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.