There's been a lot going on behind the scenes over the past 3-4 months to make this project happen. Discussions about a potential collaboration between myself and Tom began back in early February - and we've certainly put in a few hours since then!
This folder shows some of our working out along the way - with a supporting commentary from me (MT) to help explain some of the stages / background thinking.
There's also been a lot of shared jokes and giggles to get us through - and we've tried to keep some of them alive here - so that we can look back and remember what the project FELT like.
We hope this brain-dump folder gives an interesting "behind the scenes" glimpse into what we've done - and explains some of the decisions, processes and software tools we've used along the way to produce our final images.
If you want to shortcut all this stuff and just focus on the finished presentation artworks, feel free to use the links below:
2020-03-11 Early Alias CAD volumes
We both like to begin seeing the design in 3D early in the process - just so we can understand the form and start tweaking as required until the general character and volumes feel about right..
At this stage in the collaboration we were both working on the exterior, but it got to a point where Tom had a few specific ideas he wanted to work through, so Mike switched attention to developing a basic stripped-out race inspired interior.
The intention was never to show an interior in great detail in our final renders - but put enough into the model that it would look interesting through the cockpit glass. The original model included various donor parts from past projects - just to get the ball rolling. Some of these made it through to the final cut - but most of it got reworked and refined.
2020-04-13 Early Road Car sketch
This pretty much nailed the main exterior character we subsequently developed. Still looks cool!
2020-04-23 Race Car: Preliminary Photoshop paint-over
Based on the initial Alias volumes which we'd been initially working on - starting to look at the idea of doing a more extreme / dedicated competition track variant to sit alongside the regular road car.
MT: At this stage I was still obsessing with BBS Turbofan wheels and an exposed 917 style engine bay. Side skirts needed a bit more development.
The venting panel on top of the front wing was interesting - but we both felt it broke up the character of the car too much - we wanted there to be a close synergy between road and race for the upper bodywork.
20-04-24 Kill 'em all!
MT: I'd been looking at fighter plane cockpits for inspiration, and loved the idea of doing some sort emergency kill switch - something for the driver to yank if there was a major battery / motor problem etc.. I originally modelled this BIG on the rear bulkhead - but quickly realised it was going to be FAR too prominent through the windscreen - it can be practically seen from outer space (see image top left)
In the end we put it on the central tunnel (bottom left) so its was still in there but a bit less shouty - more of a finger toggle switch than a full lever.
2020-04-25 Interiorzzzzz
MT: Hehehehehh . . . . although it was never intended to be featured close-up in our final renders, I ended up getting pretty obsessed doing the interior.
I wanted this space to look stripped out and racey - but tidily designed and coherent at the same time.
The dash crossbeam was done deliberately to keep an open feel - and to show off the extinguisher system at the front of the central tunnel.
I'd been playing a fair amount of ProjectCars2 prior to this, and picked up on "real" GT cars running full interior dash displays to give the driver detailed lap and race information - so thought it'd be cool to add the same to ours.
I kept our central screen size huge - so that the information would be larger / more legible when racing at speed.
The finished model has ended up with a linear "industrial" vibe - a deliberate contrast to the clean flowing lines of Tom's exterior.
Point to note: In this early guise we were still playing with the idea of a big cooling fan to stop the battery and electric motors overheating in our "engine" bay - this detail was true to the original 904 / 917 bloodline, but later in the project we beggan to feel it looked too "internal combustion" (and a bit fussy in our renders) . . so we chose instead to do a very simple, clean battery recess with heavy duty connectors - true to current EV conventions.
2020-04-26 Playing around with wheels.
At this stage we wondered if race and could be a common rim, but with additional turbofan covers for the race spec.
Neither of us were 100% convinced - and amusingly were both starting to rave about classic Fuchs wheels in passing conversations.
We'd not yet put two and two together ourselves in terms of a design direction for this project . . . D'oh!
2020-04-29 NUTS!
Whatever we did, we knew we wanted to add in plenty of realistic details - to help bring the concept to life. we wanted to keep the bodywork super clean and simple - so went to town detailling the centrecap - based on photos of production cars. We also got lucky and was able to find a reasonable brake caliper and disc model on GrabCAD - which again helped add a bit more realism to what we were mapping out.
2020-04-29 Headlight - Photoshop doodle
MT: By this point, Tom had got the initial bodywork volumes pretty much defined, and was hinting at rectangular vertical LED headlight arrays on his A-surface.
I was having one of THOSE nights where my brain was keeping me awake - so got up and did a quick photoshop doodle of how I thought the form of the units and their reflectors could be developed. I pinged it across to Tom - who replied saying this seemed cool and worth pursuing. On the following morning I modelled the units up - and was able to stay pretty faithful to the photoshop doodle.
2020-04-30 Headlight - Alias CAD / vRED Render
The headlight unit assembly came out looking quite detailed and complex - but was actually pretty simple to model.
Once we'd defined concept volumes for A-surface reflector rectangle, it was straightforward to recess this, and develop supporting geometry.
The idea was that the side wings around each LED would double up as reflectors and also be heat-sinks.
We've no idea whether this is remotely feasible, but it looked cool!
We then did some supporting geometry to hint at adjustment fixings before copy-pasting to make the full assembly.
MT: I'm glad we added this level of detail to our concept model - it's subtle in the final images, but adds a bit of depth and interest.
2020-04-30 FUCHS! (Photoshop)
Soo.. when they did arrive, the Fuchs dropped into place in pretty much one hit.
This was a rough initial photoshop doodle using the array tool to map out the basic shape. We wanted to keep the full character of the original Fuchs, but allow for a single centre knock-off wheelnut . . We also wanted them to be a bit more dished than the original, rather than being a heavily inset relatively flat feature - so that the wheel design would be more visible in 3/4 views.
2020-04-30 Fuchs (CAD)
We felt the developed Fuchs wheel model was a nice mixture of old and new.
We left the design exactly the same for race and road to give more visual cohesion to the two variants, but on the race version the centre starfish was done in carbon rather than silver - and had a single fast release nut with locking split pin. (a detail cannibalised for MT's earlier BMW 3.0 CSL project)
The tyre shader is standard vRED - but we scrubbed the Autodesk branding off the front face, and applied speed dashes to add a bit of dynamism.
The brake disc was from Grabcad's online library (www.grabcad.com) - we can't recommend this resource highly enough - it's a great place to find numerous bits and bobs - and saves a load of work modelling everything from scratch.
Apologies, but we forgot to scribble down the name of the original CAD author for this 3D model - we've looked for the same model since, but there's over 100+, and we've not been able to track the same file back down to give a suitable written note of thanks. If this is yours, feel free to DM us so we can credit you accordingly.
2020-04-30 Traditional Aero
We knew we wanted the race car vibe to be really simple and straightforward. We didn't want there to be loads of active / adaptive aero features like on modern supercars - but we still wanted to offer aero adjustability - something that would be set up by the driver / Teams in advance.
That way there'd be a bit more skill / luck involved in getting the right setup for each circuit - rather than having all the cars on the grid behaving exactly the same in each corner - which would have been the case if they all ran with active aero. The aim was to ensure more interesting racing.
At this stage, MT was still proposing a huge rear wing, and hadn't quite ironed out what to do with the side skirts towards the front wheel - but the race car principles were already in place.
2020-05-05 Factory launch liveries - first thoughts
Initial vRED images looking at a potential simple launch livery for the race-car programme - the type of thing Porsche might put out to promote a one make series before individual sponsors got onboard.
Front end aero stayed much as per this - but the big splash of colour on the front splitter looked all wrong - far too shouty. In the end, MT cut this back so that only the lead edge was colourcoded. Based on TU's suggestion, we'd also cropped a bit of height out the rear wing, and reshaped the endplates.
Interesting to note that these are the original volumes Tom had proposed for the bonnet & front wings - but having lived with them a few weeks, he decided to rework the model to reduce height of front wing, and balance out the proportions - it looked much sleeker as a result.
2020-05-12 Bonnets
Whilst reworking the bonnet and front wing areas, MT took a fresh look at the bodywork splits. We weighed up doing very linear splits like Tom was proposing for the road car (as per LH car) - but felt this looked a bit too harsh when applied to a recessed race bonnet. We quickly reverted to a more rounded shape as per the RH car - as this sat better with the front light, windscreen and engine bay perimeter shapes.
We also considered doing twin fillers (electric fast charge points) to boost race car recharge times - but felt the twin fillers didn't look as cool as the asymmetric filler / latch combo we'd shown previously.
(by this stage, you may also have spotted that MT had resolved the side skirts - so that the character front and rear was more balanced.)
2020-05-14 Ministry of CGI - welcome support!
MT: It's at this point I was approached via Behance by Paul Hogenboom of Ministry of CGI fame.
Paul was keen for me to trial some of his Company's image assets - studio quality HDRI's and corresponding backplates to improve our image quality, but also create something he could potentially use to promote his business. When I told him about this project he was keen to get involved, and sent a suite of example images through immediately.
These assets worked brilliantly within vRED, and allowed us to quickly generate some early concept images with a stronger, more photographic quality.
We'd certainly be keen to recommend his Company's services to anybody involved in CAD imaging and concept work.
2020-06-01 NEVER ENDING FILLETING!!
This is probably the worst bit of any creative project. We've got the basics all mapped out, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting to get the geometry set up as we're intending it - but in order to get nice images done, the CAD model has got to be fully filleted, so that you get nice edge highlights and shadows. So you've got to put the hours in.
To try and make the task a bit more manageable (and also because we shared a lot of common upper bodywork), we divided the task (and shared the pain) so that we could get it all done a bit quicker - and get back to the fun creative bit!
2020-05-12 Jägerbomb 1
We knew we wanted to do a series of classic race liveries from our earliest project discussion, and had a list as long as our arm of classic Porsche liveries we'd be desperate to show.
MT: at the outset of the project I had little experience of applying complex decals accurately in vRED - the very basic Jägermeister livery shown here was the extent of my vRED decalling knowledge at this point - so although our livery ideas were starting to get quite ambitious, I was a bit anxious that I'd not be able to deliver our vision convincingly.
2020-05-27 Martini, anyone?
MT: To support this project, I actually did 2 quick folio pieces specifically to practice vRED decal application (the NSX Super GT, and the Nissan 240RS). This helped me get up to speed on the basics, and give me enough confidence to tackle some of the more challenging liveries we ideally wanted to show.
This Martini livery was our first hesitant steps to try something a bit more advanced in vRED . . and with a bit of practice I quickly twigged that the vRED software interface for decalling is actually superb - from this point on, in terms of surface graphics the sky was pretty much the limit . . .
2020-05-28 The Pink Pig
The Zuffenhausen "Pink Pig" livery is one of Tom's personal favourites, so HAD to be in the mix!
MT: Thankfully, but the time I got round to starting this one, I'd got to grips with vRED decalling, and was able to pretty much get it thrashed out in an evening. The image above shows the mid-way part of the process, where I'd got the main cuts of meat identified and decals invented / applied in the right areas - I was then using Photoshop to begin figuring out what dashed lines I'd need to finish off the look.
In the end, I was able to get something "close enough" by just re-using the 3 curves shown above.
We did originally consider leaving the pig a flat pink body colour to be true to it's origins, but once we'd developed the livery concept, we felt that a pearlescent / soft metallic would make this Porker look a bit more premium - and help show off our bodywork volumes better.
2020-05-28 Game ON!
By this stage, we'd got 3 liveries underway, and were starting to get excited about creating digital race scenes.
MT: The excitement of first playing GranTurismo always springs to mind when developing digital race car concepts - I'd love to imagine this (and any of my other designs) in game - being able to thrash round the Nürburgring in my own car design. I remain respectfully (but deeply) jealous of the guys in established car studios who've had chance to develop concepts used in GT sport - that's gotta be the coolest assignment ever, surely? ;-)
2020-06-06 For Florian
MT: Florian Schneider (one of the founding members of Kraftwerk) had died a couple of weeks earlier - and since then I'd had their "Minimum Maximum" live album on repeatedly whilst working in this project . .
I've wanted to put a BASF livery on something for a long time (having had a BMW M1 as a small die-cast as a kid) . . and everything just seem to converge - The music references, the strong red white and black colour pallette which reminds me of Man/Machine Album graphics, the BASF logo itself being tied into audio tapes and music in my formative years . . this is the result.
I've not overtly branded it as Florian's, as they all seemed like quite unassuming understated guys - but he's down as a named driver in the later race images.. I paired him with Gary Numan - another electronic pioneer with a penchant for stark red and black album graphics in his early career - I hope Florian would approve of my choices.
2020-06-09 Ayrton WHO?
MT: OK . . this one freaked me out more than a little.
I've always loved the Joest / NewMan Porsche livery - so knew I had to do one for this car. However, it was only when I started downloading pix that I learned SENNA had driven for this team in car #7 . . his early career before F1 was before my motorsports knowledge began - so I was totally oblivious.
When I learned this was a Senna car it knocked me sideways. I'm SO pleased to have been able to work him into the script of this project.
You'll also spot that on this one I managed to shoe-horn my beloved BBS turbofans back into the project - AND recycle some rear wheels from my earlier BMW project. This isn't just me being lazy - these wheel types were true to how the original NewMan 956/962 cars were run.
2020-05-31 The Prime Minister's new ride
We wanted to make sure that The Ministry of CGI were in some way recognised within this project. They've basically sponsored us by letting us use some of their photographic assets - so we thought it would be cool to put them on our grid.
MT: I had a quick chat with Paul at MOCGI, and asked him about who he'd want as his ideal co driver (his wife Yvonne), other sponsors he'd like to see on the car (His son's Company - Mokum Mayhem), and any motoring history he cared to recall. (rallying a Lancia Delta with Martini / Pirelli sponsorship).
He was born in '57, and is Dutch - so blatantly BIG slabs of bright orange had to figure quite heavily. ;-)
I'm actually really pleased with how this one came out. I was wary that the dark graphitey bodywork might get a bit lost - but for me it works - it's got an air of menace. You'll also note that we recyled the initial wheel design which came out of Tom's first sketches - I still think it looks really cool - so wanted to feature them somewhere.
2020-06-09 The Mystery Machine
This was the last racing livery to be prepared for our grid - and again, took a bit of working out. We wanted to make sure the Hippie Porsche swirls complemented the lines of our car - so had to tweak things a bit compared to how they were on the original 917.
MT: At the point where I'd got the green shape successfully onto the car I still wasn't too sure I'd cracked it, but then when I started to drop on the really jarring colours of the Shell, Bosch and Cibie sponsor decals it all seemed to somehow work? It's a mess - everything's sort of fighting each other - and yet somehow it's all OK.. in fact its actually quite Groovy, BABY!
We shared a few jokes earlier in the project about this livery being a lot like the Scooby Doo van - so when it came to picking co-drivers, there really was only one possible choice . . .
2020-06-21 Jägerbomb 2
Having been through the grid and developed our vRED decalling technique, it was clear the original Jägermeister livery was now a bit lacking - so we pulled it back into the spray booth, and threw a bit more "stuff" at it.
MT: I'm always gonna be a big fan of orange stuff - and loved doing a basic Jäger livery on my earlier UP GT++ project, but this one feels a lot nicer - the rich metallic really gives it a nice pop.. The driver names for this team are a couple of cool guys my Daughter is friends with - I'm hoping they'll be chuffed to bits when they finally see this - they currently have no idea! (their nationality flags on here are the destinations they planned to go on holiday this year - before Lockdown messed things up for everyone.)
2020-06-09 Avengers - assembled!
All the main liveries are now done . . . there are plenty of others we still fancy having a go at from the Porsche racing archives (Apple Computer, Vaillant, Gulf, Saltzburg etc etc) but for now a grid of 7 race cars gives us enough colour and variety to begin creating the illusion of a race car series.
Also worth noting at this stage of the project is the return of Tom's road car data-set - and our battery bay has been cleaned up to ditch the big fan and connectors.
Everything we need is now fully filleted, and we're in a strong position to begin final visuals.
We're keen to point out online resources such as https://worldvectorlogo.com were REALLY useful during this livery development phase - their online logo library is superb for this type of activity.
2020-06-15 Post-processing overview
Getting close now - we've begun development of our final series of race images.
As we're wanting to show the cars running at real tracks, we're having to rely on back-plates we can find from the internet - typically taking existing photos from racing events and cloning out the original car so that we can super-impose our own.
MT: The animation sequence shows the main stages I went through to make this image. I'm still new to digital rendering and post processing, and there's probably many experienced visualisers out there who'd cringe at how I've gone about this - but for me this is a good result - I'm on a learning curve, and very much enjoying the process.
Point to note: sincere apologies to any irate photographers out there who feel we've wrecked their perfect shot - and if you do want us to give a suitable photo credit on any images we've re-worked, we'd be only to happy to do so - please feel free to direct message us.
2020-06-15 Let's get Dirrrrrrrrty!
Photoshop post-processing to make the car look a bit race-worn.
MT: The look was achieved by rendering the image with & without a dirt overlay shader made in VRED. Then using photoshop we can control which areas of the car were more dirty / clean using a transparency map - helping to create streaks, a few discreet handprints, and a clean arc on the windscreen to show the path of the wiper blade had been. To finish things off, we also found a few good pictures of paint scratches and gouges on the internet, and applied a few of these as overlays - to help give the impression the car has seen some serious rough and tumble action . .
Nice simple techniques - but a few streaks of dirt and some scratches really help make the image look a bit more true to life - and less obviously a CAD image.
2020-05-27 Offside!
Finding the right race backplates can be hard when all you've got is what falls to hand from the Internet - this image of the Paul Ricard track is beautifully lit, and so we wanted to do something with it . .but unfortunately it's of the infield - so there's on logical reason why there'd be a car there.. it's also a bit low res and grainy - so didn't make the final cut in our Race folder.
2020-06-10 Concrete / Goddess
MT: Early thoughts on what we could perhaps do for launch images for the road car variant. I'd been getting into concrete textures - something rough and angular to contrast with the smooth flowing lines of the bodyshell..
I then thought it might be fun to include a Venus statue - the most beautiful woman in the world looking on enviously at the new curvy girl in town? It didn't make the final cut, but there's something about this image we both liked - so it's here for the record.
2020-06-11 Preliminary Road Car trial renders
We've produced a lot of renders along the way - and have tried to keep our final Road and Race presentation folders as concise as possible so that they don't get long and boring - so these beauties have ended up in our "making of" section . . . they're really nice, but we felt we had stronger material which deserved more focus in our final cut.
2020-06-11 Preliminary Road Car trial renders
We've produced a lot of renders along the way - and have tried to keep our final Road and Race presentation folders as concise as possible so that they don't get long and boring - so these beauties have ended up in our "making of" section . . . they're really nice, but we felt we had stronger material which deserved more focus in our final cut.
2020-06-16 Teaser image development.
We played around with a few different approaches and lighting setups before we got to this - it's all very Cliche'd and has been done to death by just about everyone - but it WORKS!
Some nice views here to choose from, but in the end we both felt B was head and shoulders above the rest - it's hardly there at all, but if you look REALLY closely there's enough info in the pic to give you a fair idea what the design is all about.
Job done.
2020-06-16 UFO
This was one of the ones that (narrowly) got away. vRED has got a really nice SkyDome setting - where you can render based on dates, times and geographical location. By twiddling with the sun until its JUST about to set (down to the last few minutes) you can achieve images like this.
MT: I was born in 1973 - software like vRED which allows me to produce images like this still feels a little bit like magic . . long may this feeling continue!
2020-06-22 Ice Ice Baby
Been playing around with potential launch images today. Not sure we've found the right shots yet, but we'll keep trying stuff out and see what looks best at the end - not all are going to make it into the final cut for the road-car project folder, but we might show a few near misses here . . .
MT: I managed to get to Iceland tail end of last year and fell in love with the landscape. A friend of mine - Andy Sykes - went a few months later and was able to catch some stunning other-worldly shots from the beaches - black sands, twilight ice glistening against very pale blue skies. I fell in love with the shots, and really wanted to try putting our concept road-car into this slightly etherial other worldly landscape.
Backplate photo credit - Andy Sykes
2020-06-22 Paris under Lockdown
MT: I don't know quite why, but I've had Paris on my mind as a potential render destination for the RoadCar for a while - perhaps because I went there with Tom on a work trip a few years back and we had a really chilled time just walking the streets and enjoying the crowds. I found a lot of poignant photos of Paris under lockdown - deserted and missing it's people. It makes me sad, but at the same time it's a beautiful backdrop for our renders.
Apologies, back-plate found on the internet - please let us know if we can give a suitable photo credit.
2020-06-22 Paris under Lockdown
MT: I don't know quite why, but I've had Paris on my mind as a potential render destination for the RoadCar for a while - perhaps because I went there with Tom on a work trip a few years back and we had a really chilled time just walking the streets and enjoying the crowds. I found a lot of poignant photos of Paris under lockdown - deserted and missing it's people. It makes me sad, but at the same time it's a beautiful backdrop for our renders.
Apologies, back-plate found on the internet - please let us know if we can give a suitable photo credit.
2020-06-22 Paris under Lockdown
MT: I don't know quite why, but I've had Paris on my mind as a potential render destination for the RoadCar for a while - perhaps because I went there with Tom on a work trip a few years back and we had a really chilled time just walking the streets and enjoying the crowds. I found a lot of poignant photos of Paris under lockdown - deserted and missing it's people. It makes me sad, but at the same time it's a beautiful backdrop for our renders.
Apologies, back-plate found on the internet - please let us know if we can give a suitable photo credit.
2020-06-22 C'était un Rendez-Vous
Parisian streets bring back vivid memories of this staggering 70's film - so we felt it only appropriate to give our 904e an early morning blast around the city streets as a homage to the original movie . . . .
2020-06-29 Exit through the Gift Shop
As we pull this initial phase of the project to a close, we thought it fun to imagine doing some exclusive merchandise to promote our work.
In reality, there's no commercial plans whatsoever - but it'd still be cool for a concept project to have its own range of "Designer" T-shirts!
MT: I'll take an A, a B and an F in XL, please . . . I'm pretty sure I've put on a few extra pounds during Lockdown, so wanna go for a looser fit!
