Ever wanted to know how the artists create those amazing cars for AAA video game titles? Well here's your chance to find out. In this incredible CGTuts+ exclusive tutorial series, you will follow professional CG artist and teacher Laurens Corijn as he creates a high quality, next-gen, normal mapped Hot Rod for realtime use.

-Day1: In this first part of the series, Laurens takes you through the first planning and design steps, such as gathering inspiration, collecting reference, and fleshing out the idea, and then demonstrates how to get started with the first rough blockout of the model.

-Day2: In this second part of our mammoth series, Laurens will show you how to add technical details to the blockout (created in part 1) that was used to define the final proportions and design. A big focus of this part of the tutorial will be how to use and interpret reference when creating mechanical components, as well as understanding what you are effectively modeling.

-Day3: In the series' biggest part yet, we'll be diving straight into highpoly modeling with the most challenging part of the car, the gigantic, supercharged Hemi 540 engine and its transmission! Through this, you will learn that modeling something as complex as an engine is not an impossible task!

This tutorial can be followed as part of the larger series, but it can also be viewed as a standalone tutorial for creating an impressive highpoly engine block. It even includes a bonus video that explains how to make a nice render setup for this sort of highpoly mechanical work!!

-Day4: Now in the fourth part of our mammoth series, we will follow Laurens as he completes the high poly mesh of his hot rod, all the while making sure that is will be suitable for baking onto a low poly realtime model.

-Day5: Now, in the fifth part of our mammoth series, Laurens will demonstrate how to carefully design your low poly model in the most efficient way possible, while still being optimal for baking the details from your high poly model into a normal map texture.

-Day6: After having finished the task of modeling, we will now jump into the unwrapping on Day 6 of our Hot Rod series. We will show you some important methods that can improve your overall unwrapping workflow, and some tips regarding optimizing your UV's for proper baking later on. You will also be introduced to some handy 3ds Max scripts that can make your life loads easier when unwrapping.

-Day7: Now that we've wrapped up the UV's in the previous part, it's time to get to business with some serious normal map baking. You'll be taken from a simple bake that shows an almost ideal baking scenario, to some very difficult examples such as the drivetrain and engine. Smoothing groups, UV splits/seams, cage setup and tweaking, and filtering settings, etc.. are all covered in detail. A few exceptionally difficult normal map problems, as well as their respective solutions, are also shown in this video.

-Day8: Finally, it's time to start texturing your Hot Rod model. Using the finished normal maps, we will bake out Ambient Occlusion with Vray, which we will then be able to use as a base to start texturing. We will fully texture the wheels and get about halfway with the chassis in this part. A lot of important aspects of texturing will be covered, such as hand painting as much as possible, layer management, non-destructive workflow, and creating additional maps such as specular and glossiness

Tutorial Details

-Difficulty: Advanced

-Techniques Covered: Reference and inspiration gathering; Initial blockout

-Completion Time: 1- 2 hours

-Software/ Hardware Requirements: 3D application capable of low and high poly modeling; Dual core PC and recent (GeForce 8 level) graphics card

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