interesting render because of light reflection and geometric variation. AKA, more interesting to look at. Finally, set the black engine-box thing in a little bit (extrude it downwards, slightly). Then, maybe make the black box on the hood, a skylight? I don’t know what it is :o! Finally, up the sampling amount - and render out that sweet car! Keep up the good work! And PM me a picture of it when you are finished!

A bit dark and blurry.

@silkroadgame: Yep, that’s because I don’t have a fast computer, so the rendering samples was somewhat low. The darkness come from the lack of lights. I used to have a bright scene, but lots of professional cars have a very dark scene with lights that show the paint…so that’s what I was somewhat going for

@NationAnimation: thanks for the feedback :slight_smile: I thought about 3-point, but I just thought it was usually for Blender Internal Render, so I opted out of it. Plus, If I use planes instead of lamps, then it will look a little fake because of the brightness of the car paint…or something…? I actually did a glass, but I used layer weight so that only the back of glass furthest away would get the glass, and the rest facing the cam the most would just get an ugly blue color. I don’t have anything inside, and I have no idea how to fake it, since I’m going to take multiple shots, and don’t want to adjust for each shot. I already know, but my computer is slow, with Core i3, so I can just wait a while and use my school’s Core I7 computer…hopefully then I’ll give it more samples :slight_smile:

Oh, and your attatchment doesn’t work :confused:

Sounds good! Yeah an i3 core won’t get you very far. Yeah, sorry about my attachment, it was an image of a car: (not mine btw)



There it is, its the body detail of the car that makes the render look more interesting from light and such. Regarding lighting, you can do the 3 point lighting system in Cycles with planes, just watch this BlenderGuru tutorial, and skip to about 24 minutes: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/mastering-lighting/ :slight_smile:
Lastly, for the car window, just boost the reflectivity and I think it will look more like a window. Keep it up! :smiley:

Thanks! Detail is fairly easy, but did I mention that I don’t have subsurf on my car? :stuck_out_tongue: The tutorial seemed interesting, hopefully I can apply it sometime! For the window, I modified it so now the parts that aren’t directly facing toward the cam will have a glass+translucent, and the parts that are have a glossy+translucent, or that’s what I think I did :slight_smile:

Gave the car midsection a makeover in topology, so I’m able to add detail.
The only think I don’t like about that picture is that you can’t see the front side, the back seems a little too boring :confused:
Car Update:



I think this model is really improving! I see you made some lighting adjustments, which makes it a lot easier to see the car! Its probably about time to get into the nit picky stuff! :smiley: First, the “tire holes”… you might want to clean them up by making them have smooth edges, rather than low poly edges. In all honesty, a subsurf modifier might be great for this whole model, considering the rougher edges along the windows/windshields. Secondly, you might wanna make the windows a grey/black shade, just like window tint. Anyways, its looking great!

i think you should use a texture environment, so the car body has something nice to reflect back.
A shader tip for cycles, you can use two shaders, like one glossy and the the other difuse bcdf, then combine them and use a mix shader before your output, next as a way to control the mix shader, use a fresnel, and play with the index in the fresnel.
In fact you could do that a few times, if you want a bright collor then maybe go for “add” shader, to get that high polish but dont overdo it.

There are ways to reduce noise in cycles, when i do a movie i wont like to go beyond 17 samples, which is really low.
You can reduce caustics in render, you can test clamp setting try something between 0.2 and 3
You can filter glossy (i usually set it to 10 ). My experience is that normal lights work better then nodes based light emmisions.
And there is the letter B to partly render your screen, which is ideal to determine optimal render settings.

oh and maybe try subsurf, so you got more round objects (i see corners around the backwheels)

But it looks nice, i was wondering if i could improve my above points but your attachment link isnt working.

Hmm…Thanks for the advice. I’m actually going to put the environment texture last, as it increases render time quite a bit (for me) and I want to get the shaders right first. I already use mix and other multiple shaders, but somehow I can’t get that glazed car polish look, for one reason or another.

If you can provide the node setup for a better car polish that would be great :slight_smile:
I’ve actually been using Fresnel but I have no clue how Fresnel is better than changing the default .5…hmmm

Is your experience with Blender Internal Render or cycles?
Normal lights? you mean the lamps? filter glossy is a check. Who’s attachment is broken? I see all of the pictures

And there is the letter B to partly render your screen, which is ideal to determine optimal render settings.

Sorry, I have no clue what that is all about :confused: can you explain please? I actually don’t use caustic reduction because caustic reduction is for a diffuse light ray hitting a diffuse and then hitting a glossy. In my case it’s the exact opposite. I’ll see if subsurf will work, but I already have 255,000+ verts, so adding subsurf will drastically increase render-time

Oh, and do you suggest any environment textures? HDR might just be it, not just a regular image



Will this work for the windows?


wheel rim already has a subsurb on it

Another update to the car. Major updates will be posted in first post

Sorry for the long replay wait, too much homework and projects to keep up my time :confused:
Here’s my final renders as of a long time ago. I can’t seem to find the right combo for a realistic car paint. Other than that, I think the car I the best I can do, obviously with a little tinkering. I didn’t add in the environment lighting/texture yet, but I will soon. For now, here’s the final renders. The environment textures didn’t do too much except make it a little brighter, but here’s the renders before env. I guess these will be my finals until I find the perfect body paint :slight_smile: Enjoy



Hi, I think the model by itself is great, very good work, you’re just missing with the materials and lighting. If you could get an HDR (something like a white studio with lights and some details) or at least a decent size enviroment image it will greatly improve you’re scene. For the materials I would suggest create another scene with the same lighting, enviroment, a floor and a simple object(like a sphere with smoth and subsurf) and test on the object diferent materials. This way you can make some high sampling renders to try diferent materials and see the reflections and all that, and it will be way faster than render the whole car.

Great tip mrangel! I actually already somewhat do that. What I do to test out my materials is I created something that resembles a car, with extremely low-poly, and I just use that to test my materials with different lighting to see if it works

Good model.

…but if the car is supposed to be glossy, then something is wrong with your material.

As for the lighting, it doesn’t do the car any justice. The tonal range in your scene is way too low, the overall color value is fairly low and uniform (i.e. low contrast and dark), this is exacerbated by no gloss on the vehicle which could create bright highlights to break it up a bit. If you want a dark scene but well lit paint, then start by making your ground material darker, and increasing the strength of your lights…but without sharp gloss highlights and reflections it’s always going to look strange…the main exception being if you pull off a convincing matte paint render, but that still requires the correct type of gloss.

When people refer to 3 point lighting, they means “3 lights”, not 3 “point lights” (as in Blender Internal point lights). Watch some 3-point lighting tutorials for Blender (there are plenty) and you will see what I mean, just use emission planes instead of the blender internal lights, it’s the same principle. To summarize what they are going suggest, you will have a key light that is somewhere close to the camera, and two fill lights at either side (often two subtle complimentary colors are used to tint the lights which helps define the form in 3D). That is the 3 lights they are referring to (the exact placement and strength varies). A well placed rim light (behind the model can highlight the edges and produce some nice reflections.

If I were you, I would use an HDR environment map AND a 3 point lighting set up where necessary to get the right light for your scene. The light provided by the environment map can be altered with nodes, so you can choose where you want the majority of the light coming from (enviro v 3 point). Put a very simple slightly glossy material on your car just for testing purposes and fine tune your light first. Then try and get your material to look right with the same lighting. A good hierarchy of things to get right in order is modelling first (check), lighting (not yet), materials (not yet), rendering (not yet). Of course, you can back track and tweak, but how can you tweak your materials to know they are responding correctly when your lighting is nowhere near ready? The same goes for final rending and post-pro stuff, that can obviously come later.

Post some images of the kind of result you are going for and we can help point out the difference, and work through the settings to get the render you want.

@Blender Matt: Thanks for the response. I already know what a three-point lighting system is, I just didn’t want to use it because it would defeat the rear light purpose. I actually already did a three-point lighting system, in a way. the two points (both emission planes), are in the front of the car. the third is in the back but with barely any emissions, because I want the dim reflections of the ground and rear lights to show the back of the car.

I think my main issue is that I don’t know what kind of scene I was going for, so I pretty much has no goals. My main purpose was to have high contrast in the back, using the rear lights, small emission planes, and the reflections to create the contrast. the front of the car had no real purpose, just so the car would blend in with the rest of the scene. My materials are the main problem. I can’t seem to find the right ones for the body and glass.

Surprisingly, the body and window material shaders are somewhat complex. I can’t just have a mix with diffuse and glossy. I want there to look like there is a layer of crisp diffuse, and on top of that, a very thin layer of transparent glossy. This is the scenario in the real world.

As for environment texture, as I said before, I already did before, but chose to leave it out until I get the basic lighting right. Then I will add it in. It’s already in the file, just not being rendered

Interesting how you put lighting before materials…why in that order? I usually do a simple lighting and make my materials off of that, and then add in the main lighting system.

Based on what I have already, what do you suggest I should create the scene lighting?

After looking at some cars for a little while I think I will go for these
I want to get the reflection of the windows from this car

I like the car body from this one

And I want to be able to make the ground reflection, more or less, and the body highlights.

The environment light will provide a lot of the white reflections, so it will have to go in eventually. If it really slows your renders down that much then leave it to later, but I would try it out every so often whilst working on the other aspects. It’s hard to say how much it will affect the overall lighting, that will depend on how you set up the nodes.

I should clarify - I don’t entirely leave materials until after lighting, I will set up a fairly simple material that is close to what I want, and then focus mostly on the lighting for a while so that I will end up tweaking the materials under a decent light set up. I’m sure there are plenty of methodologies that will work just fine (or better), but that’s the way that makes sense to me.

I would start by setting your ground plane & background to black, add a simple enviro map with enough distinct light sources to potentially create some interesting reflections, and see if your material responds better in that situation. If you’re still not getting the reflections/gloss aspect of the material coming out, then I assume something must need changing.

The first two cars in the reference pics are actually rather brightly lit. The first one looks like it is reflecting sky, whereas the second one seems to have a smaller light source reflection. It might be hard to get both of those, but with some careful camera work you might be able to get the larger reflections on the window and smaller ones on the body. It’s hard to tell on the last pic (rather small) but there might be a lot of post-pro going on there. The black ground plane with some mirror effect (strength based on a texture?) might be a reasonable place to start.


My work. I don’t do nearly as much, since this project is technically done…but…here’s the latest…

Well you can change the blurriness of it by changing the sampling amout:

In Cycles Renderer (which you are in most likely)


Set an higher number.
Preview is just to look how it is going to look

Is setting it to 200 a good number? I’ve always used that number for rendering, but there’s so much noise even when I blur it, there is little difference. I can’t do a clean render because it wastes too much time for a progress check. My pictures are not previews, they are renders