Thomas Suurland | Freelance 3D Artist

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New Beetle "making of"

Below you can read the "making of" article I wrote about how I modeled and created the original black renderings of the new beetle, the green ones that are in my portfolio was created at a later date using Vray. It was written back in 2001 so some of the technical parts is totally outdated, but I hope it's of use anyway.

Initial thoughts

When starting up this "New Beetle" project I had a few goals to achieve. I wanted the model to be 100% perfect or close to, the final output should be better then anything I've done before. From the beginning I chose not to have a deadline, I wanted to put the time that I needed into this project, no shortcuts.

References

First thing to do is to find reference material, lots of reference material. This is a crucial part of modeling an object perfectly, you need to know how it looks to make it perfect.

Fig 01. Shows a 1/18 scale model, this reference was probably the one I use the least. Besides the scale model I bought an 80 page book about the New Beetle, it got some great images of the car, and some cool history about the car. The last piece in Fig 01. is the brochure about the car that I got from my local car dealer, I don't know if you can see it on the picture, but the back of it is almost falling apart! Fig 02. Is 66 pictures I took with my digital camera on a field trip to the local dealer. Also very useful because I could take some close-ups that I didn't have in the book or the brochure. Plus I could take perpendicular pictures of the lights and other stuff I could use as textures later on.

Fig 03. Is the most valueable reference you can ever get when modeling a car. I got 3 sets of print of the Beetle, but one of the sets was far from precise. So remember to check the prints if you want to model something, is the headlight in the same height on the front and side pics? And so on.


Fig 01.	Fig 02.	Fig 03.

Analysing the model

When all the reference material was found, I analysed the model to figure out how to model it. As you can see on Fig 04. I divided it into parts, the red parts is of course almost the same part as the back. My plan was to model the front arc (red part) and then mirror it and adjust it to make the back arc. These two parts should of course fit 100% to the blueprints, but even though they fit, it's not necessarly right.
The blueprint is only 2d, so we can only see wether the outline is right or not. But if I made an intersection between the green line and the red parts, I could see on the front and back view on the blueprint if the 3D model was right or not. it's pretty essential to do this kinda cuts to see if the 3d is ok when working with blueprints. If the front and back arc is ok, it's going to be relative easy to make the side (blue part)


Fig 04.

Modeling

This section will be about how the beetle is modeled in Rhino 1.1

First thing to do is to setup the blueprints. I do this by importing the blueprint bitmap into the background of Rhino, and then draw on top of it using NURBS curves (Fig 05.). Remember when drawing with nurbs curves, draw them as simple as possible, it will save you a lot of work later on, and will make the surfaces as smooth and simple.

When I got the blueprints in 2d I rotate them into 3d, see Fig 06.


Fig 05.	Fig 06.

Front Arc

The first thing I started modeling was the front arc. This was one of the main parts of the car. On Fig 07. You can see how I made the outline for the front arc, using curves (99% of the time I use curves, and not interpolated curves) When I draw these curves I always make them with the fewest points as possible, when working with NURBS it's always a good idea to keep things simple, if you use too many points you will quickly get some bulgy surfaces, they will look ugly, and you will get a hard time filleting the edges.

With these 4 curves I could easily make a 2-rail sweep, the result can be seen on Fig 08. But as you can see the surface is far from simple and it doesn't fit the blueprints at all. To make the surface more simple I used the "removeknotsrf" command and removed all the knotlines that I didn't need to form the shape. With a lot simpler surface I manually tried to deform the surface to fit the blueprints better, the final result can be seen in Fig09. But as you can see it actually doesn't fit the blueprints, but thats because the lines in the blueprint isn't the contour line but intersection lines between the arc and side/hood of the car. So to see if the arc is correct I used the top view as reference and drew what you see as a green line in Fig 04. If I trim away the area inside the greenline, the arc should fit with the blueprint. on Fig 10. you can see how it looks when it's trimmed.

After I made the front arc I of course made the back arc, using the exact same tecnique.

You may ask yourself why I didn't make the half of the arc and then mirrored it to make the whole piece. I could have done it this way, by having one of the rails going trough the middle of the car, but it would have been impossible to get a perfect curvature over the seam.


Fig 07.	Fig 08.	Fig 09.	Fig 10.

Side


Fig 11.	Fig 12.

Roof

After the arcs and sides was done, it was time for the roof. I could use the top of the sides as rails, and then I just had to draw cross-sections and vola I would have the roof, OK it wasn't as simple as that, the roof was maybe the most tricky part of the entire car, the back of the roof had to go down in a very special form, but with a lot of tweaking it was possible to make it using this simple technique, the final roof can be seen in Fig 13.

With the roof in place it was time to make the hood. This was made with a surface I made from the front arc, the surface can be seen on Fig 14. And a trimmed version can be seen on Fig 15. Then I made the sides of the hood using 1-rail sweep, vertical in both the sides, and horisontal in the middle, with a fillet I had a perfect hood. Actually I don't fillet right away, I check if I can fillet it but I undo it again, I don't fillet before the very last minute, because a fillet can mess up the surfaces, and make it harder to add details later, or fix something in general.


Fig 13.	Fig 14.	Fig 15.

Lights

Next step was to make the headlight, the headlight is a vital part, almost as important as human eyes. As you can see on Fig 16. I modeled both the outside and inside of the headlights, if you only make the outside and smack a texture on it, it will look flat both in stills and especially in animations.


Fig 16.

"Trim"

The previous parts pretty much sums up the hard part of this car, all there is left now is cutting out doors, windows, lights and things, this is pretty easy using the "trim" command in rhino. But trimming gives the parts of the car a very hard edge, so I usually take the edges of the trims, and extrude them inwards a few units and fillet the edges to make the model more realistic. on the next two images you can see the finished model in rhino, the rest except the rims will be modeled in 3dsmax.


Fig 17.	Fig 18.

Export

When the entire model was done, I had to get it into 3dsmax somehow, there is two ways to do it, as a mesh or as IGES, but my previous attempt to use IGES on detailed models failed, so I choose to export it as a mesh. When doing this there is 2 important things to remember; 1. Always use the detailed controls. 2. Never export the entire models in one go, always take the parts one at a time or part thats similar. Far from all of it needs the same settings. To find the correct seetings you have to have a farly good understanding of what each settings does, I'm not going to explain it here you can read all that in the manual and in the help documents.

On Fig 19. you can see the settings I used for the Beetle. I write all seetings down because if I later have to go back and make corrections to an object, I need to know how it was exported.

Under additional images there is more wireframe screenshots, where you can see the mesh.


Fig 19.

Rim

The first thing I made for the tire was the rim, on FIg 20. you can see it in shaded with wireframe, shaded and finally rendered. I just made the profile, revolved it, and cut away the parts that wasn't needed and trimmed the edges.


Fig 20.

Tire

Next thing to do is model the actual rubber of the tire, some might do this with bump maps but my oppinion is that it looks completly ridiculous.

First thing to do is to figure out how the pattern for the tire is, for this I used one of my reference images I took at my dealer. But as I'm written this I can see I made a mistake, I assumed the tire was mirrored over the middle but I see now it isn't.. ups.. The pattern is tiling all the way around the tire, so it's obvious to just make a small pieces and tile it, on Fig 22. you can see the small piece I've made, ready to tile along the x-axis.

I then copied the piece out, how many times I don't remember, you can count for yourself on Fig 23. But the count is quite important, to make the tire I bend all the pieces, and the count pretty much decides the radius. The result can be seen on Fig 24 I welded all the vertices of the tire, and extruded all the open inwards to "form" the finish rubber tire. On Fig 25. you can see the final tire with textures and everything rendered with finalRender plus a bit of photoshop work.


Fig 21.	Fig 22.	Fig 23.	Fig 24.	Fig 25.

Materials

Actually there isn't much to say about the materials, there is 28 of them and all of them is finalRender materials. The main body of the car got a falloff map in the diffuse slot, going from black to white and a falloff map in the self-illumination slot going from grey to white, and it's using metallic reflections. The rest of the materials is simple fR materials with a bitmap in the diffuse and a bit of reflections, so all in all none of the materials is actually complicated.

The textures for the scene is mainly put together from various scans and photos, only parts of the headlight and the whole tire is painted by hand. On Fig 26. You can see all the textures used for the scene.


Fig 26.

Lights

As I just mentioned I used fR for rendering, and fR supports HDRi (High Dynamic Range images), so I used that for lighting the scene and getting some nice reflections. on Fig 27 you can see the HDRi map I used in several exposure stages, If you want to know more about HDRi you should pay www.debevec.org a visit. My map is angular and not circular as the one you can find on debevecs site. Mine is angular because I used the probe2sphere.max scene that comes with fR. with an angular version the map is much easiere to control. (This can also be done with HDRShop) On Fig 28. you can see the car rendered with different types of HDRi maps, all maps can be found on debevecs site.

Beside the HDR lighting I used a spotlight, no particular reason for this, but I think the car got a bit more depth with it then without.


Fig 27.	Fig 28.

Rendering

At the same time I started modeling this car I was lucky enough to get on the beta testing team on finalRender (fR), so when I had it all modeled it was obvious to render it with fR. fR is a full-blown raytracing system for 3dsmax 4.2 with features like GI and HDRi that I used heavily in this project

If you want to know more about fR you can take a look at www.finalrender.com the maker of fR or www.trinity3d.com the distributor of fR.

This is going to be fR specific, so if you don't have fR skip this part.

The scene is one big sphere, with a plane in the bottom where the car stands. You can see this on Fig 29. I did this in order to exclude the sphere from the MSP so it didn't show up in the reflections (instead the HDR shows up). And most important to render the car from all possible angle, and still have a single colored shaded backgournd, instead of seeing the HDRi map.

Settings	Global	Local Tire	Local Ground	Local Env.
Reflection Depth	3
Refraction Depth	2
Diffuse depth	2
Prepass size	1/1
RH Rays	512		1024	1200
Balance	90
Curve balance	75
Min. Density	8	100	10
Max. Density	16	200	100
Ambient Multipliere	1
Adaptive Quality	0
Ambient rougness	15
HDRI cover angle	300
AA, Min. Samples	5
AA, Max. Samples	10

As you can see I used local density settings for the tire and ground. This mean I get more details exactly where I want it. The tires needed more dense samples because the tire is made up of small canyons, and if you have read the manual this can be a bit of a problem, but with local settings this was easily fixed. Also the ground plane got higher density and more rays, more density to catch the details between the tire and ground, and more rays to smooth out the large ground area. The big env. sphere had a higher amount of rays too, to make it smooth.

But remember density setting is scene depended so you can't transfer my settings directly to your own scene.

On Fig 30. You can see a rendering where show samples is turned on. The body of the car got some huge samples, but more details isn't needed since the car is so reflective, so even with low distribution of samples, you can't see any artifacts on the final image. The ground, env and tire got a lot more density to catch the details and smooth it out nicely.


Fig 29.	Fig 29.

Useless information

Faces: 828998
Samples: 43929
Rays cast: 47804496

226 Rhino files using 758meg.
159 3dsmax files using 3624meg.
94 Texture files using 257meg.
428 Renderings using 561meg.
3036 Animation files using 1037meg.
If you count the last bits and pieces I got exactly 5000 files using 7,07GB

Additional images

Here is a bunch of additional images, wireframes shaded views.