Thursday 14 April 2011

Car Modelling

In the first part of the module I have modelled a car wheel as I did not have enough time to make a whole car itself. My animation requires the whole car. Therefore, as promised I made my own model of car body. It turned out very well and I am very pleased with the overall result. It took me more time then I expected and as the time went by i decided to leave this model at present stage and exluded some car detail, like working lights, door handle and hood exhaust. As my animation will be dynamic and fast paced it still should work well and not distract the viewer of missing details.

The beggining was as usual, I set up a reference planes with blueprints in 3d MAx and found some photo reference from the internet. Photo references have been very useful. When model became more complicated I only relied on them, because blueprints did not actually matched each other in different viewports.

I decided to model the car polygon by polygon. First started with front wheel arc by creating simple plane. It was converted to editable poly and the modelling took part. The plane was sliced and the edges were shift dragged to match a wheel arc. the shape to the arc was given by moving vertixes in top viewport. Second part include creation of front body. I used same principle of selecting edges and dragging them along. Using edge selection methods,"loop" and "ring", I continued to move edges to match the blueprints. Some of the vertices had to be welded to connect side car polygons with top polygons. The rest of the body was created using same methods as mentioned above. The car roof was made by exrtuding polygons in editable poly. At some point the soft selection tool was used to move vertices in order to make a more organic shape and curves. Basically I have tried to match my edges with the parts of the body where following shaping and curving were suppose to take over. Offcourse, the symmetry was used to create the second identical half of the model.







After the basic shape of car was created i started to shape and add detail to my car. To immitate the feeling that car body was made of different parts I have chamefered some of the edges and then extruded new polygons to the inside of the model. The meshsmooth have been used to remove sharp edges and make them smooth. Therefore, some of the edges that were suppose to be sharp required more chamfering. Also to shape the car I had to connect some of the edges.



After the final car curves and polygons for separate parts have been prepared it was time to detach the polygons. Side window, window rims and lights have been detached as new objects in editable poly section and then applied with symmetry for the other side of car. With the symmetry modifier turned on the car body, new editable poly modifer have been applied and I started selecting polygons for detaching front windows, their rims, back plate and front grill.






The original grill that i made from my detached polygons did not satisfied me. Therefore i create new box primitve, gave it enough segments for each side. Then box have been converted to editable poly and after connecting more edges for the gril shape I extruted unwanted polygons and finnally deleted them.
Window bits were applied with materials. The lights were given a box shape. Couple of hemispehres have been created for the front light as it used transparent material. The number plate was grouped together with text which was created as shape and converted to editable poly to extrude polygons in order to create a little depth. The wheel arc edges were selected and shift dragged to make the inside part for wheels. After this I created new polygons to cover the inside of arc. Finally using border sub-selection i selected bottom border and closed it using cap option.





Here is materials that was used for the car. Body material shader parameter was changed to multi-layer to make two different highlights for car body. Then in maps sub-windows the reflection was picked and amount set to 20. The raytrace map was chosen for the reflection map.
Mirror object has two polygons ID's. One is for mirror and other for the body part. This is different approach for applying materials to objects as you do not need detach polygons and have different objects, but can apply different materials to different polygon ID's.









Reference images:
Blueprints http://carblueprints.info/eng/view/aston_martin/aston-martin-vanquish-2006
images http://www.cars.com/aston-martin/v12-vanquish/2004/pictures/

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