Speed Racer Wallpaper

I am a huge fan of the Speed Racer movie. I think it is a great combination of real and practical effects that pulls at your emotions visually. Not only are the visual effects very good, but Speed Racer's car is iconic, simple yet striking, like it's cutting through the air when it's not even moving. I wanted to make an instructable about his Mach 6 car, it's the car he wins the Grand Prix in, and a very stunning.

For my render, I used the 3D software Blender for all the texturing, modelling. and Rendering. I used Adobe Illustrator to remake the Mach 6 Logo. Then I used Photoshop for the final colour grade.

I actually had some trouble finding a reference to the Mach 6 specifically; I found plenty of the Mach 5, however. But in the movie, the Mach 6 is the car that is driven in the Grand Prix. So I screen-recorded the final race of the movie and took it into Blender's editor sequencer. Then went frame by frame and screenshotted as many angles of the car as I could. This was actually enough to get a really good template of the car.

With all my references, I was able to make a blueprint of the car. To do this, I took an image showing each side of the car with as little distortion as possible. If there is too much distortion, and one side of the car is bigger than the other, that could affect the accuracy of the model. Then I scaled and aligned all the images so they are all accurate from whatever angle I look at them from.

Since the Mach 6 is very curvy, I used the spline method of modelling, which consists of using the reference blueprints to trace out the outline of the car with a spline. Then, switching angles and adding the line on that specific axis. If you do this with every angle and with enough lines. You can make a pretty solid outline of any object; all you really have to do is connect the lines together with faces. This is also trial and error; every time you connect lines together, you have to add or remove vertices, and shift them around while constantly looking at the reference to match them as closely as possible. It can be tedious and takes a lot of time, especially depending on how accurate you want it to be. One thing I learned while doing this is to imagine how hard it must have been for the original designer. They didn't have a reference for exactly what they wanted to make; it was all up to interpretation and creativity. Try to use that as motivation.

The Tire was a very similar process; I tried as best I could, but this became more up to interpretation because there were not as many clear shots of the tire and its rims. The tire itself was actually quite easy, Blender have a very versatile spin too, which can rotate the vertices of an object around its origin. This lets me make an outline of the tire, then spin it into a circle.

The textures are pretty simple. For the car paint, I adjusted the basic principled BSDF texture node until I got the look I like. Similar for the tire. I knew I wanted to go for a mostly pristine look, like the car has just been made and driven onto the race track. But I also added some surface imperfections using noise textures, which just give a little depth to materials to make them look a bit more realistic. Since I ended up really close to the Mach 6 Logo, I wanted to make sure you couldn't see any pixels. So I remade the logo in Illustrator. If you dont have Illustrator, you could do this in Blender. It just might not look as crisp. For the Yokohama and ADVAN logos, I just got away with saving the SVGs from their websites. Might as well save time where you can.

Before you render, you need to light your scene, but before you light your scene, you need to decide on your camera angle and what you will see in the final image. I modelled the whole car, but I really liked this close-up camera angle showing just the tire and the Mach 6 logo. Also, I wasn't able to model the interior of the car due to time constraints. So I played with the camera and lens for a while and played with the focal length. You want to try and see as much as possible while being close enough to see as many details as you can. I had spent quite a lot of time modelling the tire suspension, so I knew I could get quite close. Also, the low angle will let me get some nice reflections against the ground.

For the lighting, I knew I wanted a red glow shining against the red of the suspension, almost like the rear brake lights were lighting it. Eve thought those lights would be shining back and not making direct contact from the angle they are positioned physically. That's another thing, you want to utilize the lights that would be in your scene to your advantage, like if my camera angle was showing the front of the car, I would find a way to use the front lights to contrast well with the environment of the silhouette of the vehicle. I also wanted to highlight the Mach 6 logo and the curve of the car, so I put a light in the top left and bottom of the frame.

For the rendering, I used the Blender Cycles render engine. For a free engine, you can get some amazing results with it. But Blender is not perfect, so I usually always take my images into Photoshop to give them some final colour adjustments. I am not the best image editor, so I open the camera RAW filter for the image and adjust it with the sliders until I get an image I like.

I am super happy with the final image. I think it's a great desktop wallpaper, or even something you could print out as a poster and put up in your room if you were a really big fan of Speed Racer. I plan to continue modelling and texturing the rest of the vehicle and releasing it online for anyone to use. But for now, this simple composition of the tire and side pannelling will have to do.