Car Project - WIP

Currently working on getting this car model done for my reel. I'm actually working off a tutorial provided by Thierry which is pretty in depth and will eventually cover the interior of the vehicle as well (it's a Lamborghini something or other). Following any kind of video tutorial is always a painstainkly slow and arduous process for me personally but in the space of two weeks I already feel like my overall modelling/workflow competency has improved - for example i'm barely using the toolbar now (pretty much everything done through the various ctrl-click/shft-click/space hot boxes) which speeds things up massively.

The actual modelling process isn't as complicated as you may think. This method uses a nurbs/polygon hybrid workflow that I will try to document below.

First off you start with setting up your image planes. The only issue here is switching between the front/rear image planes of the car since you only have one projection on Z by default .The way round this is to create a new orthographic camera, align it along Z accordingly and assign a new image plane to it. You can of course do the usual thing of panels>orthographic>'select view' every time you want to switch between both views but that's a kinda long especially if you're constantly having to switch image planes. So the shortcut for this is to use a bit of mel script to do this for you. Here it is:

------

if ( (`modelPanel -q -cam modelPanel3` ) =="rear")
{
modelPanel -e -cam front modelPanel3;
setAttr front.visibility 1;
setAttr rear.visibility 0;
}
else
{
modelPanel -e -cam rear modelPanel3;
setAttr front.visibility 0;
setAttr rear.visibility 1;
};

---------

The above will only work if you name your new camera 'rear' obviously. This code is basically saying that if rear cam is currently projecting (i.e. visible) then switch to 'front' cam etc. Everytim you run this it will cycle. You can copy this code to your toolbar for a quick MEL switchable button. In fairness this is not essential but may help some of you.

Anyway, once that's done you start by creating a curve network of the vehicle using the contours from the images as a guide like so. So all the panel outlines, rims and depth need to be drawn out. You should end up with a 3d nurbs curve representation of the car itself.












For the more longer, flowing curves it's best to use CV curves so you get more control over the CV placement. For most other lines, a 3 Cubic EP curve (which defaults to 4 evenly spaced CV's between 2 points) is sufficient. Obviously every time you lay down a curve you'll need to switch between your four orthographic view to allign your curves properly in terms of depth etc. Once you get one curve down the rest are just a matter of snapping to the previous one (C - middle click) and continuing the network. It's not absolutely necessary that all your curves are connected but will help massively down the line. The more accurate your curve network is the more efficient the modeling process becomes later on. It's a good idea hit 3 to smooth out your curves before you adjust them as well for a better representation of what they actually look like.

Once your curve network is complete it's just a case of using the 'create polygon tool ' (deselect anything in the viewport, shift-click, top option) and snapping your first 4 sided polygon to the curves by using curve snap. From there you just need to use the 'append to polygon tool' (object mode> shift-click> right option) to create additional faces to block out the area you need. In some cases, i.e the roof of the car below, you can block out the whole area with one polygon and add use edge loops/split poly to add detail. Once you have those extra vertices it's just a matter of snapping those to your pre-existing curve network to get the form you need:














Snap the edges of panels to one-another for more accurate alignment, and extrude edges inwards to give a sense of depth. Beveling edges helps with the roundness as well.














Progress thus far:














Long way to go yet. Hopefully will be done in 2 weeks or so. Planning to get a few shots out of it, and definitely some kind of composition, maybe onto some footage, but after the last stint with Dan's camera the idea does actually scare me.

Anyway, hopefully this will have been of use to some of you. I'll check back with some more WIP pics in a few days.

-P