Photoreal Automotive Shading and Lighting 2025
This live and online course will teach you how to create textures, shaders, build environments and light and render photoreal vehicles.
Learn how to prep, texture, shade and light photoreal vehicles
Photoreal Automotive Shading and Lighting is is an on-demand course where we will teach you how to prep, texture, light and render a photoreal vehicle under different setups.
We’ll start by prepping our vehicle before moving into the texturing and shading process. Here we will create a series of car paints, leathers, veneers, metals, plastics and other shaders. Following on from this, we’ll create a full CG studio setup and cover the process of rendering out multiple elements that we’ll then be able to push in post.
We will then look at creating a full CG environment setup and lastly, we’ll cover the process of creating a setup using a HDRI and backplate.
We’ll be presenting this course in Maya, however, you will be able to follow along in any other application as all the concepts for the setups will be compatible for any app that is PBR-based.
Students who enrol on the course will also have access to our on-demand course, Introduction to Maya 1001, to ensure you are ready for the course from the offset, and thanks to the extremely talented Clément Feuillet, the course comes provided with his highly detailed Honda NSX-R model, complete with production quality UVs and texture maps for the tires and the rear lamps.
We are also happy to have HKV Studios support us on the course and they’ll provide enrolled students with a whopping 40% discount for any vehicle from their site. We ourselves for this course will be using assets from the HKV Studios Library.
Understand how to render photoreal vehicles under different lighting setups
Industry partners
Lessons in this course
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Week 06. Lighting your Vehicle in a Studio - Exterior
In this lesson, we'll first create a series of 'Hero' exterior cameras and then focus on lighting an exterior shot within our studio environment. We'll look at using a combination of direct and indirect lighting techniques to bring out the shape of the vehicle and the material qualities. We'll also create custom light rigs for parts of the car, such as the wheels and headlights. -
Week 08. Creating a Full CG Interior Environment
With our studio shoot complete, let's create an alternative interior environment. We'll start by once again gathering reference of a real-world location and then we'll use that reference as the basis for our digital environment, which will include modelling and UVing, texturing and shading our environment. -
Week 10. Capturing Real-World Lighting and External Environment Data
Let's now get a little creative and light our vehicle within our full CG environment. We'll use the basis of the environment to influence our lighting but then we'll push the setups to bring out the core design lines of the vehicle. -
Week 12. Finalising your Renders and Post-Production
Up to this stage, we've created renders within a studio environment, a full CG internal environment, and an exterior environment with a backplate. Let's now take our renders and look how we can push the believability using tools such as Photoshop and Nuke. We'll also look at working with AOVs, render passes and creating additional custom light rigs for specific regions of the vehicle.
Course Fee: £399.99
Format: Video on-demand
