Final Major Project : NSX GT3 Evo - Update 13 - Madness at the 11th hour

As the title suggests I decided to pull something crazy out of the bag at the last minute. When I set up the NSX next to the Miura in engine, I was really disappointed. The NSX looked so much stronger and the Miura just brought the overall level of the project down. So, in less than 72 hours, I reworked the Miura and here is the result.

At first glance, the differences may look subtle as a lot of what I changed was workflow and technical application. The comparison below will hopefully make the changes a little more noticeable. 

List of things changed:

• Remodelled:
• Front and rear headlights.
• Front and rear reflectors.
• Licence plate.
  
• High-poly bake to only use parts that had an effect.
• Added additional components to the:
• Engine (bolts, pipes, etc that had been previously baked).
• Wheels (rims).
  
• Fixed
• Mesh structure (individual assets were 92 now are combined into 3).
• Bonnet blades (artefacts).
• Multiple Ngons.
• Symmetry issues causing meshes to not be connected.
• Full UV rework for every texture set.
• Smoothing groups (now set via UV's).
  
• Textures
• With new UV's all textures have increased detail.
• New bodypaint and more accurate material.
• Grey/white Underpanel is now correct material (previously metal now painted bodywork).
• Rear "Lamborghini" & "MiuraSV" badges now correct material
• Reflectors and lights all semi-transparent materials with reflective internals.
• Interior materials more accurate to original and mask separation clearer.
• Gold material in engine refined.
• All Metals, Leather, Fur, and plastic materials refined to match intended material.
• Correct resolution textures. Previously all 4k to have "even some" detail.

Ideally, I wish I had more time to be able to continue the Miura's development. One thing I wanted to add was a more complex car paint, utilising fresnel nodes and colour hue shifts to add more detail and variety to the paintwork.

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The new final mesh, I've combined this down to now only be three parts as opposed to the ninety-two that it was before. The centre main body and then the front and back panel so they can be lifted. I've exported both meshes so that I can utilise it for the Level Variant, rather than changing it inside UE4 which is what I did previously as this caused issues.

I changed up the baked mesh as every piece of the car previously had a high-poly version. This was a large waste of time as 90% of the baked details had no effect. Trimming it down so only the visible components were included, I had four high-poly parts; The tyre tread, seats, door panels, and a few engine pieces. When baking this down however I got stuck on a few parts. Where I had more than just those pieces on the texture map, it would bake the high details onto those parts but then blackout all the other pieces. I wanted the other pieces to self-bake using the low, but couldn't find the right method in Substance Painter to make this happen. One bake would clear the other so something was always missing. 

To fix this I came back to 3DS Max and created the below high-poly setup. It has the high-poly pieces and then a clone of the low-poly for anything else on the texture set. This is effectively replicating the self baking but in a manual sense. This worked exactly as intended and I got a full clean bake from this setup.

The main reason I did this rework was through having a lack of detail in my textures. This was caused by poor and mismanaged UV's. Below are all of my reworked UV's with all I've learned being put into practice. I made sure to place all seams where I wanted smoothing groups to change, as well as squaring off any boxed shapes so "stepping" would not occur.

The texturing process from this point was relatively simple and followed my previous workflow. By using the smart materials I had created previously, it allowed me to adapt the base textures I had created. Some had little changes and others I started over, but it made the process a lot simpler and I could purely focus on adding more detail to each piece. The main focus in a lot of cases was better matching the material on the original car. In a few places, for example, I had made the material a shiny metal rather than a black plastic as in photographs they look similar.