“FAB-1” – Part #2

Project:

Some more renders of the re-imagined “FAB-1” from Thunderbirds – I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working around issues in Lightwave to do with HDRI (High Dynamic Range) images – these supply lighting information from a photographic image, and effectively you can light a scene without any (virtual) lights, using just the image.

The other major part of the project was arriving at convincing shaders for the various surfaces, e.g. pink car paint and different types of chrome, and so I spent a lot of time looking at how these surfaces appear in the real world.

The slanting grille is possibly the most controversial and radical departure from the original and after some feedback I may adjust the rake so that it’s less severe, but it’s current form embodies the sense of a powerful, sleek & even aggressive vehicle, which is what I was after.

These are “single-pass” renders, as opposed to post-composited images made up of several render passes – another departure from my usual modus-operandi – average render times were about 20 minutes per image, which is not a massive amount of time & so suggests that current technology and processing power makes this a realistic option – I’m using an I-Mac.

FAB_1_12_OPT
3D Render composited into a location photograph

Ravi Swami 2015