Interior almost done

One of the most scary parts of the project has been done. I have some bad memories from last year when I had to Unwrap UVW for the interior of the Stiletto. I started with the steering wheel since the material are divided so that it makes selection easier. For some reason all the selection tools are not working with Unwrap UVW modifier.

What is unwrapping? It's telling the program how to map the textures and materials of the objects'. Imagine you had a piece of leather and a ball. If you had to wrap the leather around the ball you would have to make cuts to the leather somewhere, wouldn't you? It's the same thing basically. Click here for a short tutorial about the subject.

I took a couple photos in the Pick Nick car event (see last post) of car interiors. I used a photo of a leather of a Corvette seat and turned it into a tileable pattern in Photoshop. That would do the job for the diffuse map. Then I turned the diffuse map into a bump and glossiness map using curves and levels. Got to say the result is pretty neat. The base was Arch&Design material. For the brushed aluminium I used the Iray-material and tweaked the brushed aluminium preset a bit. I added a map into the reflection coating the make the brush strokes visible. You can see both the material in a closeup below.

I made the gauges a bit smaller and pushed them further back. They were a bit too much on-show like you see in this render.

Once I was happy with the interior (the roof of the interior still needs to be done) it was time to spend some time thinking how I would like the headlights to turn out. I took a render of the front and then rendered a couple different headlights with Photoshop. Got to say the second one is a bit too futuristic for a car with classy lines like this. Oh, and look a that front spoiler-thingy. It's gotten itself a carbon fibre cover.

Pics from Pick Nick added to the Photography section

Yesterday there was a huge event for American cars in Forssa. I added the best pics to the Photography section. Go check them out!

Interior coming along nicely

The making of the interior has been pleasant suprise! I was quite afraid of it at first since I had some trouble when making the interior for the Stiletto last year. I began by modeling the steering wheel. Again, lots of sketches were made and the one I was satisfied had some Photoshop to make a decent blueprint. The progress was very similiar to that I used modeling the rims. 

First I made the the torus (donut would just as accurate), then extruded and beveled the spokes. Symmetry was of course used so I only had to model half of the steering wheel. When making the steering wheel I noticed how useful the extrusion actually is since it keeps the mesh clean of triangles. The seats were modeled using boxes as basic shapes. Then quite a bit of beveling and chamfering were added to find the right shape. I also tried to add stiching to the steering wheel, and although it looked splendid it added quite a bit of extra geometry propably many would not notice. I doubt I will make any closeup renders of the interior when everything is finished.

Splines were suprisingly useful as well. The whole dashboard/floor was made by extruding a spline of the side profile. I saved probably 5 hours of work compared to the same part in the Stiletto.

A couple of renders to show off the progress.

I half-accidentally made a good way to make the gaps between body panels. Here is a quick tutorial.

1. Let's start with a simple sphere. I already converted this to Editable Poly and selected a ring of edges. When modeling a car these edges are the ones where you want to add a gap.

2. Add chamfer.

3. Bevel the faces inwards a couple of times with zero outline.

4. Bevel one more time. This time the outline should be larger than in the step 3.

5. Make a Multi/sub-object material with one material being pitch black. Easy way to make such is choosing Standard to start with and then taking colour and glossiness to zero.

6. Add the material to your object and choose the material ID of the highlighted polygons corresponding to your pitch black. This method works rather well with turbosmooth and doesn't force you to add open chamfers.

Most of the panel gaps in the car are modeled already. Here is a little closeup.

Chamfering - done

Well, almost done at least! I must say, even it took more than a week to smoothen the edges of surfaces, it all went better than expected. Sure the experience from working with Stiletto helped a lot. 

As you can see from the wires there was quite a bit geometry to add.

Here is some stuff I learned within the past week:

1) It's better to avoid triangles as much as possible. They don't mess up the mesh at first but after adding TurboSmooth the weird corners and bulges start to appear.
2) Using splines to make smooth surfaces might be a good idea to try. Like I've said earlier it took quite a bit of work to get the surfaces smooth and after chamfering I had those annoying wobbly reflections all over the place once again. I was able to fix this rather well by making a spline from the edges that run down the hood, deleting at least every other point of the spline and then, by using snaps, attaching all the verticles to that spline. Splines are much easier to make smoothly curved. I hope the picture below explains the idea.

3) Beforing chamfering the corners it's useful to add an Edit Poly -modifier to you modifier stack. This allow you to still make basic changes (moving vertexes) to your unchamfered model which has a lot less geometry and is thus easier to work with. 

In addition to chamfering the body I also modeled rims and tyres. There were many good tutorials but I followed this for the rims and this for the tires. I'm pretty happy with the rims. It took quite a bit of head scratching to find a design I was happy with. At first I drew different rims on paper and after that I made at least five different versions on Photoshop of the favorites. I had almost finished one rim type but, since it wasn't really pretty, I had to start all over again. The blueprints were made with Photoshop as well.

As you can see the materials and texturing still need work. I have made a little changes to the tyre after this render. It doesn't look like it's going to explode anymore like in the picture above.

Finally, a test render of how the thing looks like in blue. The material is a preset with small changes to the scale of the flakes. You can see there are some problems with the geometry in the trunk lid. The trunk looks a bit too soft and the highlight has an odd dark spot inside the register plate inset.

Tail light testing

Made a couple of photoshop renders to visualize what kind of taillights to make. There is four options at the moment but I can't say I'm completely happy with any of them. The first and the second versions look rather neat but there is still left to improve.

Not much else has happened since last post. I mainly have tried to make the surfaces less bumpy and also I made small changes to the front "splitter" inside the bumper. Oh, and maxScript is awesome. I made a quick tool to let me select smoothing groups faster and also buttons to freeze and unfreeze selections.

Rear end finished

Base body of the car is now complete and it's time to start adding details and cutting the body panels. I already made a diffuser and front splitter. Rims are drawn on a paper but require modeling.

I'm really loving the iRay. Arch&Design -material works fine but there was also an  Iray material to use. I downloaded iRay material from here. There are pretty neat setting such as creating CD-disc -like prism effect by applying different thin films on to a material. Also the presets for car paints seemed pretty good and render fast.

MaxScript seems interesting. I just watched a couple great tutorials from youtube. Now I just have to find a way to apply the things I learned. Making edge selection between two smooth groups would help since chamfering is propably the next part to be done.

Getting shape

Hey folks!

Managed to get something done from all the other projects. I've been making an Arduino project to control my curtains remotely but there has been some technical difficulties. The control itself works well but the mechanisms need a bit work. Enough of that, time to show you some progress.

As you can see, all the windows are in place and so is pretty much the whole side profile. Also I found a couple useful tricks to make the surfaces smooth with more ease. I used iray-renderer with a constant hitting of Shift+Q (make render-shortcut). This combined with the Push/Pull and Relax -brushes actually made it much faster to get even, smooth curves to the body panels and windows.

I didn't model the rear light -area just yet. I think I'll get to it once everything else is modelled and it's time to chamfer the edges between surfaces. As you can see below, all the edges are now just made with different smoothing groups.

Getting the surfaces smooth

A summer course at school has kept me very busy but I've managed to get something done. As you can see quite a large area of the side has been modeled. A-pillars and windshield has also been made. 

I have noticed a good way to get the surfaces smooth by doing renders in an environment shown. There are a lot of thin, illuminated planes forming a cylinder and the car in the middle. All the wobblyness and sharp edges are easy to spot due to the reflections. The downside is that the renderer must be mentalRay - meaning each test render takes some time.  The hood is starting to look rather smooth but there is a lot of work in the sides still.

Made a quick bonus render in the parking lot -environment where the Stiletto was rendered as well.  Let's hope this will turn out nice!

Good use of a morning

The car got a little further this morning. A friend of mine threw an idea of mixing the headlights of the old and the bumper of the sketch. Decided to give it a go and I'm actually quite happy the way it looks. The sketch at least. Sure I had to make some modifications to the bumper to make it fit with the old headlights.

There will be a single, larger vent in the middle of the bumper with carbon fiber divider inside. Also added a vent to the side to match the rear end of the side. Below you can see the wire frame and a quick render. I really like the way the car looks in white. Better keep the colour in mind when taking final renders.

I will be a bit busy for a week from now on but I try find some time to get someting to show you.

Skeching the new look

So, as stated earlier today, I had some difficulties with the front end. Creating the mesh wasn't the actual problem, it was the design. I have found this method useful when some changes need to visualized before the actual modeling.

What I did in a nutshell:

• Took a render in 3DS Max
• Opened it in Photoshop and drew some basic lines of the body as lines on a new layer. I also made a couple lines to help with the perspective
• Made new layer under the lines layer and painted it white
• Started skeching new lines while having the basic body shapes as reference.

I actually think the skech doesn't look that bad! Sure, it shares some features with Maserati Granturismo but what I think is more important, it shares a lot of features with my previous project, Stiletto. 

I'm still wondering if it's an overkill with all that aggressiveness. Better let it sink for a while before starting to make this radical changes to the 3D model.

Problems with the front end

Back in business. Had some lack of inspiration (in addition to a lot of mandatory work which couldn't wait), thus the long pause since last post. No worries, not much has happened since.

I have made part of the side and most of the front area. The front especially gives me headache: it seems I have no idea what I'm trying to model and the blueprints are not helping much. Now the front end remind a front end of a car driven into a wall. Not good. Better get back to the drawing board.

Something I've learned since last post: When deleting edges, holding Ctrl deletes the edge's vertexes as well. No need to do that manually from here.

Keeping you up to date

I have done some experimenting with the surface of the hood. There is a small bulge at the center for now, we'll see if I end up changing the shape of it later on. I also tried to seek for a same sort of color I spotted in a new'ish Civic another day. It was hard to say if it was brown or purple but in an overcast day it looked spectacular. The color was probably Kona Coffee Metallic I think. Link here just in case you are curious.

Sorry for the dark image. The material is also just a plain Arch&Design meaning there is not much depth or detail in the paint. If I used mental ray's Car Paint material the rendering would take way too long and since there is no environment what so ever it wouldn't make much difference.

Something to show already

Hey! The new car is slowly gaining progress. A bit faster than I expexted actually, it's amazing how much faster things start to roll when you have a little experience from a previous project at your belt. The blueprints are set up and already I have modelled a part of the front of the car. I have kept the model rather simple and thus there are no chamfers or such. There is a Turbosmooth added to the wireframe.

Things I have found useful at this point if there happens to be beginner modelers reading this:
- Shortucts, shortcuts and shortcuts. Target weld can be found with Ctrl+Shift+W, and the movement of verticles can be limited to polygon edges only with Shift+X. Oh, and the polygon cut can be accessed with Alt+C. More useful shortcuts can be found here. You might also want to assign hotkeys of your own. I added weld to my shortcut list. Instructions here.
- Try to keep to polycount down. It will make fixing the model much easier once you notice you have a bunch of verticles int the wrong place.
- Use Smooth Groups. In my case I don't want to add chamfers just yet but I want to keep sharp edges around headlights and fenders. I changed the smoothgroup of the sharp edged polys and added checkmark in Turbosmooth menu "Separate->Smooth Groups".