Legend Car
As a NASCAR fan, I discovered The Legend Car Racing League while watching televised events at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The legend car is based on the 1935 Ford Coupe and is powered by a Yamaha XJ1250 or FZ09. After months of work, I decided to write an extended breakdown provide value to other artist.
For this project I had the appetite of designing my own paint scheme instead of copying a specific design from a race team. After looking through dozens of colors, designs and logos I decided on a candy apple dark purple as my main color and added a candy apple black for fenders. The logos selected are current sponsors in various racing leagues such as Nascar & Indy Car.
The Legend Car was modeled with a high-resolution orthographic blueprint, which was used to create the primary curves and proportions. The exterior details were assembled from smallest to largest, using reference images. The interior was modeled almost as a standalone project, involving multiple interior photos and careful study of their shapes. Its always interesting to model real world objects, allowing to visulize and learn how real mechanical objects work.
The texturing process was crucial for creating realistic and easy-to-read details in race cars or other vehicles. To prepare, utility maps were created in substance painter and imported into Mari, a powerful tool for texturing needs. The candy apple purple and black were created in Maya using a blend shader, stochastic flakes, and Vray Material shaders. Imperfections along the CarPaint were hand-painted and exported as transparent layers for later blending. I recommend building texture collections before starting a project for confidence in texturing. Color channels are approached by layering procedural tiles and using operations like screen or overlay for lighter or darker details. I add a paint layer to remove seams and fill in additional details, except for specific hand-painted details like decals.
After combing all textures into shaders and dialing in just the right look and feel. For all color channels I use a standard “HSV Remap” to manipulate color, and “ValueRemap” for scalar data channels (roughness, bump, etc). After dialing in each shader and applying the materials to my objects I used camera angles used in car commercials and magazines to get an idea on how to compose and light car shots mostly within studios using soft boxes.
After the final 4K renders were complete I used after effects and magic bullets awesome color grading tools to add a film like effect to my renders to avoid a overly synthetic look.
I’m actually satisfied with the final product. I spent alot of time dialing in the perfect look for another hard-surface asset. 3D is that medium where you can have almost unlimited artistic control. I’m having a lot of fun with. Can’t wait to tackle more race cars in the future.