Progress Review

Last week I needed to create a progress review to show where I am and and where I'm heading. It needed to be in the format of a poster so I made these two and tried to make them as visually appealing as I can. I may end up using these to present my work at expo tees too. I talked about my research into what mod tools/game to use. My modelling process and programs Im using and everything I've done so far. And what I plan to do next.

Bucket seats

I have been working on getting the car in rFactor 2 recently and ill post some updates for that soon but for now here are the bucket seats I recently textured. Again using xNormal for the normal and ao map baking. Marmoset 2 was released recently as well so i haven been playing around with that for my beauty shots. I set out to make some bride seats from the start which is a big Japanese company that makes racing seats. I also decided I was going to make a carbon kevlar seat as they have an interesting pattern on the back which i tried to replicate on my texture.

Steering wheel

I've been fixing up the model and trying to remove any unnecessary triangles without loosing any detail. I managed to remove about 7,000 tri's. So the whole car is about 50k tri's at the moment which should be fine. I wont be making and LOD's at the moment, I'll see how the game runs with my model first.

I've also textured the steering wheel, I used nDo2 to add all the stitches and leather texture. I added some smudges to the brushed metal bits too in the specular map as brushed metal show's finger prints.
Here are the diffuse, normal and specular maps ip made. and the final result in marmoset.

Wheel Texturing

I decided to texture the wheel as I know It wont need any adjustments to the model and for rfactor 2 the texture for the wheel has to be on a separate texture sheet. I used xnormal to bake my normal maps and ambient occlusion maps. The normal map needed some fixing as you will always get errors baking something circular. I used Ndo2 to add some more details too like the tyre tread and text on the side of the tyre. This is the normal map, Diffuse and specular maps I made.

And heres a pic of the textured applied to my model in marmoset toolbag.

Fixing things & lowpoly

I met with my supervisor and he pointed out a few things to change in my model so over the past few days I've been fixing any errors and improving the topology. I decided to change the design of my front wheel arches and the front spoiler. Some of my friends said they could be improved and I did say earlier that I was thinking of changing the front spoiler to a more aggressive looking one. Here are my new front arches and spoiler.

I also started making the lowpoly. I did this by just duplicating the highpoly model, deleting the turbosmooth modifier and then just removed loads of edgeloops. I got the model own to 57,000 tris which should be completely fine. I will just have to see how rfactor runs when the models ingame. If it needs more optimization I could easily go back and delete some more loops.

And here's the high and low poly next to each other. High on the left and Low on the right.

Seats

For the seats I decided to make some modern bucket seats as the stock seats differ greatly from my reference and It will suit the street racer look I'm going for. The seats I decided to make are these...
Bride Lowmax, they are a very popular Japanese brand so I think they are ideal for this car.

This is quite a complex shape to model but I've made a bucket seat before so Im sure I can get it looking right. I started off modelling the base first which will be a separate object to the back and front. Here's the model I made, Its quite blocky but I used edge loops so it smooth out well with turbosmooth applied.

Misc

I made the exhaust today, I decided to go with a twin tip design. I had to cut a hole where the exhaust comes out but ti do this I had to detach the rear end and mirror it over so that will be once piece. I also made some windscreen wipers. I may have to add some extra detail to these as they are a bit too simple at the moment.