Vinny has been posting samples of his work for some time now, and the sheer volume of objects he has been able to turn out is staggering! Here you can see just a small sample of vehicles out of the many he has created - the quantity he can produce just shows how quick the process is!

The technique can be used for characters as well as for cars. Vinny still adheres to the principle of low poly, working to get polygon counts down as low as possible. He does the poly count for the triangulated mesh, even, to ensure the exported mesh has maximum compatibility. In this image you can see some low poly characters, looking almost like a scene out of a Monty Python movie.

All good things have a beginning, and in this instance it is good quality photos of your object. One important point that Vinny pointed out - if you can see the sun in the picture, don't take the picture. Overcast days at midday, or early morning / late evening are best, to avoid direct highlights and harsh lighting. After all, the lighting will be done by the renderer at render time, so you want even lighting in your pictures.

The next step is laying those pictures out in one image, so that they can be applied to the object as a single texture. Vinny noted that he had a lot of trouble tracking down an image of the underside of a car! This was one picture he was not able to take himself, and he did track one down on the web finally.

The Vinny technique laid out in steps - it was great to see this followed live on the projector screen! Click for a larger version

1. Working in Solid plus Wireframe realtime rendering mode, start with the photo you took. Scale a plane so that it equals the proportions of your image (eg if your image is 512 x 350 pixels, your plane could be 5.12 x 3.5 in size inside trueSpace). Quad Divide the plane to give you some points to work with.

2. Make a copy of this divided plane, and set it to render just as wireframe, with no image showing. You can divide the plane more at this point if you like, I have gone with a 8 x 8 divide of the mesh in this instance. Raise the copy of the plane upward, so that it floats directly above the original plane.

3. Resize the new plane so that it matches the size of the vehicle in the picture. In the sample above I have moved the plane to the side so you can see it more clearly, but you would have it directly above the original plane, using a top down view to do the work here.

4. Now begin moving the vertices on your plane to match the contours and details of the photo. By working in Solid plus Wireframe mode, with the individual plane set to wireframe only, you can see the points as you move them, but still see the photo underneath on the reference plane.

Pay particular attention to having the lines in the plane lining up with natural breaks in the car. For example, with the door frames. By doing this, later you can select those faces and 'separate' them from the car to create a perfectly textured and fitting door.

5. Step 4 will leave you with extra faces on the mesh, such as around the windshield and inside the wheel wells. You may want to use the POLY DRAW tool to create 'smoother' wheel wells. Here I just used the quad mesh, which makes the wheel wells a bit 'crude' but keeps the poly count lower on the final model.

You can see here how the lines on the plane match up with details on the car, you can see the shapes for the windows and doors all laid out.

6. Now texture the plane you have made, using a Planar UV projection. My goal is to always use Planar UV projection - it is easy to work with and control. Scale and move the texture until it fits almost perfectly on the plane

At this point, I have also started to 'bevel' all the faces on the mesh, which gives me a nice simple 'curve' along the edges of the vehicle. You may want to bevel the faces first and then texture, but I like to texture, bevel, and then retexture.

When you bevel the plane, you can end up with an empty or missing face on the underside of the plane. Simply use the Add Face tool to fill in the gap if this happens!

7. Select that face on the underside (as we look at the mesh, not the underside of the car!), and then sweep. This is the face you will use the Mirror tool on, so try to make it about half the width of your final vehicle.

8. Of course, the texture on the car's underside (facing us in this view) is all distorted, since it is the side of the car applied to it. This is the stage where I start to paint all faces into groups. A group is made up of faces that are all basically flat in relation to each other - this lets me apply a separate Planar UV Projection onto each group.

9. After using the Mirror tool, I finish up painting the groups of faces, and here you can see the end result of my paint work! Each group is painted with a different color. This makes it easy to select all the faces in a group by holding Shift and using the Select Using Freehand tool, and then apply a Planar UV mapping to that group..

At this point you can tweak the car mesh, scaling the roof and other contour lines etc.

10. Now the UV mapping can be adjusted in the UV editor, to match up with the sections of the car in the texture map. Above you can see how this was done for the gameSpace Summer Shootout contest, with Second Runner-Up James Brand's model of a Mini. James used "the Vinny Technique" in creating his prize-winning entry.

The technique works for characters as well as for vehicles, though the modeling steps may be a little different! In this example, Vinny creates the detail on the figure, from the patterning on the muscles, to the veins, to the bones, by using texture maps and accompanying bump maps. The results are very effective to look at, and yet still very low poly.

Click the left image to see the figure in more detail, and the right image to see the bump map used for the face.

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