Mercedes Benz W06 SSK 710 Black Prince 3D model

Mercedes-Benz Super Sport Kurz 710 W06 (custom bodywork) „Black Prince” high poly count mesh model

The model known as SSK was a based entirely on the W06 SS luxury models (these were true racecars coming in first in races like Le Mans 24 hour), the only difference was the wheelbase that was shorter. The car was built for uphill mountain races, but was used successfully in GP. Only a few SSK-s were built therefore it can be considered a rarity. All these cars had custom coachwork. At that time you had your car coming from the factory in a state depicted best by frame6b.png, this one was no exception, having a distinctive bodywork, built upon the request of Carlo Felice Trossi a GP racer, the most known owner of this piece. It resembles (intentionally) an airplane. The only remaining documents regarding the builder, gathered (and shared) by Paul Russell, point to a yet unknown coachbuilder Willie White. The hand drawing signed by this name shows a coupé. There is also a sketch from Trossi, showing a roadster. The true designer/builder may be still debatable. Trossi was a wealthy Italian having friends like Enzo Ferrari. He may have had gathered multiple excellent craftsmen for his “project”. The model is currently part of a private collection.

Technical specs: 7.1 litre inline 6 cylinder engine, equipped with an “elephant” blower. 2 seats roadster body

There was no independent suspension at that time, coil springs were not yet used in automobile production, hydraulics was not reliable, the first synchromesh manual gearboxes were yet to be invented (partly by Ferdinand Porsche who led the development of SS and SSK models). Driving this car requires experience and a good ear.

Properties of the 3d model

The model was created in blender 3d versions ranging from 7.8 to 8.2, the creation method was based on shrink-wrap modifier and all quads workflow. The number of objects is 380 that is corresponding to roughly 1000 individual parts.

The subdivision level of the parts in viewport is set to 2 in case of large elements like body panels, 1 for medium elements e.g. compressor, knockoffs, and 0 for small parts e.g. bolts and nuts. For renders the meshes have 1 additional subdivision level compared to viewports. The vertex count for the model in viewport is approximately 5000000 and 20000000 for renders.

Aside of a few minute parts all meshes are UV unwrapped, parts/objects are grouped in collections labeled with a color hex code (this codes the object color in basic viewport as well e.g. “chrome parts UV0000FF red” these parts are red when the viewport color is set to object), one such group is corresponding to one UV layout. In one UV collection/layout only meshes that are 100% identical (e.g. instances of each other) have overlapping UV islands. There are more than 20 such collections in the model file. The conversion of the different UV groups to one single non overlapping UDIM UV layout can be provided on request, but it is not included. All the parts are parented to an object called “carbox_main_parent”. Select the car through this object to move or rotate in the scene.

Armatures

Hood and trunk can be opened using the bent arrows (that are the main control bones). Before moving these parts make sure that the transform pivot point is set to median point, and the object interaction mode is set to pose mode (this can be done after selecting the control arrows), press R to rotate arrows and open the hood. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/introduction.html#header-region Front suspension, steering, and rear suspension is rigged for posing purposes. The front and rear suspension can be independently moved up and down or rotated around the main axis of the car press G to move and R to rotate (please note that from certain viewing angles the rotation may not work properly. Turning the large steering wheel ghost will steer the front wheels and rotate the real steering wheel (press R). Rotation and movement is constrained to the desired rotation axis. The hood trunk and steering is animated. Frame 1 shows basic state, from the 3rd frame steering sets in motion from frame 30 hoods and trunk opens. Move the cursor on the timeline at the bottom of the “Layout” menu to actuate.

Materials and textures

Materials and textures are created in blender, with some exceptions that are photographs taken by the author. For the majority of materials the textures are baked to raster image files. Some of the materials are performing best in their native procedural form (leather for example), therefore the procedural generator is provided to the end user. The node trees of procedural materials are built around a principled BSDF node, theoretically they can be assembled in other PBR render engines having a node editor, with similar results. The node trees are arranged to clean formats to promote readability. Although the presented vehicle is originally painted to glossy black, a semi procedural generator that is capable of generating advanced metallic paintworks also with sparkles is provided, with 4 initial setups (one is the glossy black of the original model). There are 100+ texture image files included with the model. The materials are optimised for both eevee and cycles render engines. To change settings of the car paint generator go to “Shading” window (top). In the viewport select a car body element (e.g. fender). The material node editor with the car paint node tree shall pop up in the bottom window. Go to the upper leftmost part of the material node tree where a value input node lies asking for an imput that is an integer between 0 and 3. 0 stands for the original black paint (default setting), the other integers are different presets that can be adjusted by the RGB color inputs just under the main type selector. The car paint material node uses some baked maps. For example a combined mesh map baked to the body UV it is an RGB image where the red channel contains the pointiness, green is the ambient occlusion and blue is the dirt map, there is also a dedicated sheen map baked to the model. The sheen map mimics the dust collected on the surface.

About Blender 3d

Blender is a completely free GNU licensed 3d creation suite with a multitude of functions including modeling, rigging, texturing, 3d and 2d animation, texturing, rendering, texture painting, sculpting etc. To download blender, visit blender.org it takes only a few minutes.

Hardware recommendations

The hardware recommendation of this model (for optimal performance in EEVEE) is as follows: 32 GB DDR4, GPU: at least 4 GB RAM, processor: Late generation gaming processors, on board SSD for quicker loading. The recommendations are based on blender 3D related online resources.

Please note that the model is not 3d printable in its current form.