Capra Cars
Hi! I’m Lisa. One of my first assignments on Neocab was to make an iconic autonomous car using Vincent’s lovely concepts pictured here:
My job is to translate these awesome 2D images into a 3D asset for use on the Los Ojos streets!
The first step is to model it in a 3D modeling software. I used Maya for this asset due to its hard surface qualities. At this stage, I like to get all the feedback I can to avoid any rework later on. This model went through a couple of rounds of feedback before it came out looking like this:
Once the model passes muster, I start to UV the model in Maya. This process is a way to unfold the geometry you’ve made to be flat so that it can then be painted as a texture.
A texture sheet looks like this:
I turned on the wireframe layer in Photoshop so you can see the thin lines representing the wireframe of the 3D geometry. This is like a roadmap to tell you where each piece of the 3D car is located in this 2D space. The texture was kept quite simple with just a quick ambient occlusion bake and some basic color. Ambient occlusion is a shadow based on proximity to other geometry in the scene as well as self-shadowing based on an ambient light.
The final result will have layered specular, reflectivity, decals and emission maps overtop of this base texture to hit the look we are going for.
Some quick jargon-y explainers just in case I lost you:
- Specular - the amount of shininess the object has and what color that shine will be
- Reflectivity - how reflective the object is and what texture it reflects
- Emissive- whether the object emits light like a glow and what color that glow is
- Decals - I went old school and layered some transparent geometry overtop of the car to add the logos and turn signals
Once we have all of these textures and the geometry finished, we can start getting this thing in engine! This is where we can tweak the specular, reflection, and emissive textures in a neat package called a “Material.” This step is where it all comes together and the hard work starts paying off.
The final result (with both sets of turn signals on) looks something like this:
