Abandoned Volkswagen Creation: Detailed Guide

Introduction

Hello! My name is Anson Weese, and I am honored 80 Level reached out to me to hear more about myself and my work.

I am a recent graduate of a comprehensive 3-year video game design program here in Canada. I am currently working freelance. Prior to enrolling in college, I worked in the graphic design industry, but I was always passionate about working in 3D/CGI. My goal is to find my way into an environmental art/design position; I want to create new and fantastical worlds for people to explore. In pursuit of this, I spend spare time working on personal pieces, like this lonely Beetle.

Gathering the Reference

My Abandoned Volkswagen project started not long after I finished my last piece (abandoned sofa).

I wanted to work on a similarly themed piece, albeit more detailed, comprehensive and challenging. The dichotomy of nature’s reclamation of something man-made is fascinating to me; I’m not sure if it’s the juxtaposition of these two elements or the narrative it can imply, the nostalgia, or simply the colors – or all of it. Regardless, I bounced a few ideas around as to what I was going to model, from appliances to furniture, buildings, and finally settled on the iconic Beetle.

Modeling

My process was rather typical. I gathered a plethora of reference material – abandoned vehicles in the forest are not hard to come by – and set about modeling the high-poly (HP) version in 3ds Max. Zbrush was used to sculpt some wrinkles and folds in fabric, as well as refining bent metal. For simplicity, I modeled the entire car in a non-distressed, symmetrical orientation, before skewing, denting and generally messing it up. Once I had the HP,  where I wanted it, I retopped each element (painstakingly); usually using lower iterations of the HP for this process. Before moving on to unwrapping and texturing the car, I switched gears and started on the environment. I felt the colors and values I used had to complement the vegetation, so I introduce foliage early. It was important that the scene was cohesive, so during my process, I bounced back and forth from car to flora often; this also helps mitigate fatigue from working on one element for extended periods. I usually work this way: bringing each level of the scene up together.

One unique strategy I incorporated into the distressing process was using 3ds Max’s cloth modifier to deflate the tires and dent the hood, roof, and fenders. For the tires, I simply turned the HP into a cloth and let them settle on the uneven ground, deforming their bottoms. For the metal components, I used basic geometric shapes and “crashed” them into the car creating random deformation I could later refine in ZBrush.

Interior and Detailing

The interior was straightforward. I studied the radio, dials, knobs, steering wheel, etc., from reference, isolating the different pieces I needed and set to modeling them in HP.

One challenge I came across didn’t appear until texturing; I wanted the AO bake of the dials to affect the dashboard itself, but as they belonged to two separate texture sheets I had to solve the problem my way around this. By duplicating each HP piece of hardware and adding it to the dashboards HP bake groups in Marmoset I was able to get their shadows to imprint onto the dash.  The other challenge I faced was marrying the exterior and interior geometry together; even with reference images, it can be hard to comprehend how these two pieces join harmoniously. This is something I was conscious of early in the modeling process though, and by blocking out and experimenting I was able to join them without much difficulty; I also knew that I could hide some of my crimes with foliage later.

I was fastidious about not cutting corners or being cheap with geometry, since I did not have a targeted polycount in mind, and I knew I wanted to render some close-up shots. For instance, I modeled the metal Wolfsburg crest into the steering wheel, and the gauge into the speedometer, instead of just texturing them in later.

Rust was an important part of this piece and I spent time researching different strategies to create a convincing look. I tested out a layering technique early in the project and was pleased with the result.

I determined, in which areas corrosion would occur; isolated and duplicated (x3) polygons from those portions of the geometry, and made sure they each had their own UV space. I baked them at their original orientation; it wasn’t until I was ready to export them to Substance Painter that I moved them away from the main mesh, making it easier to paint varying levels of transparency. I also made each of the 3 layers a slightly different shade of umber to help sell the effect.

Back in 3ds Max, I snapped the rust cards back into place, skewing, bending, shifting and duplicating them until I was happy with the look. I know painting 2-dimensional rust right on to the car would have sufficed, but I really wanted to step out of my comfort zone and try something new.

For the fabric, I used Substance Painter to layer up the leather/vinyl pattern, and when I was happy with the overall look, random grunge wear and color variations were introduced. Lastly, I hand painted the mold onto areas where water would settle.

Substance Alchemist was used for creating ground textures. I have very little experience with Designer, and Alchemist provided a great platform to build quick dynamic textures, with a very little learning curve. By importing photographs of dirt and ground cover in my garden, adding an equalizer, delighter and tiling layer, I was able to create a small library of textures I could later blend and paint onto my ground plane in Substance Painter. Additionally, Alchemist’s tiling function makes tiling a photo a breeze with threshold adjustments and blurring/smoothing; I highly recommend checking out it out.

For the plants I picked a variety of leaves from my garden; ferns, weeds, and flowers, etc., (I’ve kind of let it grow wild). I photographed them individually and meticulously cropped out the background in Photoshop, after which I laid them out on alpha cards.

I also changed the violet flowers to fuchsia, because why not? Once in 3ds max, I cut up the sheets into individual leaves, bent and warped them accordingly and combined them back into “plants”. I used the “paint objects from list” function and set it to random. Just make sure to reset XForms once moving the pivot to the base of the stems. I created a simple normal map from the diffuse, and an SSS map for the light to pass through. Additionally, in Marmoset I added variation to the hue of some of the diffuse maps to give subtle variety to the coverage.

Painting plants into the environment was easily the most satisfying process for me. Once I had created a cohesive collection of flora to work with, peppering the landscape was a blast and everything started to come together. I acknowledge that I could have just as easily used an online catalog of plants, such as Megascans, to achieve the same or even better results, but I really wanted to challenge myself and fabricate everything from scratch. I guess I am only limited to what my gardens and backyard can give up.

Lightning and Camera Setup

Once everything was in place in Marmoset I could concentrate on lighting and camera setup. I recognized this was my weakest area, and I wasn’t afraid to reach out to a mentor of mine for some guidance. The talented Hugues Giboire was a former teacher of mine, and he was more than happy to help me out with composition. Using simply a key and fill light, some atmosphere, DoF, and some tone mapping I was able to come up with something I was happy with.

Afterword

The most import advice I have regarding workflow is not to rush anything, and experiment, especially when working on a labor of love like this. I spent hours researching reference images, studying how and where moss and rust forms on stationary vehicles; I ran small scale test on distressing strategies and spent an extended amount of time in substance painter tweaking and retweaking values before I let myself move on.

Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me.

Anson Weese, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev