BNR32.... the ongoing project that will never get finished

[Cosmo°]

Here's one with a darker colour and subtle lighter blue specular settings, on standard Carlswood at afternoon (which is not very well set up, but at least comparable):

[endo]

thanks cosmo, thats greatly appreciated... does confirm a concern i had that the details of the car seem to get lost with dark body colors.

though im trying to work out if its a reflection issue since irl, the skirts and horizontal edges pick up nice highlights and reflections of the sky,

gonna take some ref shots today since its a bit overcast, and the lighting is pretty neutral

[Cosmo°]

Carlswood is not a good example of realistic lighting, I actually hesitated to post the picture because it looked too dark. The pictures I took before are from Dave's track and an old render scene where I tried out different settings, but things still change behind the scenes and that results in ambient light being processed differently etc, accounting for a lot of difference. Also, I'm not running with bloom enabled since I think it looks quite bad for the most part, but if it were implemented more subtly than you'd surely be able to get more contrast out of the scenes again.
Just for comparison, here's another shot of the same car/shader on Dave's track with the sun coming about 90° from the left, similar time of day:

[endo]

some ref pics of the rear...
managed to do some texture photos before the battery ran out, then spent the rest of the day trying to find the damn charger for the camera.

anyways
still to me the car looks to flat, could be the lack of contrast in the shading or something.. or it could be the specular is too blue and overpowering the reflection color?
i know this is just a quick test shader, but its just my initial impression on looking at the car.

The horizontal/near horizontal edeges tend to reflect the sky quite a bit, and pick up a nice highlight along them which the screenshot lacks, which could be down to the spec etc not being fine tuned yet, but i feel its most likely that the reflection level isnt really high enough on the car.

[endo]

not too much to report...

did some fixing to the taillights
thought the high beams looked a bit bland so added some bulbs (uncessary, but still, it looks nice)
started putting a texture for the lights together from the photos i took on the weekend.

going to take a while to replica the diffuser on the headlight glass, but i'll get onto that so it looks nicer than having clear lenes, and probably make a start on the window borders etc, since all the alpha stuff is going on one texture.

currently keeping it to 3 textures
1. Main body
2. Wheels, Lights, Chome
3. Alpha - glass, windeflectors, stickers etc...

[endo]

got the diffuser on the headlight glass drawn out, still tweaking it some to get it more natural looking but its not all bad...
and rear closeup

the plan is to make the pattern on the glass alot more subtle, then use a spec map to make the pattern pop as the light hits it... all good in theory but wether or not it actually works is another story..

of course i could be sad and do the glass as two seperate planes offset from each other with a normal map on the inner portion to get the glass to bump... but i dont think its entirely worth it, not when i can't run cg shaders and won't be able to admire it.

[The Dark Shadow]

Having the car at your disposal you could "simply" take out the headlights glass/cover thingy and take some photos with a white or black background and work from there.
You could also take some photos of the headlights when the cover is off, that way both the cover and projectors will have separate textures.
That's if taking the cover out isn't a pain to do. 

[endo]

erm is an idea, but its a mission to remove the leneses.

I've got a thread saved of how to install the supermade clear lenses, since it was a route i was considering going down... but it involves removing the light, baking it in the oven to heat up the sealant, lots of cleaning of sealant... and then new sealant when i put it all back together. So not that easy really.

Photos of the lights themselves (the chrome reflectors) are useless, so not much point in taking pics of them since the reflective surface will just reflect anything around it (sure having a reflection of the bulb is handy, but not the surrounding environment. They're just going to be a chrome material in racer, with a base texture (like the way the exhaust on the S13 is done)

works quite well, and the sell shadowing is in the texture, and it works quite well with a reflection map to make the chrome look more real than being a constant chrome all over the exhaust.

[The Dark Shadow]

It was worth a try.

[Cosmo°]

I think you're on the right path with the reflect+spec shader approach. There isn't much use in doing things more complicated for diminishing returns.

[endo]

More bits of texture for the moment, started doing the window borders and pulling my hair out trying to replicate the rear heater matrix... fortunately i found a reasonably decent pic to base the pattern on.

and the stickers added, just missing the GTROC sticker from the top of the rear window.

[endo]

some more updates,general model fixes and tweaks and more texturing, the body texture is very basic atm so ignore any shading errors since i havent looked into them yet.

[The Dark Shadow]

I must say your wireframe is reassuring!

I was getting a bit too obsessed with having super tidy lines, constant spacing and most of all trying to stick with quads only.

Not that your wireframe is messy but it's just more relaxed.

Actually it seems to pay off more using that route, the model looks smoother and you don't lose your mind trying to make everything in quads.

I know it probably is something stupid but I sometimes get into this maniacal things and completely lose the plot, like when I got caught in poly modelling needless to say as soon as i stopped using poly modeling only in favor of a mix of mesh and poly modelling 3dsm stopped crashing. Ups! 

[Cosmo°]

The updates are fine really and again I think it's great that you can concentrate on getting the details right now instead of bothering with bad prints and incorrect dimensions. On the rear end, I'm still distracted by the boot lid panel gap and wing model though

[endo]

erm TDS.. you've lost me
I assume you mean modelling the entire car with every row super straigh and 90 degrees from each other.
Not the best way to make a car tbh, you want the polys to flow with the shape of the car as much as possible, while keeping them spaced as evenly as possible... (yeah i cut more lines in the bonnet.. but anyways)
it's allways why i build the stuff to come out as fans from the wheels.. rather than taking the rows straight up and across the bonnet.

uses less polys too


@Cosmo
Well it is an advantage, i've done a few changes just because when its come texture time the photo didnt match the mesh... and since i've set up the tripod, and using the narrowest dof possible to get the textures as isometric as possible, does work quite well.. till i had to tweak the mesh.

lol, i'll look at the wing/and mirrors again at some point.
Hmm.. dunno what i'm going to do about the boot panel gap, i'll have to see what i can do with the texture since the gap is larger in the mesh, could cut a few more lines in to emphasie the step from the bodywork on the rear panel to the bootlid i suppose.



meanwhile, threw it in the render scene