Puncture on a Desert Road

I am very proud to show my latest 3D project highlighting my completed (and wrecked) vintage tire model, created in Maya and rendered in V-Ray.

After spending a long time trying to get the wear and dirt on the tire to look realistic I really wanted the backdrop to measure up as well, I took inspiration from a road in Death Valley, California that I had driven down on a road trip about a year ago and I decided to recreate it with a fully CGI scene.

This has been a really challenging project and it's the first time I have created an outdoor scene like this from scratch but I honestly really love the final result and it pushed me to use a lot more tools that I had never tried using before like MASH to help me place all of the rocks and grass props in Maya.

-Overview of the process-

The tire was already pretty much completed in the previous W.I.P project but I'll overview it here.

I started with some reference of a mid-60's era U.S. Royal bias ply tire and I used some creative license to change up the design to look a little more unique. I then loaded the completed model into Substance Painter and I was amazed by how easy it was to use as well as being really fun to get into the nitty gritty details. It's so easy to get lost in the process of adding more and more detail and wear and little flecks of dirt and rust I kind of got carried away.

After easing back on the grime I think I had a much more realistically weathered tire and wheel than the previous W.I.P I posted, it looks far more like a real object with a story behind it.

I sculpted the ground using Maya's tools to get the shape of the road and the piled up gravel smoothly flowing into the surrounding land, I then used the V-Ray distance shader to get the different textures on the ground to blend into one another further from the road, mixed in with a few layers of noise to break it up. (I remember having some difficulty getting the displacement maps to blend together, I think I used the lighten mode to blend them, this kept only the highest points from each map in the blended area which I found looked more realistic.

After getting the ground textures sorted it still felt like the landscape was pretty barren and empty and despite it's name Death Valley actually has a lot of life in it so I spent some time searching for the correct kind of plants that would be growing there. I used a combination of MASH and some manual prop placement to fill out the scene. I'm always kind of a control freak so for me it was quite a break from my usual process of putting everything in the scene by hand.

I was really impressed (and simultaneously frustrated) with MASH, kind of sad that it hasn't really been updated much since it was added to Maya but it definitely made the process of placing down fifty thousand rocks a lot easier than if I had done it manually 😂

Finally I rendered using V-Ray and did a small amount of post processing in Photoshop, the first time I'm using the new OCIO functionality there. There wasn't actually very much that needed adjustment because I had already adjusted the exposure and colour for the render, it was just a few small tweaks to the contrast as well as adding some grime to the car and depth-of-field effects to the render.