Hi all.
After some time away from Blender, I’m finally back with a project that motivated me enough to get back at it.
The reason I started to use Blender, was to model a BMW E30, but I quickly found out that doing cars wasnt the most obvious place to start learning. From time to time I’ve tried doing a car again, but it always want bad and quickly took away my courage to continue them.
But finally, it seams that my skills have reached a level where I can start making something that actually looks like a car
One of the big motivations for me to do this now, is because over the summer I bought this little fella:
“See below”
I finally got a BMW again And now I have all the reference photos that I need, or better yet, I get my butt out the chair and go look for myself in the garage
So this is what I’m building, except that I’ve changed it to a 2-doors, modeling it with standard side mirrors and with other rims (Already sold the ones thats in the picture).
So here is my progress so far:
“See below”
What do you think? Please let me know if there are places that look way out of place, or just need some tweaking.
I would also like to hear if anyone knows of good tutorials to make car lights? I have NO idea how to approach the fonts and rear lights?
Same goes for how to make the tires for the rims that I’ll model?
Your progress so far is really good! The grille is especially well done. For the taillights, it’ll always look better if you model the interior of it, but if you’re really good with textures you could try texturing in the finer details. I don’t know of any tutorials, but I do know that it takes a lot of practice and fiddling to get right, so take your time with it. Here are the most popular tutorials for tires and rims, by Andrew Price. His methods of course aren’t the only way to do it, but its a pretty good one to start with. For the tires, in his tutorial, Andrew actually models the tread. If you plan on making this very high-poly, you should consider texturing the treads in instead.
Welcome back Wega ! This looks to be like a cool project and I can tell just at the beginning stages that this will come out good. I’ve never attempted a car model, so I won’t be much help, but I will enjoy following it.
sdighe: Thx for the links, I’ll have a look at those tuts. I think I would like to try and model the inside of the lights, but then again it really limited how much you can see of the inside of those?
Harley: Thank you, it’s good to be back Diddnt you make any of the cars in your Final inspection movie?
I modeled all the watercraft and the segway used in Final Inspection, but I reached out to Blendswap and another site for the truck, Ferrari and Helicopter.
When time allows click on that “Relapse” link in my signature… I’m working on part 2 of Final Inspection.
For glass car headlights I make a black and white map (black where the dips are) then I blur it a little to make it smooth and not so blocky, then I plug that map right into the displacement slot on the cycles material output.
Congratulations to your new car, Wega, and also to the good start of this thread. The modelling in your first post already seems to be very decent.
There are a lot of people with high expertise in this section of the forum, when it comes to model a car and I guess that you will get a lot of good and helpful feedback.
I’m a bit late on this, but if you want you can check my tire:
It includes the tire without the modifier so you can see how its made. It’s an evolution of Andrew’s technique. Basically, it consists in making it higher-poly for smoother curvature.
About the headlights… You have a great advantage over me. You have the actual car (E30, so jeaaalooous!), and you can just study how it’s made. So just model what you see. For the materials, which can be a bit tricky, just make the interior part chrome/metallic, and then head over to my 850 CSi thread and check out the material for the glass. You can also make a photo (preferably outdoors) of the lights from an ortho-like perspective and use that as a texture. Or, you could actually model all the little stripes/treads that the glass has. But that’s so much work that I usually don’t do it.
Minoribus: Thanks a lot, it’s a small dream come true, getting this car and with the engine that I like Good information is already here, but more is coming I see…
Impreza09: Great Blend file! Very good inspiration, and insight into how a very nice tire can be modeled, thanks. I will have a look at your 850 threads again, to look for materials and tips on the modeling. I dont know if I’m going to model the lights or do it with textures, I think I’ll try and experiment a little with both, and see what works out.
A little progress in some details, and tweaking of the back part of the roof:
I love it! Only driven it 3 times though, as I need to pay taxes of the car before it’s road legal here in Denmark. I hope to get it out and running at spring, but I’m not sure yet. So now it’s been prepped for winter and is now sitting in it’s garage, waiting for warmer days
Edit: Ohh yeah, i forgot to remove the stupid plane on the first image, please ignore it! I just used it to measure something, and then forgot to delete it…
Impreza09: TY Where on the bumper do you see any problems? And congratulations on winning the Blender Guru competition, you definitely deserved it! Awesome vehicle you designed and very atmospheric renders as well.
Thanks!! And the “problems” are where the rear bumper curves, so to say in the corner of the car. Could be an optical effect or something, but I’d check it.
Harley: Sure I will tell more about how I did it later today, need to go to work for a few hours first though
Almost finished one of the headlights, some materials and the grunge needs more tweaking though. Also thinking about adding more detail to the glass, but I’m not sure it’s worth all the extra polly’s.
And now I have all the reference photos that I need, or better yet, I get my butt out the chair and go look for myself in the garage 
Only driven it 3 times though, as I need to pay taxes of the car before it’s road legal here in Denmark. I hope to get it out and running at spring, but I’m not sure yet. So now it’s been prepped for winter and is now sitting in it’s garage, waiting for warmer days 
