I always wanted to create one of these low riders and the motivation kicked in after watching a clip from Ice Cube, called “Chrome and Paint” . A couple of days later, the model was created . I managed to find a high poly model of a Chevrolet Impala from an older project and I created a low poly version , made by 17.000 polygons, without the wheels. Once everything was done, I created the textures but if you scroll down a little bit, you will find out the entire process
Impala 1965 – Lowrider theme – BREAKDOWN
As mentioned, I already had the high poly model which was provided by a client a long time ago. I made the retopology using 3D coat. I made only half of the car except that part which is under the windshield. That parts is not symmetryc because it has some small details that holds the windshield whipers
Since I didn’t planned to put any text on the car, I made it symmetrical / mirrored. Also, being symmetrical, it won’t be necessary to create a very high rezolution texture to look good.
I split the model in 3 textures : car’s body , car’s parts (bumper, frames, etc) and interior
Below you have the model unwrapped :
Once the model was unwrapped, I imported the model into substance painter and baked the textures :
I used the orthographic view to take some screenshots of the car’s body :
I used these images to have the right proportions of the template. I imported the images into Photoshop and used the as guide to create the template. I drew the base lines using a graphic tablet but can create them using the pen tool. Its pretty easy, you just need to find some inspiration.
The next step was to project them on the car. Again, I used the orthographic layer to project them on the car but before doing it, I duplicated the base color of the car (a metallic paint shader) and used a different color. I projected all the lines and duplicate this layer several times and each one had a different color and a different roughness/metallic setting. This was, you will have a higher range of reflections on the car.
Then, mask different parts of each layer to make the base lines different colours.
For the final step, I projected the gradients on the car and I also applied some glitter on different parts of the car.
I hope you find this useful if you are planning to create something similar. I always loved to share knowledge.