Been trying to figure out Blender for a few years now and finally had time to devote to watching tutorials and practicing with the tools and something finally clicked a little over 2 weeks ago. I’ve been working on this Jeep for about 2 weeks now and wanted some opinions and advice on how to make the materials look more realistic. This is much better than before, at first it looked like a green plastic toy Army men Jeep.
Anyway, I chose a Jeep since at first glance, most of the panels are flat. I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably picked one of the more complex vehicles to model since you can see the suspension and interior all the time… LOL
Anyway, here’s the pics and please let me know what you think.
Thanks,
The interior is on the list of things remaining to model, I need to add the spring shackles that connect the leaf springs to the chassis, the front steering components, and the shocks. Then I’m going to move on to the seats and steering wheel/column.
Then the detailing parts. One thing about doing this vehicle, there’s never a lack of things to model… LOL
that is a great first model! it looking quite real in model sense, here a tutorial from blender noob to pro wiki book http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Simple_Vehicle
i remember making my first vehicle (the one from the wiki book) keep at the blender stuff it will get “easier” as you go along and learn the techniques of creating scenes. maybe you could model it so it is realer looking but make the materials make it lok like a toyat the same time, you could add some “big” objects like a ball, or a remote, any everyday object in the background to make the truck look small in a way, if that makes sense hah! good luck keep all of us blender heads updated!
Got the passenger’s seat done and the gas tank in. Had to re-work the angle on the rear fender behind the seats to make them closer to the angle on the seat back but it looks better now.
Worked on the materials a little bit since I liked the green on the seats better than the green on the truck. I think it looks more like WWII OD now.
Built the back seat, shocks and the spring shackles. Also tried a three point lighting system with an infinite ground plane, but I’m not getting good shadow so I guess I’ll keep working on that… LOL
Talked to a photographer friend of mine on lighting and principles of lighting… made a HUGE difference in appearance. Also turned ambient occlusion on and that helped immensely too.
Only thing I’ve physically changed on the model is I turned the mirror down to 10% of what it was before on the windshield. All other material settings are the same.
Biggest complaint is the black area in the windshield. I’m not sure if that’s an interaction between the windshield panes or what… any suggestions?
Great progress! One thing: one of my friends has a 1942 JEEP. Although there were many versions of the WWII JEEP, one thing that seemed consistent was the clips for a shovel and a mattock on the driver’s side.Here’s a link to a good picture to show you what I mean.
I know about the tool indents and plan to add them later. Right now the tub is mirrored from the left side so if I added the tool indents now they’d be on both sides. Once I lock the mirror modifier in, I’m going to add the tool indents, the raised section of the floor for the accelerator pedal, and the indent in the bottom of the dash for the steering column. I’ve got only one or two more mirror items to go on the tub before I lock it in, so it won’t be long.
Figured out the black areas in the windshield… for some reason the ground plane I put in was only visible through the glass… I shrank it down until I can figure out the proper settings (hence the shadow falloff in the foreground of the rear 3/4 view).
Built the spare tire mount and hung the tire on there. Also decided to put the windshield down to see how it looked. I think I have a setting or two wrong in the glass material because it’s throwing a shadow.
More progress today. Built the gas can for the rear, the drive shafts and tie rods, and reworked the transmission crossmember.
Also did some more tweaking on the tub in the rear fender/cargo area.
Joe, you said that after fooling around with Blender for a while, something just clicked and you were off to the races. Man, it shows! All the details make this a superior effort. Great job.
The shadows casting from the windshield? : Enable “Receive Transparent” in the Jeeps green body material settings, under the Shadow tab. Poof!
Thanks for the compliment. I’m really happy with the way it’s coming along.
I tried setting the receive transparent box on the green material, but it didn’t have the desired result. That or there’s not enough light from above. I’ll experiment with that tomorrow to see what happens since it’s late.
Worked on some details for the tub tonight. Got the grab handles and the reflectors built on the rear and built the mount for the windshield pivot. I also added the bumperettes on the back but haven’t subsurf’ed them and the tool box lids in the back corners.
Still don’t know what’s going on with the glass material. I put a spot light beside the camera and it’s still throwing a shadow.
Joe, I set up a little experiment with your exact settings, and everything worked fine. So I thought it might be your lights. I was testing with a spotlight that had raytraced shadows. But when I changed it to Buffered shadows, the glass went black… so maybe?
Thanks for checking that for me. Since you verified the glass settings, I started changing other settings and discovered the problem is Ambient Occlusion. Or, at least that’s what the problem is interacting with if it’s not the direct cause…
I removed Ambient Occlusion and it made the scene really dark, so I added a sun a good distance away above and behind the camera. That seems to have solved the problem.
Does anyone know if there’s a solution other than “Don’t use Ambient Occlusion?”
