There isn't much i can say about this artist but the simple 3 letter "WOW"
I had to post some of his digital 3D artwork just for the fact that his work not only renders beauty and clarity, but also his vision and ideas are astounding.
His name is Neville Dsouza. For this piece below, which was composed in i believe 2006, a beautiful design of the Ford Focus WRC. He designed this 3D model in 3Ds Max, Metal Ray and finished up the touch up with Photoshop. Here is what he had to say about this work.

">> The How ...
< Modeling >
It took at least 8 - 14 months to finish this model, mainly due to my laziness... plus, at one point i completely stopped everything, so after a gap of 4 months, i continued with the modeling process again...
I used subdivision polymodeling ... no nurbs at all! ...
lots of edge extrusions, chamfering, outlining, insets, subdividing etc ...
It was tough, but worth the effort! i was really scared when it came to detaching the different parts of the car, i had to maintain the design 'flow' , i didn't want any blocky sections.
As you can see at the bottom of the pic, the polygon count is a freaked out 2236691 !
My graphic card took a good beating when it came to 505 objects, which is mainly because of the tyres; the nuts, bolts, caliper, disk brakes ( too bad they are not seen much )
The main shell cover of the car has a meshsmooth iteration of 3 !
There were a lot of problems during the modeling process, once the objects started to increase, so did the polygon count, then memory, then viewport display was slowing down, which of course my graphic card wouldnt be able to handle it all, so there was one life saving option... select the group of components that had a higher polygon count and check mark the
[ display as box ] option in the properties dialog...
I also started to 'categorize' the objects using layers ... this helped a great deal while modeling, i can hide completed components whenever i wanted to thereby saving a lot of memory while working on the new sections of the car.... very cool indeed! its just like using layers in photoshop and illustrator ...
< Materials >
The materials used here comprise of standard max shaders and mental ray.
for the outer shell of the model, rubber parts, tyres etc. standard shaders were used, but, for the glass objects like headlights, bulb, rearlights etc. mental ray glass physics phen was used.
As for the texturing, which is obviously the trickiest, painstaking task of all... i used good ol' texporter! very helpful plugin for max!
Now to mask all the decals ( sponsors, numbers, paint strips etc. ) i had to use the blend material. The map channel option was used extensively as well!
Below is a link giving a full description of how to use the blend material and channels to the maximum level!
A plus, even the modeling process is shown here... a Nissan R390 GT ...
http://www.enriconencini.com/tutorials.htm
very informative, but take time to understand it carefully, its worth it!
Another addition to the group is the ' composite map ' ... this too is equally important ...
> i'll update this post soon once i find the link...
< lighting >
The lighting setup used in this project is slightly different :
> Skylight : this light provided the overall Gi
> Free Area light : i specifically used 2 of these lights for ' speculars ' on the model with the diffuse option turned off, this helps when you only want to show that gloss or shine and you don't want the colours to be affected, in other words, washed out!
You will have to play around with the multiplier to check up on the gloss intensity, so... test renderings galore!
I even excluded the ground plane from illumination and shadow casting, plus i turned off cast shadows for headlights, bulbs and rearlights in the properties dialog.
> Lightplanes : these planes were used for the additional illumination and most importantly, reflections.
For this the glow lume shader fit the bill!
< Rendering >
All of you know, i'm a crazy person when it comes to mental ray! love the renderer to the core! maxwell comes a close second!, then V - ray ...
actually, this is just my personal opinion, in the end it all depends on how well you manipulate the renderer to the fullest.
As for the rendering of all the scenes, it was a major disaster! it took at least a week to finish it off!
Since my graphic card konked out... i had to bring my work to the institute and render the images...not to mention regular power cuts from 3:00pm - 6:00pm. But, somehow i managed ... correct me if i'm wrong, but, i think its best to collapse the entire modifier stack to improve rendering speed...
At 800 x 480 for each of the views, it took 4 - 6 hrs ... even more, depending on the camera angle and the materials used.
Also, without the settings for BSP, Map manager and memory limit , max would shut down immediately after hitting the render button! thanks to the high polygon count!
These options were very new to me in the initial stage, so i had to look it up in the reference file to see how i can render scenes with high polygon count.
>> The end ...
Even after experimenting with the settings, still the rendering would take very long. Which left me no other alternative but to render the entire scene in 'regions'
Yup! region rendering it is!
dividing the scene into 2 parts or 2 regions ... i finally got the rendering started!
Thats that!
The rest was the assembly of all the images and few corrections in photoshop..."

Labels: 3d model, 3ds, 3ds max, metal ray, Photoshop