BMW M3 CSL - Page 6 - Simply Maya User Community

Sorry, I was gone for the weekend. But here's some questions answered:

Magicsy: Depending on the car I'll use either standard polys or NURBs but never SUBD's. If the car has smooth flowing surfaces (for instance a Porsche, Jag etc. ) I'll go with NURB's as it's quicker and easier to tweak curves (and thus the surface) to get a nice smooth surface thanks to Maya's construction history. Always tweak the curve that made the surface, and not the surface itself. For cars that have harder edges, and weird corners I'll go with polys, as sometimes it's just too hard to create the curve network to produce the surface. This BMW is a poly car due to all the hard edges and weird shapes such as the front bumper. Producing those things that stick out of the front bumper with NURB's would be a nightmare to get right.

Clopper: Create a NURB's plane with enough UV isoparms to get the size of your grid looking good. Rotate the plane into the position that makes the isoparms look like the grid you're trying to model. Then select ALL the isoparms and use the duplicate curves on Surface tool. Delete the NURBs surface, and you now have the curve network for your grid.

Next, create a NURBs circle. Select the circle, and then shift select one of the curves of the grid. Execute the extrude tool, using the "tube, at path, component, and profile normal" options checked. Reselect the NURBS circle alone and scale it up or down until the size of the tube looks right (once again thanks to construction history). Then repeat this process for each of the other curves of the grid (this can become tedious if you have hundreds of grid curves, so have patience). After that you'll have a ton of individual NURBs tubes in the shape of your grid. Select all the tubes and group them.

Finally, project a closed curve onto your grouped tubes (Project curve on surface tool) in the shape of the edge of the grid you're trying to model, and then use the Trim tool to trim away the excess grid. This method results in a heavy object to tesellate, so be aware of your tesselation settings on each of the tubes otherwise it'll take forever to render.

Taking it to the next step: You can apply a sine wave deformer to each of the duplicated surface curves before executing the extrude command if you want a wavy grid. To make them interlock takes a lot of work, and would be impossible to describe here without wring a huge essay.

Turbo Dan: For a surface that is being used to create reflections, I would connect the ramp to either the ambient color or the irradiance node of the lambert. For some reason the Final Gather part of the render picks up these nodes better than input from the color node (don't know why). If you use the color node to "emit" the reflections, it seems like you have to crank the HSV values up way high to get the wanted result. You can mix between the tw for different effects. For instance, connect a ramp to the irradience, but emit a solid color from the ambient. The paint shader does have a metallic flake effect from the shader network.

pbman: No, I don't think it is. I haven't seen that tutorial, but from the commercial I think it is modelled with SUBd's which I never use for two reasons. First, it won't render with Mental Ray which is the key to all my renders. Second, I find that SUBd's just are not suited for vehicles. The crease and partial crease functions are too unpredictable for exact surfaces. I prefer to put extra edges in my poly meshes where I need to make hard lines. That way I'm the one deciding on the outcome, rather than letting Maya decide what it thinks I'm trying to achieve.

Tim_livid: Here's the general shader network for the paint. Once the model is finished I'll post the actual shader for everyone to use if they want. There's too much going on with all the ramps to describe it here. I got the basic technique from a tutorial on the web, and then modified it a little. Do a search for "car paint in Maya" and you'll probably be able to find it.

Hope this helps.

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