It was a long time I wanted to modelised a big amercan truck. I aready searched the web for photos or blueprints but not find anything very interesting. After a TV show about Australia which showed a road train I had the idea to start my search with this keywords. I discovered a nice web site with a lot of photos : TruckWEB.ca (in french). Then I choose the truck I will modelise. The criteria was obvously the look of the model and the easyness of modelising it only with CSG because I don't know and I don't like using modeling software. I choosed a Peterbilt 379.

At the beginning I was a little bit afraid by the complexicity of the model. After three ou four days of watching photos on the web and hesitations I started writing code. It was the 1st october and I did not think of submitting it to POVCOMP. When I said to a friend on IRC I started a new scene, he asked me if it was for the competition. I answered that it was to late. The 10 october the truck tractor was finished then I seriously began to think of submitting it to the competion. I needed an environment but I had no idea and I had not a lot of time to do something very complicated. Then I put the truck on a car-park and I surrounded it by a forest on hills. It give a nice result but maybe it needed more work.

At this time, I do not consider this scene as finished. I will make other views with a trailer.

How it was made

The truck modelisation is based on blueprints extract from a Peterbilt's pdf. I have two views : the face view and a side view. I maped this two views on thin boxes and I used orthographic cameras to align objects on them. The Truck is a large amount CSG. There is some complex transformations such as matrix with a rotate and another translate especialy for the bonnet and the windscreen.

The roofs are made of sphere_sweep. One on each side for the rounded edges. Then I needed an extrusion of this sphere_sweep to cover the entire roof. I used the same sphere_sweep, I scaled it with a very I value for the axe of extrusion and kept the part I needed with an intersection.

The tires are made of torus inside a difference with cylinders and 600 boxes for the sculptures. The first try of modeling this sculptures, it highly slowed down the render but ones I changed the camera for a global view of the scene, I realize that the render was reasonable.

The indicators are superelisoid. The rest is only made of spheres, cylinders, boxes, prismes and torus.

The grids are brick patterns. The metal lozenge pattern is a tile of scaled sphered rendered separatelly used as bump_map.

The terrain is an height_field based on the wrinkles pattern. I covered it with 53400 spruces created with PovTree using the trace() function. It is not the spruce provided as an example with PovTree. There is also 10000 grass patches from Gille Tran's makegrass macro between the car-park and the forest.

I added a media inside large sphere to make an atmosphere. It add depth to the environnement. The sky is a sky_sphere. I fought for finding nice colors.

Render time

This scene was made on a Athlon XP2600+ with 512Mo RAM DDR400 running Mandrake Linux 10.

1st pass : 6mn30s
2nd pass : 9h54mn