The big tire thread!!!

[liquidpope]

Hello, 'wavers.

Here's some tires I've been working on.
One is 32000 polys, the other 6200 polys. Both sub-patched. Everything I do is sub-patched, I think it's a sickness.
Anyway, I haven't thought about how to do the lettering yet... how would you guys do it? Maps, polys, both?
Anybody with any tire, modeled in any way or another, please post them here as a place to compare methods. I think it would be great to see alot of different techniques in one central location.
Post away!

[liquidpope]

A quick cheesy render. What do you think so far?
Am I just nutty for sub-patching these?

[Meaty]

Am I just nutty for sub-patching these?
That depends entirely on what type of horsepower your renderbox has =]

My opinion, lettering on tires should be done with a bump map. The "elevation" is so small that doing it with polys isn't worth the effort. Plus, its a helluva lot easier to manipulate and change after the fact.

[marble_sheep]

Hey, those look pretty nice. I've often wanted to use subpatches for building tire tread, because that's really the best way to accurately mimic a real tire's form. But I usually get lazy or run up against a deadline and end up using the "fake it" method of using frozen/smoothshifted polys :D

I second Meaty's opinion... definitely use bumps for the lettering. Done correctly, they hold up extremely well, even for close-ups.

Good work!

[lion111]

hi
i like this idea and i hope it will grow to a BIG tire
never did tires and the "how to", s..t would like to see more and learn something from it:)
greetings from poland

[liquidpope]

Thanks for posting, gents. I hope others will post their own tires soon.
I'll give the bump mapped lettering a go.
I think for a car tire I might model only the very outside of the tread and bump the inside tread. I tried that with the truck tire, but there wasn't a good place to make the transition, the tread blocks are to far apart.
Also, maybe I should sharpen the top edges of the tread blocks? The part that actually touches the road looks too round to me.

As for how they're made, I laid out points for the profile without the tread and lathed it. Then I modeled a rough single row of tread blocks across the width of the tire, and then did an array. Took some playing to get the number right. Once I got that, I had to re-array my tire profile so I had the same number of tire and tread polys, to match them up later. Refined the tread blocks and modeled them into a single tire section, deleted the tire parts that weren't attached to tread block, and did one final array.
Both were made the same way.
I'll post some screen grabs later tonight if anyones interested.

[flakester]

Sorry Pope, I have no tyres (sorry, in the UK!!) to post as a comparison.

Be rude not to comment thought!
Some darn nice bits'o'rubber there. I don't think the contact patch is too rounded at all, and the material is very, very, very close to being photorealistic in my opinion.

Be sure to post your lettering tryouts when you get a chance.

Good work, keep it up.

flakester

[theWOODman]

C'mon, be a man, freeze it, FREEZE IT!!
LOL, just kiddin

Looks pretty cool. I like doing tires and treads cause it can present a good challenge and the results are pretty cool. I'll eventually need to do the same thing on a project I'm working on with a custom Harley.

[hrgiger]

Hey Pinhead, don't listen to the rest of these non-believers! You've come this far with subpatching the tires, don't stop with the letters. Have you tried making the letters subpatch and seperate objects that just intersect the tires? Nothing says they have to be attached.

BTW, it's not a sickness to subpatch everything. It's a sickness to not.

[liquidpope]

Meaty - yes, bump mapping = easy changes. You can't beat that.
Can you imagine subpatching in a great looking bunch of text, spending 35 hours to blend it all together just right, and then at render time finding a typo? I would chew my own face off if I did that.

Marble - Thanks. Go on and give it a try. The first one I did took a really long time, but after doing that and learning as I went, the second went much faster. 10 hours vs. 45 minutes, roughly. Of course the tread pattern is FAR more simple on the 45 minute one...

Lion - I was hoping too for more posts. Would have been fun, and a great learning tool for everyone. We can all use new techniques.
And "Howdy" from the south US.

Flakester - Thank you. I hope to get to work on these again soon. I'm in the middle of some paying work ATM, but should be done in a few weeks. I'll keep this going as long as possible, and post more of my own tires if I have to.

WOODy - I'm scared to freeze them. (I freeze them, they freeze LW?)
Be sure to post your Harley tires. If I can be of any help, I'm here.

HR - I'm usually the first to say "BAH" to the nay-sayers, but I thought I'd get a feel for other options first.
I originally considered modeling the tread blocks separately and not actually connecting them to the tire, but then I wouldn't have that extra little groovy curve where the two meet. It would just be a sharp edge.
The lettering on real tires is always quite sharp, so I suppose it would "look right" that way. But that would go against the sublime sickness of subpatching, which of course I whole-heartedly embrace. So I don't know. One of my favorite things in LW is "things don't have to BE accurate, they only have to LOOK accurate". So I could go either way, I guess.

Either way I end up doing it, I'd still like to see others posting their tires here as a comparison of techniques.
Anybody? Hello? Is this thing on?

[Bog]

That's nice work alright! What's the polycount on those at rendertime?

Last time I made a tyre, I epitomised laziness. The "Bend" tool was involved. Then again, I don't drive - so tyres are something that mainly happens to other people.

What you coulllld do is poke the tyre wall surface out with a displacement map. It's a bit brute-force, and a bit crufty. At the very least, though, you could use that to give yourself a hint of guide geometry for putting in the subdiv text.

[art]

These are some good looking tires. Funny, I was just thinking about how one would approach surfacing a tire the other day when looking at real tires on my way home. I'm not planning on rendering tires, I think I'm getting this sickness; when you look at stuff in real word and you start thinking how to render that in LW.
Anyway, I think your tires look excellent from a modeling standpoint. I'm no surfacing expert whatsoever (total newbie in fact), the surface is good but I think that it could be improved further. I'd like to see some surfacing ideas in this thread also. It is supposed to be a tire thread after all

[Silkrooster]

LiquidPope,
Been awhile, Excellent looking tires. This would have been a cool project to test 9's displacement tests.:hey: Maybe with the lettering.:D
The last render, the texture looked flat to me. I wonder if it would help to add a negitive micro texture to it. After all rubber is very porus. If you bent rubber you would see holes in it. Color could be a little darker as well.
Then again maybe you were just showing the modeling and not the texturing? :o
Silk

[liquidpope]

Bog - I really like that "displacement map" as a guide idea. I could see that being amazingly handy for lots of other things as well. That's some dang-good thinking!
Poly count at render time is 32,000 times however many times you divide it. Actually, four times each subdivision. So the real answer is, way too many.

Art - these aren't textured at all, really. I added color and adjusted diffuse, gloss and spec levels, but that's all.
Good luck with the sickness. I hope you develop a raging case of it. You'll end up loving it.

Silk - Man, it has been too long. How ya been, pal?
I was only going for modeling here, so no textures yet. I had the 9 beta but didn't get much chance to play with it yet. The new nodal stuff looks like lots of fun, though. Looking forward to that.

[Bog]

You'd've got to it yourself in time. Just glad I could cut a corner off. :)

[Silkrooster]

While I was making that post it was almost an after thought, that maybe you didn't start texturing it yet. lol. Good to here from you anyways.
Silk