• Mana

  almost 2 years ago

  Alright, so... where to even begin...

  Let's start with an up-front TL;DR — this .blend is a hot mess. Some things about it are five stars and other things are one star and there's no real middle ground with this asset.

  So, let's start with the good. What you see in the preview pictures on the product page is what you get: a highly detailed Bugatti Chiron model (although be aware the demo pictures have been post-processed, as is to be expected with any Blender render).

  Now, onto the bad. Speaking of the above-mentioned quality... it's achieved in the most horribly inefficient, brute-force way possible — the entire car and all those details you see in the demo pics? It's all done through modeling. 100% mesh and 0% textures. No Normal Maps or Bump Maps, etc. The result? The base car with no Subdivision Surface modifiers active clocks in at almost 10~ MILLION tris. Toggle on the Subsurf mods for the tires and grille mesh and the tri count ballons to over 30~ million. Even with my RTX 3090 and GPU-accelerated Subsurf calculations courtesy of newer versions of Blender, turning on the Subsurf in this .blend made my computer hang for a long, long while. I feel bad for anyone with a lower- to mid-end ring, as this would surely crash their computer (or, perish the thought, laptop). And, speaking of hanging, the chassis on this car has an active Decimate modifier that also takes forever to calculate, so when you first open the .blend, you'll have to sit through that as well. (I recommend turning it off immediately, myself.)

  So, you've got all these inefficient modeling details, but at least they look amazing, right? The problem is, a lot of them don't hold up on closer inspection, which isn't something you can tell from the demo pictures on this asset page. For example, those four little circle markings on the front of the chassis? Those are actually just rings that are... floating in space... out in front of the car... yeah. They look great from certain angles, sure, and create the illusion of accuracy, but you go to do a side-angle macro shot of the front of the car and the illusion falls apart. Same story for the side details on the tires; all that lettering you see is just mesh that's floating ever-so-slightly over top of the tire. You do a close-enough macro shot from the right (wrong?) angle and you can see the detailing floating over the tire and casting a shadow on it.

  So you've made it this far into my review, but you're thinking... maybe you still want to buy this asset and work with it, right? Polish it up and fix it yourself. After all, it does look good, and only $26. So you go over to the Outliner and *nothing* is labeled or organized. It's Object_001, Object_002, Object_003, etc. etc. ad nauseam all the way up to over Object Two Thousand and Thirty-Something. Over 2,000 unlabeled objects! And the unlabeled objects aren't even sorted — there's one collection for toggling on or off the objects used to convert the Bugatti into a no-rear-spoiler version, and then everything else is dumped into the other collection. The one thing on the car that is actually labeled, the tires, isn't even done so in a helpful manner: they're all labeled Front_Tire_Left.

  Okay, so you've read this far, and you *still* want to buy this anyway, because, like I said... it does look good right? Something else to keep in mind is the materials used on this car rely on a lot of fakery. For example, all the glass on this car is not glass at all, but just Glossy BSDF and Transparent BSDF nodes mixed together to create the illusion of glass. So you think to yourself, "no worries! I'll just slap down a Principled (or Glass) BSDF and dial in the IOR and problem solved!" Except the windshield and headlight covers aren't modeled realistically/accurately, so you can't do that, or else the results will look wildly inaccurate. Instead, you'll first need to make edits and improvements to the mesh of the windshield and headlight glass covers. Then you can actually make them into real glass that looks like how glass should look in Cycles.

  Setting aside the glass, the rest of the materials look decent enough, and, for all I know, maybe how they were set up was the best you could back in Blender 2.79, which is what this was released on. I've only been using Blender since 2.93. So I won't go into much detail or judgement here, except to say the material labeling is also lacking. Materials are labeled in a way that tells what the material is supposed to look like, but not its aesthetic goal. For example: "plastic." Plastic what, though? Trim, accent, interior, exterior? No idea; find out for yourself! Moreover, this .blend has multiple redundant copies of materials with identical values needlessly cluttering the file, almost as if the car were modeled in multiple, separate .blends and then everything was appended into a single file, creating duplicate material entries. Also, certain material assignments are sub-optimal — e.g., the black car paint shader is also the same material used on the tire rims, and the red car paint shader is re-used on the brake pads. Key parts of the car like that should have independent materials for fine-tuning the look of the vehicle.

  Alright, so... what else. And, yes, there's more. A lot of the objects in this .blend have a placeholder material assigned to them instead of an actual material. The most obvious objects are the passenger-side tires, which, coincidentally, you'll notice aren't visible in any demo shots. Once you've got that sorted, you'll also need to fix the *size* of the car. The vehicle in this .blend file is approximately *one hundred times* larger than real-world, accurate scale. But before you can do that, what you're going to need to do first is get everything parented to the control empty that allows you to move the vehicle around, because not all of the mesh is correctly parented. The control empty is simply labeled "Default" btw. Lastly, the underside of the car is un-modeled (not that I expected it to be), in case that's relevant to anything you might have in mind.

  So. I think that covers everything. In closing, my goal with this review is not to be harsh on the author. But I want this review to serve as a warning to any other potential would-be buyers. This car looks great, but please go into purchasing this asset with both eyes wide open. This is not a game-ready or animation-friendly asset. This is also not something you can simply buy and drop into a scene and hit F12. But with a lot of work and polish, you can make something great out of what's already here.

• 

  David Stingl

  almost 2 years ago

  Hi, I am sorry to hear that you are not satisfied with the model. As you stated, 1) its quite old, and 2) it's literally only $26, the price itself asks for a large tolerance in this category, and 3) the product page definitely did not describe or advertise any of the mentioned and it is absolutely a what you see is what you get, having even plain screenshots on the product description. So I am a little surprised to read this thorough review; for instance, I don't see how from the product page you expected details through baked textures..? among other your points. Most of what you are describing is indeed not ideal, on the other hand you would find such state even on models for hundreds of dollars. And yet you would receive the same or worse. I definitely did not describe this as a game-ready model as you mention at the end. There isn't enough space to respond to all of your points but if you would have contacted me with your dissatisfaction about the model, I would have offered you a refund, which you still can do if you are dissatisfied and don't have a use for this model. I hope you will be more satisfied with your future purchases on this platform.

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