Dodge Viper SRT-10 2009

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I began this project two years ago as my second attempt at modelling a car (for my first car project I created a fairly crappy model of a Lamborghini.) After a poor first attempt at modelling this car, I threw out the mesh and started from scratch. Eventually I came up with another much improved version (though still not as good as the current) about a year ago. I though that I was done with the project but in the past month I have taken it up again. I thought that I would share this with you guys and hopefully get some critiques and advice as I continue working on it.

Once I achieve a good enough result I will probably put this model aside as a side project, and update it off and on with more details. There are still many things that I could add to this model such as a detailed interior or a rig.

Just my personal opinion about the car, but get rid of the air foil. I know it’s really part of the car, but to me it looks like something that belongs on a riced out honda civic, not a luxury sport car. It also looks like you made the sills curve in too sharply under the doors, to where is looks like they are missing, at least from these angles.

DONT get rid of the spoiler. hes right. its part of the car. it belongs there. sometimes what looks better isnt always more real. besides, it looks good. to say it doesnt belong on a high end sports car is to say that a high end sports car cannot enjoy the luxuries, and advantages of after market parts.

good work. i like it.

just something i noticed. this is an earlier srt, not a 2013 srt. just something i noticed since you where posting on my thread.

Thanks.
I am not exactly sure what year this Viper is from. I used a lot of reference images when modelling it and they were all from 2006-2010. The body was modelled off of a blueprint of the 2008 viper which looks like this:



I got the idea for the spoiler from the 2010 ACR-x which looks like this:


Perhaps I should add some of the other features from this car such as the front attachments and roll-cage to make it look more sporty. Apart from those two features, the cars look identical (at least externally) to me.

Here is a close-up of the wheel.


I am not sure that I got the proportions of the wheel right. I read that the dimensions of the rims should be 18" x 10" for the front and 19" x 13" in the back. However, when I modeled the wheels to those dimensions, they seemed to small in comparison to the rest of the car (which I also modeled to scale). I ended up sizing them according to the blueprint which I used to model the car.

i suggest going out and picking a different tire bump. this one is over used. pick any other brand like pirelli or toyo and just google “(brand) tire texture” and you will find some free bumps in most cases right in the images section. good year is not much of a sports car tire. try some pirelli rosso’s like i modeled. you might try some semi slicks, since this is a v10, this is sort of a fair weather car, so the semi slicks will help. semi slicks on a sports car on wet roads is dangerous though so dont put them on just any car.

BTW! 19" is the rim size, not tire size. just so you know. a 13" rim on a modern sports car is pretty unheard of.your tire should be more like 24"x13" and your RIM should be 19"x13"

other than this, good job.

Thanks for the advice, I don’t know much about different types of tires so your comments are very helpful. The bumpmap of the tire sidewall was from Andrew Price’s tutorial but I am pretty sure that the tire that I modeled was a Toyo not a GoodYear. Maybe I can find a bump map for that specific brand?

As far as dimensions go, when I based the wheel off of the car blueprint I got something like 20" for the rims and 27" for the wheel. Does that sound about right?

Never use blueprints to size up your tires and rims. Just google for a car spec sheet and learn to read tire side wall data.

for this car I found pirelli pzero P295/30 ZR-18(front), P355/30 ZR-19(rear)

to translate this into more understandable format P355/30 Z R-19 .
P - passenger car
355 - nominal section width measured, widest point of the tire from side wall to side wall in mm so this tire is 355 mm wide
30 - because this is a two digit number it’s the % of the sidewall height to width so sidewall height is = 0.30 * 355 = 106.5mm
Z - denotes a high speed tire
R-19 means that the tire fits a 19 inch rim

To find the diameter of the tire = 19inch * 25.41mm/inch + 106.5mm*2 = 695.79mm.

what tyrant said. you can usualy add somewhere between 4 and 6 inches to estimate wheel size, or just do what i do and find the exact tire (p295/30zR-18) on tirerack.com and you can see a profile of the tread for modeling and get exact tire dimensions. usually they will say it is +6 from the rim, but i think they include tread, not just wheel wall, so really i would just add 4 or 5 inches to rim size when modeling.

I havent found many toyo bumps, but bumps are not hard to make using curves to model the shapes and parts of the content, and a curve modifier to wrap them around a circle curve.

I made a few changes and here is what I got:



I have finals in a few days so I will be too busy to work on this for the next week or so. I should have plenty of time over the summer though.

I never thought of modelling the tire treads with curves. I just assumed that it was easier to use a mesh. I could see how the curves could give you a cleaner result though.

looks good.

im not saying to model the tread out using curves, but to use curves to create the bump for the wheel wall. i say curves because of how easy they are to fill, and to wrap around another circle for the sides. ill make some soon and give them to the comunity free. just model all the parts of the wheel wall with curves and use a curve modifier to attatche them to a circle then render in the blender internal using orthographic view.

School is done and I am home for the summer so you can expect to see updates in the future. I don’t have too much time to spend on this project due to work and other things but I am making improvements whenever I have a chance.
I found the blueprints that I used to model the original car and it appeared that my current model strayed from the guidelines somewhat so I spent a good bit of time getting the proportions correct again. I am redoing the headlights and windshields and I made some improvements to the car’s hood as well. The new grid fill tool in blender was especially helpful for filling in the windshield once I had made the outline.

I will post some pics soon.

There is a plugin for gimp called Pan to Bow.
It will bend text or whatever to a bow shape. you can set the degrees for 360 and it will make a complete circle. i used it to make a tire bump for a project I did when i first started using blender. I needed a specific tire for the truck model i did.
here it is.
BTW, the tire bump Andrew uses is upside down.
If I were to do this now, i could greatly improve the quality since when I did this I was pretty noobish at Gimp also.


Where did you get the texture for the proxes from?

I googled “toyo tire texture”. The image is pretty low-res (only 600 x 600) but it works.

I would love to render that car :smiley:

looks great to me - what method did you use to model the wheel? did you use the spin tool (which I can’t find in blender 2.5 :frowning: ) ?

No I reckon he used the curve modifier with a bezier circle

I c thanks - I shall try that when I eventually make the wheels for my Lancia Delta S4 Stradale I’m trying to model :). I’m leaving them till last.

Just because I haven’t uploaded anything recently, here is a shot of the side of the car.

Right now I am working on the windows. I did a little research and decided to make the windows 1/8" thick.