3d art

Step by step:
Lighting the
Silver Arrow
240
Mercedes Benz W154 2009
Learn how to dramatically pose and light a 1938
Mercedes Benz W154 racing car to make this – and all
your future vehicle projects – really shine
Djordje Jovanovic 3D artist
In this tutorial, you will discover the
best workflow for creating your own
virtual studio environment for lighting
a reflective industrial model – in this case
a 1938 Mercedes Benz W154 racing car.
The studio is made up of a light setup
which consists of two different light sources,
custom reflection cards and a background/
base. 3ds Max is our main app with a V-Ray
plug-in used as the renderer. We will be
using a standard VRayLight as our main
(diffuse) light source, then adding a few
standard Omni lights and assigning them to
our custom reflection cards. We can use this
combination to accurately place reflections
and separately control the intensities for
diffuse lighting and reflections. In
postproduction, you can use Photoshop to
add some depth of field (DOF) to the image
and do some colour correction.
The major advantages of this setup is that
the diffuse light and reflections have
separate controls and the whole thing can
be set up fairly quickly. The major difficulty
will be the placement of the reflection cards
because it can take some time to find the
spots where reflections will be most
effective. I found some interesting studio
images and light setups on the internet that
I’d never tried before; these are always good
for inspiration or to use as reference. Similar
inspirational images are shown in Steps 1-3.
Software used in this piece
3ds Max
V-Ray
Photoshop
Inspirations
Find a cool concept
This image provided some ideas for the overall
01 mood I was looking for. I liked the relationship of the car’s
semi-reflective surface with the dark background in terms of
contrast. The position of the main light source, directly over the
car, which created a big shadow also appealed to me.