Modeling & Lighting a Realistic Porsche 911 GT3 RS in 3D
Guillaume Perret talked about the workflow behind the Porsche GT3 RS project, explaining how he modeled the car's intricate details and used lighting and color to achieve a balance between the vehicle and its background.
Introduction
Hi, I'm Guillaume. I'm currently working at Ubisoft Ivory Tower as a Technical Vehicle Artist on The Crew franchise. The latest project I worked on is The Crew Motorfest, where I started as a Vehicle Artist and then quickly transitioned into a Technical Artist, still within the Vehicle Team.
The Porsche GT3 RS has always been a dream car for me, so I decided to take on this project, which took me around 2 or 3 weeks to do. I started gathering references of the car to help with the modeling process, along with environmental references. PureRef is a great tool for that.
As soon as the project started, I knew that I would do my renders in UnrealEngine 5, but not in real-time rendering. So I model the car with as many polygons as needed, without worrying about polycount.
Porsche GT3 RS
I focus on modeling as many details as I can. For example, a single rim is around 50k vertices. And then quickly importing my car into Unreal Engine. This project was also a good opportunity to try the latest features Epic added, such as the Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE), which is new to UE 5.7.
So I created a few assets myself and got some Megascans assets from FAB to start building the environment. I always begin with an empty level when I place most of the assets I plan to use, just to make sure everything works well together.
To make my life easier, I also created a very simple blueprint that exposes a few parameters. This helps a lot and adds dynamism to the car: wheel direction, camber, suspension height, and so on.
Rendering
For the render itself, I tried to keep things as simple as possible, an HDRI (from PolyHaven) combined with a nice DirectionalLight and good work on camera settings. I think it's important to have basic knowledge and understanding of how a real camera works and its basic parameters (ISO, Focal Length & Aperture).
In my case, I gave most of my shots a quite big Aperture to get a nice depth blur, which helps me isolate my subject. Especially considering the very "noisy" environment I created. And then most of the work is done in post-process, still inside Unreal. Having nice lighting and colorgrading is key.
Here is, for example, the same scene, but with poor lighting and no post-processing:
Also, the importance of using a good colorchecker mesh in your scene, to make sure you get a good lighting balance.
From here, properly setting the Render Settings is important. In my case using Path Tracer for the render, and of course, a nice Anti-Aliasing config. The Anti-Aliasing been very important, especially for motion-blurred renders. Here is a very handy video from DrawWithNightBuzzer that explains everything:
Conclusion
And to finish the final touches in Photoshop, when it comes to a realistic render, it's important not to have a render that looks "too clean". Adding noise, for example, is a very simple yet effective way to really increase realism in your renders (there is also a noise option inside Unreal post-process volume, but I did get more freedom with Photoshop).
A nice trick is to start from a 50% grey layout as a smart object and add noise on it, blend it as an overlay, so you only keep the noise itself, not the 50% grey. And there you go!
So, to conclude, this project was a lot of fun and interesting as well. Especially playing with the new Procedural Vegetation Editor and also trying to find the right settings to get decent renders with Unreal PathTracer. It only motivates me to go further on the next project!
