Headlight material tutorial

by Daniel Buck
www.danielbuck.net

I will make this tutorial some what shorter, because I don't see a whole lot that needs to be covered. If you are having trouble and need me to expand on anything, contact me!

First off, I will assume that you already have a headlight modeled, it can be square, round, or even "new" shaped :-)

Notice how I have the inside of the headlight NOT smoothed, this will play well for reflections. I have moved the lens away from the headlight to show the inside. I have also detached the inside so I can make it a different material, or you can use a multi sub material if you wish.

Place a chrome material on the inside of the headlight and the light bulb. For chrome, create a raytrace material and set the reflection at 100, that will be all for the inside material, no falloff or anything. For the outside case, use what ever material fits your car.

For the lens, I'm going to use a ray trace material, and put a picture of a headlight for the diffuse slot. For reflection, use a fresnel falloff with the default settings there. You will need to apply a UVW map to the lens, I chose planer. For the headlight picture, I take a picture with a digital camera at as high res as possible, this is about 1/3 the original size, but will work fine. You only need a super high res texture for a super high res final render if it's going to be printed or something.

You may need to put the tiling to .9 and .9 to get the image to look good with no border. (the metal strip around the glass)

With the image on the lens, set the transparency of the material from 50-70, what ever looks best. Copy the diffuse image to the bump map slot leaving the bump amount at 30. (you may also use a different image, or create a bump map) Also copy it to the luminosity slot if you want the headlight to look like it's on in darker scenes.

Render it out and see what you have! As always, mess with the settings to get the light to look just the way you want, every situation calls for a slightly different material, so tweak away! Some situations look better with more/less transparency, more/less reflection, and so on. There aren’t many hard set rules in art! :-)

This shot is a bad render, and do you know why? The background was set to black, that's why. With ray trace reflections/refractions, "you only get what you got". If you don't got a background (or a scene), you don't get good reflections. :-)

For better examples, feel free to browse around my 3d gallery, this technique was used for some of the headlights in there.