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".

A couple of photos

Just noticed I forgot to add a couple of my favorite shots to the photographpy-section. Better late than never! The Italians are photographed at Bella Italia last year, Shelby and Veyron were shot at Berlin and the Audi at Tampere.

The first two are propably my very favorite photos. With the orange Cobra I was seriously lucky to get a sharp photo. I heard a muscle roar from the distance but did not know what was coming, focused the camera to the road between the bushes since I knew there wouldn't be enough time to focus the car itself. Once the car came to view, "snap", got it! 

The next project about to get serious

Finally got to make blueprints for the next project. The older side render and pictures from sketch pad worked as a base. I didn't have much vision for the front image at first but it turned out pretty neat. Actually I had to made some changes to other images to match the front, not the other way around. 

I used blueprints of a Maserati Granturismo to get the basic measurements of a front engined car in place. I wanted to keep the rear axle really far at the back and the same with the windshield. Due to the rear located axle, though, I faced a problem of the rear of the car reminding a cube from top view. It might be I have to bring the rear axle a bit more closer to front but it can be done afterwards with the 3D model so I think I leave it like this for now.

Time to start the 3D Studio Max for a long time it seems!