Night Rider

Abstract

The scene captures classic JDM aesthetics infused with a dark, underground mood and vivid neon accents. A timeless Toyota Supra MKIV is parked before an abandoned-looking building glowing with neon signage. The rain-soaked asphalt and drifting fog deepen the atmosphere, amplifying the contrast between the sleek, modern car and the decaying downtown surroundings.

Inspiration

The inspiration for this scene comes from a combination of my personal interests and various artistic influences.
The Japanese Domestic car Market of the 90s has always fascinated me, especially the Toyota Supra MKIV, which is an iconic car known for its performance and design.
Furthermore the cyberpunk neon lights aesthetics have naturally appealed to me, as a perfect showcase of reflective materials and vibrant colors in a dark environment, perfectly fitting for a path traced render.
Finally, the downtown urban setting with wet asphalt and foggy atmosphere is inspired by phonk culture originally derived from 90s Memphis rap scene, which often features dark and moody cityscapes in its visual representations.

Below are some of the inspiration images that influenced the creation of this scene.

Modeling

The modeling of the scene has taken the same if not more time than the feature implementation part. Every object outlined on the above image has been modeled from scratch in Blender. The non-outlined objects are 3D assets taken from BlenderKit. See credits for more information on particular assets.

Car

The car has been by far the most time consuming part to model. It has been modeled completely from scratch by following the blueprint references and an amazing free series of tutorials on car modeling.

The main focus has been to closely follow the blueprint references while modeling the main parts. The smaller details has been modeled later and only in the visible areas. The smoothness of the model is achieved by a subdivision surface modifier.

Below are some screenshots for the intermediate steps of the car modeling process:

Wet Asphalt

Modeling the wet asphalt is a completely different challenge compared to the car. It involves creating realistic material properties and textures to simulate wetness, roughness and reflectivity. The material is highly inspired by the following tutorial.

By combining different roughness maps with normal maps that represent the surface details, a realistic wet asphalt material is achieved.

Furthermore, as the texture is procedurally generated, one needs to bake it to a texture map to export to Lightwave. The most challenging part turned out to bake the normal map correctly. Although, this part was tricky to figure out, the normals have tremendously improved the realism of the asphalt, more on that in the feature section.

Progression

To further appreciate the efforts put into the modeling process, here are some old versions of the scene demonstrating the evolution of the design.

Features

This section covers the implemented features. And how the scene evolves with each added feature.

final

no features

Rendering

As there are number of features implemented, they are divided into two sections of rendering and postprocessing. The first part does not include any postprocessing techniques, so enjoy the raw and noisy render outputs. Also for the sake of simplicity, the volume is removed for such renders.

Area Lights

Adding area lights to the scene drastically improves the light spread throughout the scene, while also reducing the noise. The area lights have a completely different logic during path tracing comparing to the emissive objects. While emissive objects are just randomly hit by rays, area lights are sampled directly during every bounce.
See the implementation in src/lights/areaLight.cpp as well as the sampling of main shapes under src/shapes/.
In addition, the path tracer has been modified to make area lights visible on the first hit src/integrators/pathtracer.cpp

area lights

emissive only

Normal Mapping

The normal map is a simple yet extremely effective feature to implement. It allows to use custom shading normals to mimic the surface details without adding extra geometry. The main difficulty encountered with this feature was not related to the implementation itself, but rather to baking the normal map correctly.
See the implementation in src/core/instance.cpp

Take a closer look at how the wet asphalt turns from a smooth mirror plane into a well-defined concrete material with water puddles.

with

without

Clearcoat Material

Taking into account that the main object of the scene is the car, a decent car material is very important. The implemented clearcoat material combines properties of a diffuse and a smooth dielectric materials making it a simple yet effective car paint model. The main difficulty was to get the right balance between the color and reflectivity.
See the implementation in src/bsdfs/clearcoat.cpp

with

without

Volumetric

The constant homogenous volume is not to be treated as an additional feature (as it was implemented as part of the course).

However, for the sake of completeness, see how the scene changes with the presence of the fog, adding a darker atmosphere. The fog further highlights the area lights and neon signs, adding a better sense of depth to the scene.

fog

no fog

Postprocessing

Each postprocessing feature enormously boosts the quality of the final image. Let's look at them step by step.

Image Denoising

Even after 1024 samples per pixel, the image remains noisy, mainly due to the constant volume present throughout the scene, although the high amount of lights also contribute to this problem. Hence, an Open Image Denoise filter is applied to remove the leftover noise.
See the implementation in src/postprocesses/denoise.cpp

denoised

noisy

Bloom Effect

In order to highlight the extremely bright objects such as neon signs and the car's rear lights, a bloom effect is applied. It adds a glow around these bright areas, allowing the light to spill over adjacent areas, enhancing the overall visual appeal.

A typical bloom effect was not enough for the current scene, as it would not spread the light far enough, hence a downscaling technique was used to achieve the desired effect. This includes scaling down the image to multiple lower resolutions (1/2, 1/4, 1/8) before applying the bloom, then upscaling and blending it back to the original image.
See the implementation in src/postprocesses/bloom.cpp

with

without

ACES Tonemapping

Finally, due to presence of very bright light sources, a proper tone mapping is essential to ensure that details are preserved and the overall brightness is balanced. The ACES filmic tone mapping is a perfect fit to convert such high dynamic range images to a displayable format, while improving the contrasts between the different elements in the scene.
See the implementation in src/postprocesses/tonemap.cpp

with

without

Statistics

Resolution

2560 x 1440

Render Time

~ 11 hours

Samples per Pixel

1024

Light Sources

13 area lights
14 emissive objects

Hardware

Intel Core i7-11800H 16 GB RAM

Primitives

~ 400 k

Credits

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the tutor team that have significantly contributed to the success of this project, by pointing out mistakes and providing valuable advice. In particular, to my tutor Ben Dierks for frequent availability and useful feedback.

Blender Tutorials

car modeling
wet asphalt

Inspiration Images

Nissan - Ref 1
Supra - Ref 2

Assets

far building
near building
bus stop
sidewalk
neon light
cloudy hdri
rooftop night hdri

music

music platform

Website

Design: HTML5 UP
Template: Dimension

Fonts

Gotham - "Night"
Segoe Script - "Rider"
Electroharmonix - "sideways only"
Supra Logo

Other

clearcoat

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';