Miroslav Dimitrov, who seems to be already a regular contributor here (big thanks for that, MIro), has decided to share another tutorial with you, this time a render process from his Dacia 2012 concept. In his own words: “Here I decided to post a tutorial that might be useful for some guys. For others – might be just a reference of how another designer works. I tried to explain in 7 steps the creation of a rendering of mine I did for one presentation. Hope it is useful to you!”

01 – The first thing first – the drawing we’re going to colour in Photoshop. I already had a sketch of the front ¾ of the car which actually I was going to render. Then I spent 5 minutes sketching on the new layer the front of the vehicle. It is not so necessarily to be very detailed and precise, because we’re going to put a lot of things on top of it. Just make a decent sketch of your design.

02 – Make a new layer. Use the paint bucket tool or the big brush to fill up the whole sketch with dense colour. I used 100% black colour for this, then turned the opacity of the layer down to 40-50%. Depends on the method you use, sometimes you have to clean up with the erase tool around the outlines of our sketch.
You can do the same thing with the interior for example, or the inside of the grill and some shadows casted from the car. Try to place all these shades in separate layers, so when you need, you can play with the opacity of each one of them. After that, we’re going to put all the shadows and highlights forming the car on top of these layers.

03 – Now the fun begins! The bigger the volume, the bigger the brush :)
However, before that you must consider the direction of the light source too. In this case the light source was from the left.
Use the airbrush to spray over the body. Do it bravely with no big concern, just be conscious about the shapes and the highlights you put and try to follow your design.
Don’t forget to keep your rendering clean, it will help you see your design while working on it!

04 – We continue applying shadows and highlights to the render. That’s the mid-stage of the rendering. One by one we pay attention to the smaller details of the car. Don’t be worried if sometimes doesn’t work from the first time. It happens to me too. Just play with the brush, the erase tool…with the opacity too. Continue building the render.
By the way, sometimes this is enough. Depending on your taste and the matter of your job, this is good enough to be already presented.

05 – We’re actually almost finished with the rendering. After finishing with the main highlights and reflections and so on, I spent few minutes with the fine brush for the small details – things like grooves, shut lines and small highlights on the edges.
Adding the asphalt on the bottom is not so important, in fact I lost a lot of time looking for the proper thing I need, because I was lazy to do It myself. Just having a proper shadow of the vehicle will be enough.

06 – Well, I decided to colour my car. I thought red is good one this time, so I coloured my car in red colour. Added few more reflections and details as can be seen on the bonnet and the windscreen. I just realised, that I have forgotten to paint the side mirrors, so I had to do that too.
I applied a texture to the headlights too….for fun.

07 – I had to present the rendering in A4 format. I opened a new document and imported the flattened image of the rendering I already did. Quickly pasted an image of a factory in the background and manipulated a little bit with it. A little bit of work with the brush…using the blue colour.

I lightened up few places of the rendering as a final touch to it.
The whole rendering took me about 1h and 30 minutes.