Reading the forums the other day, I noticed an old discussion about gondolas only looking realistic if they are bruised and beaten. Gondolas are usually some of the rattiest cars in service and definitely represent the epitome of being weathered and beaten. With that in mind, I started thinking about how I could best simulate the dents and dings that are soo common with them.
After coming up with an initial game plan, I started on the low res version of the car.
Now for the dents and dings. I think, at least I hope, the best route to take would be utilizing Pixilogic Zbrush for that part. This process basically consists of creating a high res version of the car, importing it into Zbrush, then sculpting all the damage into the body. I'll be honest and say I very seldom use Zbrush for hard surface work, which is really a shame because it is such a wonderful program. So after doing a little preliminary sculpting on the car, and decimating the mesh to a more manageable resolution (roughly 8 million to 200k), I re-imported the mesh into Maya. With this part done, the high res details will be baked to the low res model. I'm hoping that all the dents will translate well in the normal map. The following image includes the high res version. I'm not completely happy with the bulges and feel like I need to tone the interior ones down, as well as a few of the exterior bulges. Its a start though, and hopefully this will work out the way I picture it.
How about a twist?
ReplyDeleteGondolas are the certainly the Swiss army knife of any road. Would you consider making one with drop down sides? Perhaps add a coil cover as a optional child object?
Its definitely a possibility at some point thought is car will just be a straight up gon with scrap load.
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