I’ve been working on this off and on for a couple of weeks. I think it is finally getting to the point where I have something worth showing off
I am going for a fairly detailed early VW Bus (1953 or so). I suppose the biggest thing in modelling it will be to figure out how detailed is too detailed. So far, I have modelled the engine and cargo compartment vents, semaphore pockets, defroster vents for the front windows and a lip that goes around the headlight pockets. Each of the above renders took about 5 minutes to render (on my 700Mhz Duron) and has close to 61000 vertices.
The next step is working on a front door. I have one (on another layer) but it needs some more work to make it look good. There is a whole bunch of stuff to do after that, but that is the next big task ahead.
Great job Reminds me of California, which I miss dearly Once your finished you have to add teh hippy designs, and then you have to add the extensions that raise up and make a bed at the top of the vehicle.
I finished the door so it looks better. I actually modelled the tire, hubcap, and rim a few months ago (darn off and on projects) I did some work to the semaphore pocket and the front end.
I’ve been looking at www.barndoor.dk for most of my research and I noticed that the front and has a slight bulge towards the headlights. It’s one of those things where you won’t see it at all angles, but in oblique angles like this you can see how the far headlight sort of bulges out.
The indentation for the door handle looks a bit small in this render, so I will fix that in the near future.
Yeah, I will when it is done. Right now, I’m just using some GI to help me with the modelling. It’s kind of hard to do GI with a shiny material. If you look close, on the hubcap under the front door, you can see the reflections of ton of lights under the GI dome Interesting effect.
I’m starting work on the headlights and wanted to see how they would look in a render. The headlight rings look a bit white when they are supposed to be chrome. I suppose that’s just the lighting though.
There are lenses in the headlights, but I’m not 100% sure how to proceed with them Anybody have any ideas? I’d rather not do a texture. I’m thinking about modelling the fresnel (fresnel lens, not ray tracing fresnel), but I can see that getting very tedious very quickly. I thought about doing a bump map/displacement map, but I am not sure how well it would work with a transparent material…especially since the outside of the lens is supposed to be smooth. Any thoughts?
Here are some images of the modelled headlight lens:
For the first image, I apparently wasn’t paying attention and had ZTrans on instead of RayTrans. It still looks kind of interesting though. The second image really shows off the modelled fresnel prisms. Compared to the pictures I have seen on the net, it probably needs double the number of prisms, but this took long enough to model…so it’s good enough for me
I’ll post a shot of it actually on the Bus soon.
Let me know what you think.
edit:
Posting a render might take a little bit longer than I thought. The GI setup I have been using has 91 lamps and 16 samples. Coupled with raytracing some complicated meshes, a 640x640 render took 30+ before Blender froze on me. It has been doing that a lot during this project. Removing doubles seems to help it overcome this (as well as using 2.32), even if there are no doubles to remove. Strange. The good news is I saw a completed render before it froze, and it looked excellent It just froze before I could save a render. Considering the time it is taking to render, and the fact that it is the wee hours of the morning, I think I will just let it render while I go to bed. After that, I will probably just leave the headlights on a different layer until I have the rest of the bus done.
Nice, nice. I’d like to see a slightly higher-poly model on the lens, it looks great but you can see each face around the edge of the rim. It is looking great so far! The door also seems to be a bit too flush with the front end of the car.
Yeah, I noticed that too. However, I don’t plan on doing any more images that are as close to the headlights, and if they are, they will probably be smaller.
Though remember, you can’t call it comlete untill it has the huge hippy daisy painted on the side and/or front.
Reminds me of California, which I miss dearly 
Once your finished you have to add teh hippy designs, and then you have to add the extensions that raise up and make a bed at the top of the vehicle.
Interesting effect.
