So recently I picked up Blender and decided to model my most favorite car in the whole world - Skoda 1203. It is very round and I find the shape very intricate and satisfying to look at
The problem with old communist cars (/vans) is, that there’s few blueprints which are usually in low quality and even fewer decent shots of the interior, so most of this model is pretty much eyeballed (and you can see many spots that are not very accurate, e.g. the horrible interior where I honestly couldn’t see what exactly is under the dashboard, rear lights that people called “iron” along with the later version found on Skoda 100 (it resembles a clothes iron…kinda), and I couldn’t decide what version I want to model in terms of the rear compartment…)
I’m a busy grad student in an unrelated major, so it took about 3 weeks to get it to this stage. The outside of the car is pretty much done, I the interior needs to be finished and engine + frame, spindles, shocks, springs, gas tank etc. should be modelled, although I’m not sure if I can find enough references to go off.
I don’t want to make any renders of it, honestly, my immediate goal is to UV unwrap the whole thing (who loves UV unwrapping??), paint some rust on it (you wouldn’t find any Skoda 1203 WITHOUT rusty parts, that thing loves rust!), try to create some dashboard stuff (speedometer, odometer etc.) and I want to read up on how to convert cars into Beamng.drive from Blender. My big dream is to DRIVE this car, so I guess my best shot would be to get it to Beamng.drive which has crazy physics. It will probably need some heavy reductions in poly count (currently around 50k), which can be a PITA I guess…
I couldn’t bear the incorrect shape of the rear lights so I decided to fiddle a little with the rear lights and try to make the shape more faithful. It still looks odd, but oh well.
I had a bit of time this weekend so I looked at many many photos of the interior and also consulted the “parts manual” - very old, grainy and grayscale, but even reading the descriptions of what’s what was useful and I came up with this:
I also remade the steering wheel altogether, because I noticed this interesting crease that shows on some older photos. I don’t know how people actually model cars to this level of detail (which is not great really, I haven’t even started the engine yet!) without actually OWNING the car…
I think once I texture it it will actually look good…
Amazing! From your nickname I’m guess you might be Czech? This was the first toy I played with in a kindergarden. A 1:20 yellow plastic skoda 1203 with a flywheel. Much later when I grew up I traded that for another toy and later I bought another orange plastic skoda 1203 online. Pity I’ve left all my cars back home when I moved.
Interesting car. I’ve heard that it was a crap and you’d actually spend more time repairing it than driving it but I love the round design with the visible welds. I guess I should add rust here and there to reflect the real state of that thing
Anyway, you can use all references from others Skoda from that period, since this car is based on 1000MB… And if you need something particular, just try luck on Bazos, or similar, just type the name of the part, and check the photos;) Sometimes the results are really surprising:)
Yep, the first dashboard is definitely very similar to skoda 1000 MB (except being a bit wider with minor changes)! However, I have a very hard to modelling the engine. I have no clue even from the photos and a few blueprints from the owner’s manual, it’s so complicated even if I want to model just the bare shell (with the typical blue intake on the top :)), I don’t even know where to start…
I suggest start with main engine block, basic primitive shapes, couple of boxes, move with then here and there to get basic idea of overall shape… and then start with visible details. And it is also good to learn something about engine, how it work… Most of the visible parts are pumps, filters, timing belts, wiring and focus only on the important and really visible parts… If you don’t have any reference, just hide that part…
Or ask on Czechs forum for some info…
In the mean time I pretty much finished modelling the exterior, minus the undercarriage (I only have a rough outline of the frame but I’m missing all the axle stuff, springs, shocks, brakes, …) and engine. I’ll try to keep pushing with the undercarriage so it can be completed ^^
So, although I didn’t update the progress here, in the meantime, I managed to implement the Skoda van in BeamNG.drive in a fully drivable and deformable form!