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.