Well, since I needed some break from modelling my Battletech stuff (needs too much time to make significant progress), I’ll try to create a highly detailed Lotus Elise Mk II (from 2002 if I remember this right). Its my first car model, and I only managed to do the front for now (around 10 hours of work), but I think, it turned out quiet well. There are some irregularities on the sides and some parts do not fit onto the blueprints very well.
Any comments of crits are very welcome.
looks great for what you have done. Im sure if you mantain this quality of work throughout then it will turn out to be a very nice car. I too am attempting to model a car…any good tutorials? Im having problems lol
looking good
For some reason I started thinking of how I could model what you have so far in Alibre Design. A couple 3D spline guide curves to guide a loft boss, a shell function, a few extrude and sweep cuts… Anyhoo, it’s looking very good.
Hey alvex. Nice front bumper for the car. I’m waiting to see the progress of this.
As for C&C - I think you’ve got a bad workflow for this model. The normal workflow for modelling a car is to get the entire car modelled - with simple or no details at all and then proceed to cut the parts out and add all the necessary details.
The reason for that is that you get all the parts nicely aligned. If you model the car part by part you will get into big trouble when you start to render with reflections - the reflection will “broke” at the transition from one car part to another and the result will be ugly. I speak from my experience with my Citroen C3 - which I modelled piece by piece.
Thanks for the comments.
There are some tutorials on building cars for sure, but I’ve not used a specific one. If you already got a good blueprint of the car, you want to model, it shouldn’t be a big deal to get started. I personally started with placing a vertex on important points of the bluepring. I scaled my blueprint, so it fits into blender units (mostly to check, if the starting placement is right). After this, it mostly boils down to vertex pushing for a basic outline, subdividing some edges to and some face tweaking. You may create a new vertex in Edit Mode by pressing CTRL + LMB, but don’t create too much of them for the start, since you will have to move them all to perform some corrections on your model. I’ve attached two pictures, so you may see, how this may look.
I first thought about modelling with spline surfaces too (in blender, not in Alibre), but I’ll need some practice on them, before I may do such hard stuff with them.
Thanks cipix, maybe I’ll try on my next model. I know, that I’ll have to work very exact, to get everything alligned well, but I think, I may manage on this one.
Here is some update. I’ve corrected some minor things on the front bumper and added some more detail. Due to cipix crit, I decided to do at least the body in one part. progress is a little slow, mostly because I have to guess on many things of the front and side due to the shape of the cars body and the inexact outline of the blueprints, I got. Hopefully, I’ll manage to finish the front this weakend.
As ever, crits and comments are very welcome.
wow thats reall cool
Wow. Crisp and clean and ultra detailed and you’ve only just started. Should be classy when finished!
~Misfit
Thanks for the comments.
Today, I was not that motivated, because all this guessing drives me crazy. Does anyone know, where to get a top view blueprint of the Elise Mk II? I ever find some for Mk I and Exige, but they have significant differences to the Mk II. At the moment, I’m forced to partly model from camera view, with a reference picture, what is ways too time consuming.
Anyway, I’ve done the Lotus logo today and set up a basic scene, mostly for some more contrast on identifing problems on the surface. Lightning is crap and there are some corrections needed on the body’s side, behind the light spot, but overall, it seems to be quiet ok for now. Enjoy!
Crits and comments are welcome.
Edit: Added my reference picture.
And another one, seems like I got the body front mostly finished. There are some problems with the glass, dunno where they come from. I’ll bother about that as fast, as the body is finished.
dang that looks so clean
it looks just like the reall thing
Seems like progress is going slowly, here is the daily update: Todays work was mostly pushing vertices. I’ve corrected some minor issues of the bodies surface and reworked the bodies part below the windshield, added the middle part (choosen the 2006 editions one).For now, I’m not quiet satisfied with it, because those soft falling parts do not join to the middle part as close and clean, as I want them to, but I’ll bother about that tomorrow (my bed is calling for me).In 2 weeks, I’ll meet my local lotus dealer, to see a real Elise (2005 edition, as far as I’ve seen from some shots), hopefully the body is mostly finished until then (don’t expact it to, but would be nice).
And here it is: arround 150k faces, excluding the logo at the bottom. 1024x768 @ OSA 16 Rendered in around 19 minutes (mostly because of all the mirror effects).
It may feel slow, but it’s really paying off! That is such a clean nice model, and you don’t have blueprints/plan of the car!??! You’re doing an amazing job. Keep on going 
I want my new wallpaper finished soon 
Thanks for the comment, hopefully, my patience will last the whole modelling time.
As I said, I got some blueprints of the car, but they are crap. The line strength, partly used for drawing them, is much too high and I ever have to guess on where the vertices would really be. But the most important problem is, that I only have a front, back and side view outline, a top view is missing, what makes especially modelling the concave parts (like the front, I’m working on now) really hard. I also have around 200 reference pics, but they include every Elise/Exige edition from 1997 to now, so I ever have to filter out, what I may use and none of them is that clean, that I may really use it in ortho mode.
Yea i think this is really cool although i didn’t model a car ever. Only moddeling organic objects 
but the mesh seems to be quite ok at the moment…
thats really quite good, nice one, any chance you could tell me where u got your blue prints form?
nice progress so far, cant wait until its ready
even though my own favourite is Lotus Exige
Thanks. I think, I got it from google image search, should be this one: http://www.tutorials3d.com/esp/blu_sheet.asp?id=260 .
And another day is gone.
Here is an update, not much progress visible, but I got an importent part mostly done: front outline is nearly finished, what was a real problem due to the lack of information about the concave parts. Some corrections to the surface have been mad too and I’ll have to do some more, because there are some parts, that seem not so clean to me, as I want them to be.
And here it is: Overall 300k vertices, rendered in 10 minutes.
