Open Sourcing

am coming along on my f1 car for the Blender f1 competition. I have most of the basic modeling done on the car itself, except for the wheels and cockpit. I'm now working on the materials. The green paint on the car is my first attempt at node based materials and I'm very pleased with it. The lighting is very simple in this image, but you get the picture. I still don't fully understand a lot of the node features, but I like the output! I also added a nice chrome material to the fin, with some grid lines and decals. I was going for something really subtle for the decals because I like the look of the big chrome fin.

I really want to concentrate on my composition for this challenge, so I thought a lot about the scene setup. I did a little photography composition research and decided on having the car framed by a garage door. This gives the car a natural frame in the picture, which is visibly appealing. I'll also have the car at a 3/4 length view on the right hand side of the door frame to abide by the rule of thirds. The picture below is a quick render of the scene setup.

And one with the car placed roughly where it should be

This last one shows a couple of material and textures. One of the common traits of most of the previous winners of the competition is that they all have great textures (and lighting, but that will come later), so I'm trying to concentrate a lot of time on this.

I also started to model the tire yesterday. This is a work in progress shot of the tire so far. I used an array modifier fit to a curve, rather than spin duping the tire. That way I didn't have to do a lot of calculations to try to get the size of each tread correct. The next step is doing the wheel and working on materials for everything.