Lancia Delta S4

Lancia Delta S4

This is a project I poured my heart into, with skills in modeling, texturing, animating, programming, and, most importantly, look-developing. As a 3D artist and rally enthusiast, I take this project as a chance to bring the iconic Lancia Delta S4 into Unreal Engine. A legendary vehicle with insane horsepower, which marks the end of Group B with a tragic accident in Monte Carlo.
The project includes the appearance of the vehicle and details of the engine and the environment with a short rally track to represent the icy track in Monte Carlo with a cloudy and foggy atmosphere. 

Lancia Delta S4 - Exterior

The vehicle is set to undergo a heavy blizzard during a rally stage. With the snow and mud that mixed and cumulated on the surface, all the snow stains on the car are slightly darker than the regular snow.  Additionally, the car is covered with snow crystals all over the place to bring convincing details.

Some art treatments, including having the opacity depth on the windshield, bring a smooth and subtle transition in blocking the interior components.

Using the Fresnel mask improves the surface reflection to have more dynamics. The additional bump details are added to create the bumpy clearcoat surface, which matches the imperfect finishing in real life.

Due to the limitation of Lumen lighting in Unreal, the thin translucent material won't work with Global Illumination perfectly in calculating the real-time AO, which results in inaccurate self-reflection. The solution I applied was to mask the leaking reflection area by darkening the color and reducing the specular value. 

A mask that goes into refraction is used to have the refraction details withing the headlight lens.

Lancia Delta S4 - Engine Bay

Lancia Delta S4 has an open engine bay where all the components are exposed, including the engine part, the Abarth Volumex supercharger, the Triflux, and all the other onboard systems. These are the iconic components that need to be displayed.

This is the most complicated part since those components must be modeled accurately and put together correctly. Most components are not angled straight, especially the engine, which has an angle that requires several mesh reworks to fit into place. 

Those details add the total mesh faces to 353208 triangles, excluding the spline meshes.

Lancia Delta S4 - Engine

The engine part displays the iconic Triflux design of the engine body, intake manifold, exhaust, Volumex Supercharger, rear transmission, and partial exhaust manifold. 

The textures for the engine are done in 2 high-resolution UV sheets and 2 others for small details. The 3D model is optimized to 125380 triangles to reduce the consumption of rendering performance.

With limited references, it is challenging to select and combine hundreds of different modifications, redesigns, and refurbishments by various engineers since the 80s, which appear in different uses of materials, processing techniques, wiring, and piping.

A spline function is created to add and adjust wire and cable so I can easily manage them. There are 2 trimsheets for wires with many material instances. They have different editable scales, colors, roughness, and bump intensity to add variety.

The spline function allows me to manage wires and adjust their paths and radiuses. It also allows me to change the mesh of the connector and plug.

Lancia Delta S4 - Environment

The environment is heavily inspired by the rally stages from Monte Carlo in Monaco with a combination of the winter in Finland, which are both the famous rally stages. The track is generated from an editable spline. As a layer of the landscape, the track can interact with landscape meshes and make the landscape deform to match the spline.

Using the world normal and world position offset, the snow material can have a similar effect as it is cumulated on top of the surface. By making this material as a material function, it can be applied as a node in other materials such as trees and rocks.

Particles are done in the Niagara system with two types of particle effects: the heavy snow dust and the mix of light and vaporized snow due to the tire's heavy scratching. 

The heavy snow is thrown at a high initial speed and falls quickly due to its heavy mass, which causes this type of particle to have a relatively short lifetime. Instead, the vaporized snow stays in the air and floats with a much gentle movement.

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