Am I not Beetley enough for your Beetle club? Beetle Beetle!

[hrgiger]

Sorry, just a little Master of Disguise reference in the title....

[hrgiger]

Sorry again, I accidentally hit the enter button and it posted.

Anyway, here is my new model I"m working on. Inspired by Lewis's great work here, I've decided to try my second car model and I'm going to do it all in subpatches (the batmobile I did a little while back I froze so I could boolean in all the details and such but Lewis convinced me to do all the small details with subpatches).

Here's the start of the car after spline patching...

[robpauza]

Turtle. Turtle. :)

Looking great so far. You and Lewis just might inspire me to finish the car I started a long while back. Can't wait to see more.

-Rob

[Dellik]

Look forward to seeing this develop, looks great so far.

There seems to be a bit of a bulge down the centre of the model though... might be just my blurry eyes though... i'm up waaaaaay too early!

[hrgiger]

Yeah, there are a few smoothing issues toward the center that I'll have to fix. Sometimes it's hard to see how your geometry is going to flow once you mirror it over. So it's not your blurry eyes...

[knuckles644]

Any tuts:D :D :D :D

Yes, I am THAT desperate. Even that simple model is over my head. Good work btw:)

[iluvatar]

yeah i never tried car modelling, but you guys really inspire me with your results!

[hrgiger]

Here is an update of the front end.

I just have to say my hat is off to Lewis. Modeling a car takes so much time and patience, I don't know how he does it. I can see how it would appeal to someone who is meticulous. It's definately a learning experience for me.

[TSpyrison]

Looks good..

You should put a circle with the number 53 on it.. :)

[hrgiger]

That would be the old beetle Herbie.:p

Here's a wire while I'm at it...

[TSpyrison]

Maybe it could be Herbie reincarnated? :D

[tryco]

hi

Very good begining

o.

[Lewis]

Hehe cool to see you with cars again :)

It definately looks good but it also have room for improvments ;).

You have small dents and bumps on bumper and bonnet but you are progressing very fast in this subDs car thingie ;).

Your dents and bumps are mostly caused with little too much polygons than needed in some areas . i.e. you don't need such number of poly rows at doors area - they are totoaly flat so you could use only 3 rows (vertical) and not 5-6 like you have now. Aslo headlights aren't too rounded now :). That's casued 'coz you didn't planed where cut will be (in start) and you had to cut in certian place later wich makes that part more like egg shaped than circle ;).

Bottom area where you have fog lights aslo need some points aligning. Use LWs "set value" tool it's very helpful. Select all polys in row and align them in "Y" axsis or so. You also can do same thing if you select points and hit "i" for info and you can copy/paste axsis values there with interactive preview.

Don't get me wrong - this is great model and progress i'm just trying to help you with thinking about modleing cars properly :). Cars are simmetrical (95% of car atleast) and all points and lines need to be in some straight values so it's easy to align them properly.

Could you belive that i started ANOTEHR pickup 2 days ago :). This time i'm modleing an Dodge RAM 1500 ;).

P.S. If you wich you can send me model of your Beetle and i'll try to fix some areas and send you back model so that you can see how i aproached to certian areas and you could compare that with your then.

[hrgiger]

Thanks Lewis, I was hoping you would chime in.

I had planned on using set value for a few areas, and I knew the fog light area need adjustment. I also already fixed the headlights. I don't know if they're perfect yet but I wasn't sure how to do it any different way. I laid out the shape of the splines around the headlight opening and that's what I came up with. Is that how you would have done it? By the way, do you eve use smoothing on the model to fix dents or other anamolies on curved surfaces?

I'll definately send you the model, just be sure to mention what you modified so I know what to look for.

Thanks.

[Lewis]

Originally posted by hrgiger
Thanks Lewis, I was hoping you would chime in.

I had planned on using set value for a few areas, and I knew the fog light area need adjustment. I also already fixed the headlights. I don't know if they're perfect yet but I wasn't sure how to do it any different way. I laid out the shape of the splines around the headlight opening and that's what I came up with. Is that how you would have done it? By the way, do you eve use smoothing on the model to fix dents or other anamolies on curved surfaces?

I'll definately send you the model, just be sure to mention what you modified so I know what to look for.

Thanks.

Hi !

No i'am not using smoothing tricks to fix dents :). All my screngrabs form modeler acctualy dont' even have turnoed on smoothing in surface propertyes ;).

Fro headlights - i would model area without headlights (it's not same for all cars but all rounded cars could use this technique) and then stencil one 6-8 sided extended circle - i'm doing that tight now on rear lights of your model. Also i now have 900 polygons and model had 1140 when you sent him to me and looks smoother ;).

[hrgiger]

All right. Thanks to some advice from Lewis, I decided to start over. I laid out the splines a little cleaner to optimise the geometry in certain areas to minimize the dents and bumps in the orginal mesh. I'm much happier with the way this one turned out and the geometry is a little more consistent throughout the model whereas before I had areas of heavy geometry and others with light which was causing some unwanted creasing. Anyway, here is the new wire (with splinecage)

[hrgiger]

And here is the layout view...

[Lewis]

Much better and celaner than first try :).

Remember it's very easy to add row of polygons if needed but it's harder to fix if you have too much polys 'coz every small movment of point will casue dents and bumps in SubDs.

Beauty of SubDs is that you can render extreme close ups and still not have any segmentatin - just ramp up subDs level for rendering :).

[hrgiger]

Here's another shot with the headlight/tailight openings made. I used the plug-in thickener just to make it a little easier to see the body shape but the thickness is only for display here and has nothing to do with any modeling I'm doing. I love thickener, if any of you don't have it, you must have it, it's great.

Lewis, I tried stencling the openings and rebuilding the polys around it but with disasterous results. Ok, maybe not disasterous, but certainly not good. I ended up smoothshifting the polys in that area, reshaping them to the shape of the headlight and then making a poly and beveling inwards, I think it turned out pretty well, but let me know what you think.

[Lewis]

It looks better now than first time there is no doubt in that :)

I do have Thickener plogin but dont use it for such things :).

I just sent you again that model file i reshaped and i included stencil polygons what i used for tailights.

After stencil there is always big mess (in terms of subds) but you just need to weld points form surounding parts and delete 2 point polys and all will be good after ;). It just takes time to understand that but eventualy it's only way to model things fast in subDs insets :).

[sKb875]

Wow, VERY good job!

Hey, where can I get that thickening plug-in? :D

[hrgiger]

Another update, made the seams in front end (near the headlights) which was a real challenge as I had to cut them out of my sub-d mesh. Reworked the front end detail and added the tires which aren't quite done yet...

[xtrm3d]

this car model seem to develop verry well..
please keep the update coming ..
i am relly interested to see your result :-)

[hrgiger]

Thanks xtrm3d. I'm learning a lot about modeling with a certain degree of precision. I've never used setvalue and cutting and pasting of point positions before so much. Lewis has been a big help (not to mention inspiration) in learning to model cars.
Here's another update. Sorry, it's it's not much further into it but I don't know how much time I'll get to work on it this weekend so I figured I might as well post this. Added the front reflector assembly and started on the window/door area. I also fixed a crease I had struggled with for probably a half an hour with and was about to pull my hair out when I figured out the answer was as close as the spin quads button. It improved the flow of the problem area. You can see the crease in the last update just below and to the left of the reflector opening.

[sKb875]

Looks VERY good! :)

But... Where can I get that thickener? :D

Keep up the good work.

[hrgiger]

I've tried doing a search for thickener and I can't find it anymore online. Try a search for thickener.lsc (it's an lscript)

[Lewis]

Looking good Steve, i like oyur progress. You are finaly picking up pieces about set value and info tool - they are very comont tools in car modelings ;).

BTW i wonder why do you show screengrabs form layout ? Isn't it easyer to post screngrab form modeler :)?