1937 Mercedes-Benz W125

This is my first ever car model.
This is a model of the legendary 1937 Mercedes-Benz W125 Grand Prix race car. It took me about two days to make and was made while using both photos and a 1:43 model for reference.
This was a fun project and really gave me a challenge. I think that I prefer to work on less complex and smaller objects, as well as low-poly work, but I think that I will have another go at difficult project like this in the future.

Settings:
Cycles Render
250 Samples




Please, any constructive criticism and/or tips are welcome.

Hi ComputerWiz!
Very nice work for a first model, it is very ambitious and you pulled it off really nicely!
From my point of view here are the improvements I think you could make:

  • When trying to make a complex object like this in a realistic way, having proper textures can really help. Car paint materials are often way more complex than a simple glossy shader! Although in the case it might have done the trick, but you might want to add little imperfections to the metal: very slight bumps for example (especially for a very vintage car). The tires, wheel, glass and inside of the car would look a lot better with appropriate textures, bump maps etc. Of course it depends on what you want to achieve, but imperfections however small are what makes a scene unique. Good image textures are hard to find, but worth it.
  • Lighting: Try to dramatize the lighting to make it tell something. Remember shadows are as important as highlights! Your lights seem to have a very small size, hence very sharp shadows. I’m guessing you made that choice to have less noise, but try to avoid having more than one shadow as sharp as that. A very simple lighting setup is made with 3 light, key, rim, and fill. You’ll have no trouble finding very good lighting tutorials.
  • Sampling: your scene might be missing 250 samples with the presets you have. But to optimize the render, try to tweak the branched path tracing or check Andrew Price’s tips on reducing the noise for example.
  • Composition: just as important as lights: Think your render as a photograph, which has areas of emphasis, rythm and color tone (can be quite complex but definently look it up! I’m thinking especially the 3d render).
    And finally, the environement also plays alot when you have reflections, but if you want it to look like a studio shot, try to add planes and such, visible only to reflections. Planes with emission material are a very good way to light a scene and build nice reflections, but it can take dozens of different plane lights to obtain a perfect render.
    That was a bit long but I hope it can help, this looks very promising anyway! Keep up the good work! Cheers.

Thank you very much for all of these tips.
I will keep these in mind on my future projects.

i would tune the mats a bit. the carpaint should be a bit more reflective mabye :slight_smile:

wonderful
great work
i love this