From Cars to Cartoons

Power Artist DJ Waterman turns his love of cars to works of art with LightWave

Posted: Wed 06 Feb 2013

While most men dream of owning and driving cool cars, Sydney, Australia-based Des "DJ" Waterman likes building them in LightWave. Whether it’s a VW Beetle, Alpha Romeo, or Mini-Cooper, bringing 3D cars to life has been a long-time passion.
As a professional 3D animator, doing business as Gloss Design in Sydney, Australia, Waterman regularly contributes 2D and 3D animation to all sorts of client projects, including commercials, corporate marketing, children’s programs, and medical/health videos.

While his freelance work as a 3D animator and motion designer covers diverse subjects and techniques, he’s known on the LightWave forums for his car renders. Waterman’s creative experimentation with his 3D car hobby has advanced his knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, and helped him refine his 3D modeling, surfacing, lighting and rendering techniques.
Waterman works from his home-based studio using LightWave 11. Occasionally, a real vehicle—like his green Fiesta—serves as inspiration for a 3D car and a handy reference for realism, but for the most part he works from photographs and blue prints.

The Body shop

“If I’m just modeling something out of my head, I can always cheat; whereas a car makes me stay true to a design and work through all the hard parts,” Waterman said. “A car contains most modeling and surface challenges. It has hard and soft shapes, sometimes flowing into each other. It also involves all kinds of surfaces like metal, glass, rubber, leather, and plastic. It’s a great subject.”
Waterman’s modeling algorithm of choice is Sub-D, short for Sub-Division, also known as quad modeling because every object is comprised of four-sided polygons, although there are instances where three-sided polys can’t be avoided.
He begins a car by building it panel by panel using four-sided polygons. These car parts are then grouped together to become a single object.
“Once I’ve modeled a panel using four-sided polygon shapes, I can hit the E key on the keyboard to extrude an edge and drag out a new shape that will become another panel,” Waterman said. "I also use the Tab key (smooth/unsmooth) to check back and forth as to what is really going on with the mesh. A non-smoothed mesh will often reveal where the problem areas are. Tiny adjustments to untangle the underlying poly mesh will magically improve the look of the Sub-D’d mesh.”

There are alternative modeling techniques—like spline patching—that one can also use to model cars. “With spline patching, you get a blueprint you can use as a background image, and the spline-patched model you derive from that serves as the starting point for your car,” he explained. “After you draw the spline-based curves of the car, you select points along these curves and click a button and it patches it and puts a nice, smooth mesh over all that.”
“While that approach gets you up to speed quickly, the problem is that if you discover a problem with your blueprint after the car’s fully formed, it becomes quite difficult to correct or modify one detail without affecting the whole object. That’s why I usually forgo spline patching,” Des said. “With Sub-D, when you build the car one panel at a time, you can go back and solve problems on one isolated part without having those fixes affect the entire car.”

Shear genius

There are many tools in LightWave that are extremely helpful but relatively obscure. One such hidden gem is called the Shear tool. According to Waterman, “Shear has many useful properties for getting nice curvature to a mesh where one might use a Lattice Deformer in another 3D animation program. Once you get a feel for the Shear tool, it will constantly surprise you. It’s very interactive and flexible.”
“If you slide your curser over a box, the object will lean in one direction, like a shed leaning to one side,” Waterman said. “Artists can quickly get the idea that that’s all the Shear tool does. If you explore further, you find that you can actually use Shear for deforming and getting very nice curves. The shear tool lets you make these adjustments interactively and see them in real-time.
Shear is just one of many LightWave tools capable of doing deformations. Waterman has noticed a lot of people on the forums talking about problems they’re having that could easily be solved by applying the Shear tool. “I just figure they either don’t know about it, or they don’t realize it can be used in a way that would solve their problem,” he said.

Detailing cars

Once the cars are modeled, and it’s time to apply the surfaces, textures and lighting, he moves them into Layout where the View Port Renderer (VPR) allows for real-time, interactive creative experimentation. “In Modeler, you’re basically dealing with wireframes, but in Layout, you can use the surface editor to apply different textures, such as chrome or leather, and finesse their reflectivity and other properties,” he explained.
“If you’re going to do surfacing, you need to get to a lighting situation that fairly closely mimics reality. If the universe you put your car into isn’t correct, you’ll be adjusting your surfaces to match an unreal environment,” said Waterman. “If your surfaces aren’t Energy Conserving, they’ll never relate to radiosity lighting in a realistic manner.” The surfaces will look wrong or odd in some way. For example, they might appear too luminous, too hyper colorful, or too dark, to name a few of the problems.

While animators used to be limited to just a few kinds of lights, like spotlights, point lights, and distant lights, Waterman said since LightWave added its broader set of lighting tools, including dome lights and area lights, quickly achieving a photo-realistic look is now very easy. Also, since LightWave 11 has a very fast, advanced renderer, animators no longer have to keep their scenes and lighting simple to economize on rendering time. “Being able to experiment freely with lighting is the key to giving surfaces a realistic look,” he said.
"Whether it's a studio set up or an outdoor location, I try to mimic reality as much as I can so that I can be surprised by the effects of light and reflection, as would happen in a real photo shoot where you don't have absolute control,” Waterman said. “This is where LightWave's renderer has really impressed me. I don't have to fuss around or employ tricks, it just works like I expect reality to work."
"It helps to think of the cars as celebrity portraits,” Waterman explained, “where I'm trying to enhance their personality or communicate a feeling, not just showcase a completed model.”
After you’ve finalized your presentation in Layout, “if you discover a small detail you’d like to change on your model, you can go back to Modeler, isolate the problem area you want to alter, and make the change,” he added. “When you return to Layout, with the click of the mouse, the object instantly updates to reflect that change.” This is extremely advantageous, because the animator only has to deal with the model and not the entire scene file.