15 replies to this topic

[philnolan3d]

I was asked to explain how I did the tire tread for my Audi R8 LW model. It was done in Photoshop and 3D-Coat and exported to LightWave. So I wrote up a little PDF tutorial (with a little video help).

Here's what the finished tread looks like (with a Sub-D tire made in LW)



Attached is the tutorial and my tire photo if you don't have your own. Hope you enjoy!

Attached Thumbnails

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Attached Files

•  tire_tread_tutorial.pdf   518.81K   1100 downloads

[haikalle]

Very nice tutorial. Thanks a lot!

[philnolan3d]

Glad to be of service

[chris_solo]

thanks Phil! very interesting!

[AbnRanger]

Thanks for the tutorial Phil...I was thinking before you went through the steps that you were going to do a top and side profile in PS of the the entire tire, use the Sketch tool in Voxels, then the Wrap Tool the same way you did. Didn't realize the Text Tool would do that.

[ifxs]

Thank for the turorial Phil :-)

[philnolan3d]

Thanks for the tutorial Phil...I was thinking before you went through the steps that you were going to do a top and side profile in PS of the the entire tire, use the Sketch tool in Voxels, then the Wrap Tool the same way you did. Didn't realize the Text Tool would do that.

Yeah I could've gone further I guess, but I think the tread is really the hard part to model in most cases. I know I had a lot of trouble getting it to look nice over the years when I've tried to model it before. This is also faster than the way I had done it in the past.

[Javis]

Nice Phil! Very cool to share it with everyone.

[UnCommonGrafx]

I really enjoyed this tute. Thanks, Phil.

What's the smallest you could get your tire and still have detail? 300k seems to be the number I have that has worked. 1.2 milpolys for a set of tires sounds exorbitant.

[philnolan3d]

Glad you liked it. Honestly I can't remember anything as detailed as that, I wrote this back in March and haven't really touched it since then. I just had a look at mine and it's 211,000 polys. Remember that if you're taking it to LightWave you can decimate it further with qemLOSS3 if you need to. Also if you're going to make the rest of the tire with Sub-Ds then there's a lot of hidden geometry that can be deleted on the backside of the tread like you see below. I have considered using less polys, just what is absolutely necessary, but without the microbevels around the edges it wouldn't look right so either way you end up with a pretty high polycount.

[UnCommonGrafx]

Yeah, I haven't looked at how to approach it, yet. What you show is where I'd like to get to but the way I approached it may have complicated things.


Which got me this:


It fit on the rim I had but now, the rim doesn't do the tire justice.
Gonna look at stenciling something into the tire as an exercise of use for 3dc. This was a very illuminating procedure.

[philnolan3d]

Yeah I think doing the sidewall in voxels might be kind of a waste as there's no need for that many polygons on a large, fairly flat, surface.

What you have here wold actually be very nice if you planned on doing some low res retopo and baking the detail to a normal map in the paint room.

As for the stencil look at the text and Logo tools.

[UnCommonGrafx]

You make a great point about the sidewalls, obviously.
So far, with fair optimization, I have each of these tires down to 50K. I believe I can hit 25k, which would be acceptable, and still have a pretty good looking tire.
The method I followed gave me a lot of tris. Gonna look for a way to do this with all quads. Plus, maybe, just wrapping the tread only and sandwich it with a sidewall piece in LW. Much lighter that way.

But this is quite cool. Have to see how to do it in ZB. Or if there is a way...

[philnolan3d]

But this is quite cool. Have to see how to do it in ZB. Or if there is a way...

Let me know if you find anything. I don't know zb very well, but I can't think of any way they could do this.

[Britain]

Great Tut..here my krawler..bty how do you compress the image size here?

[philnolan3d]

Thanks this forum automatically changes the image size to fit the screen if it's too big. What I usually do is use Image Shack, they have a really great little program that will upload images for you quickly and easily, then give you a number of link options including thumbnails to post in forums.

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