A short project for the Automotive CGI Facebook group competition, the brief of which was to use a Lamborghini Centenario model by Jakub Przybolewski - https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/9LRA/lamborghini-centenario-3d-model?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace

Originally I had wanted to do a full 3D environment scene with a fog filled forest road but I came up against memory limitations as well as not being happy with any sort of camera angle. The car itself, for me, is a collection of very interesting individual details that together create a rather awkward and lumpen overall design. I had finished texturing the model, based on a real life version of the car based in Miami that is finished in raw carbon with blue details, when I decided to change direction on how I wanted to render the model. 

I decided to focus on the interesting details emulating the FDL technique used by Sarel van Staden in 3D. The FDL technique makes reflective surfaces look matte/satin, so I aimed to make the glossy carbon body panels look matte with lighting only and not cheat by adjusting the material glossiness settings. 

At first I tried to shoot a strobe light through a translucent material but found that it didn't make any visual difference from using a large area light with a falloff gradient applied lighting the model directly. Shooting the light through a material also increased the render times.

Once again I used the Corona lightmix feature to isolate each light for compositing in Photoshop.

The layer stack wasn't particularly complicated, much of the time was spent masking in/out light layers and some final adjustments using the Camera RAW filter.