2022 Car Render Challenge - Civic EF9

More and more detailing, tweaking and such.

I'm running badly out of time, but still progressing.

Created a better background, first steps for a beach-bar building, Yucca trees for test (3ds max foliage) and other stuff.

Need to stop fiddling with the car mesh soon and start doing textures and materials. There's still details that need to be cut into the body asymmetric, like exhaust cutout and fuel flap.

Worked more on the details, background and materials.

Tires and wheels have the first texturing pass, they need more details still.

Made the cut on rear bumper and added simple exhaust.

First tests for some kind of headlight lens material, very simple road and wood planks on the background.

Got some feedback from a friend, so decided to flip the colors with car being vibrant and warm orange, background turning into cooler blue and green hues.

It's definitely better but still a lot more to do...

Steps forward again. Textured the seats, created licence plates, added things into the background bar and environment, experimented with different roads (which all look bad).

Got feedback from another friend, and made the tires wider for tougher-looking stance.

I think some small details need to be added to the car itself still but most work goes to the background, camera and lighting at this stage.

Rear light materials are completely missing from the car for sure.

The initial setup feels good, but I've gotten used to it so I might try to experiment a bit.

Still going towards the final image.

Added some more work on the background, modeled small stones, simple boom box and surf boards (they need a material still).

Shaped the road, and finally created half-decent looking material for it. I mixed and matched textures from multiple sources, and painted some of my own.

Moved around some things in the bar counters, need to do more work there.

Created some kind of material for rear lights, it's not great yet but better than nothing. I'll return to it later if I have time, it's not going to be visible much in the final render anyway.

Tested with a person in the background, he's actually the "Sprockett" guy from the Yazmuza Cop-V car that I made into this competition few years back. Not sure if I keep him there since he's...uhm, polygon-amount challenged.

Also experimented with a bright sunshine HDR image, it looks more punchy but perhaps not so real, and steps far from the initial idea of late evening.

Did some color-adjustments etc. for testing purposes on the evening version.

Two weeks left to push this over the finish-line...

New HDR and lighting tweaks for more "pop".

Improved paint material, re-arranged the background slightly.

Progressed with the road material, and numerous other small changes.

Lamps are bugged in this render, and carpaint roughness map has issues.

Still trying to find points to improve.

Added polygons for the front bumper and fenders to calm down some wild reflections.

Put some seat belts inside, added black trim around the windshield and did some other very small tweaks.

Spent some time color-correcting and adjusting values in post-production.

This might be my last version, there are few days still left so some parts might be improved yet.