Interview with Leon “majestic” Gaiazov

We have interviewed the winner of our competition “Car of Your Dream” with his work – 1999 Porsche GT. Enjoy!

Interview with Leon “majestic” Gaiazov
July 06, 2003 | Stryker

We have interviewed the winner of our competition "Car of Your Dream" with his work – 1999 Porsche GT. Enjoy!

Can we find out a little bit more about you? What’s your name, where are you from etc. =)

Leon: My name is Leon Gaiazov; I’m 17 living in Montreal, Canada. Originally I was born in Moscow, Russia.

Why do you choose to use the LightWave?

Leon: Because I have been using it for past 2 years to model. I’m not familiar with any other 3d packages. I feel most at home using Lightwave. I really like Maya but i’m not proficient in it. But someday i plan on learning it.

Why you choose to modeling 1999 Porsche GT3?

Click to view large image!

Leon: Well Porsches were always my favorite cars, and since the competition was to make a car of your dream, I chose to model a Porsche. I looked around for blueprints, and found prints of a 1999 GT3. And so I decided to model the GT3.

Tell about how you create the CG car.

Leon: The modeling is done using splines and sub-d. Modeling was pretty easy because I made cg cars before, so modeling was familiar.

When you create Porsche where you take blueprints? Tell about it.

Leon: I had a lot of reference – blueprints, photos etc. I also went downtown a few times looking for similar Porsches and took pictures of them with my digital camera. I even went to a Porsche dealer and took a lot of reference pictures, some of which I later used for texturing.

With what difficulties you collide at work above models more often?

Leon: The headlights were pretty hard to get to look realistic; I spent a lot of time on them. Also the materials were tricky to get right and still they aren’t perfect. Especially the ‘alloy’ material on the wheel rim – that took a lot of time, and still it could use a lot of tweaking.

How many has borrowed time for making the car and rendering?

Leon: 2 weeks, I didn’t know about the competition until May 15th, so I modeled for 2 weeks until June 1st. when the competition deadline was extended I have already submitted my car. I thought of making another entry, but gave up on the idea.

Do you have some tricks and what modeling technique did you use?

Leon: Probably the only trick I used was to make the tire treads. It’s very simple, first model one tire segment, and then clone it 40 or so times, to make one long tread. And then bend it 360 degrees. Originally I saw this technique used by Thomas Suurland on his new beetle, and I adopted the same technique. And to learn spline modeling in lightwave follow Lewis’s car tutorial on LWG3D.

Guide on image the cursor!

Your car looks very real! What was the light or renders configuration you have used looks like so realistic?

Leon: The light configuration was very simple – basic radiosity using white backdrop. I used an HDR map for car reflections but not for lighting because it increases render time. The HDR map I used was ‘beach_probe’ from Paul Debevec’s website. The car is composted onto the background, but the reflection map applied to the car doesn’t quite match the background, and that created a few problems. The materials were hard to make look realistic. The car paint material has a gradient applied on the reflection channel.

Our small award for a victory in competition "Car of Your Dream"

How you have picked up the background?

Leon: Well I have my digital camera, so I went around Montral with my camera and took a lot of various background pictures. Then I picked the best ones and used them.

You work at home or at office?

I work at home, and 3d modeling is my hobby.

Above what you will work now, your plans?
Leon: Well I’ll probably make another car, except this time I also want to try animating the car crash into something. I haven’t seen too many cg cars crashed, so it would be a fun thing to try. The car that I’m thinking of is a dodge viper… because I don’t really like vipers.

Thanks for dialogue and my congratulations!
Leon: Thank you Stryker, 3dm3.com, 3dvim, my family and all the people who voted for me!