This is my first attempt at a model anywhere near this complex. My girlfriend’s father built and sold these out in Cali back in the early 80’s. It was modeled using vertex loops from the “Better face tutorial”. It isn’t highly accurate because I didn’t have the correct photo angles to work from. The front picture/top photo was skewed at aprox 35 degrees and I could only see the back form the inset photo. I suppose that I learned the hard way, just like everyone else, that triangles are little beasties to be avoided everywhere other than corners. Thanks for any crits and for taking the time to look.
I realized part way through that I was using too many verts, but then I compounded the problem by trying to remove triangles, although I did a very good job of removing them. I really don’t know what else to do since I didn’t have the correct photo angles to work from.
Here are the photos that I had to work from. Any sugestions on how I might better go about modeling this?
As far as the smoothness of the mesh goes, I spent about 20 hours modeling it (yeah, that’s not a typo), so it is fairly smooth. I can send the Blend file if that might be of any use. I’d really like to know if there is an easier way, consdering the photos I had to work with, because I intend to try and make a living from this CG stuff at some point in the future.
I did learn along the way that pre-planning the layout would be really helpful in eliminating much of the work involved, not to mention rendering time, triangles and mesh complexity, I just don’t know exactly how to go about doing the ple-plan, considering that I didn’t have access to dead on front, rear top and side shots (well, maybe I do and I’m just afraid of the using a pencil, paper drawing and math). I would apprecciate an easy answer, but I doubt that I’m going to get one.
Yes, having a blueprint helps a lot. Some people here use blender as a blueprinting tool - they use curves to “mark” important parts of the model (see http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=62504 for an example).
As far as the smoothness of the mesh goes, I spent about 20 hours modeling it (yeah, that’s not a typo), so it is fairly smooth. I can send the Blend file if that might be of any use. I’d really like to know if there is an easier way, consdering the photos I had to work with, because I intend to try and make a living from this CG stuff at some point in the future.
I’m not saying that your model is not smooth - but what if later on you realize you need to tweak the proportions of the car? You’ll spend again 20 hours to smooth it, only to realize that you have to make yet another change. That’s why is good to have a mesh with the lowest possible number of vertices. This will make your mesh smooth and easy to work on.
You need to learn to model with a small number of polys, moreso if you plan to make a living from 3d.
